What is the best way to use Signals?
The feedback comes to the leadership team anonymised. This is important so that people can have a voice without fearing they will limit their career opportunities if they raise issues. Therefore, the information in the system should be more reliable than you would receive in conversations or through a normal survey mechanism.
The ideal way to work with this to get the best results is:
- Schedule the SMS survey to send to all staff every Friday
- Work with the leadership group to understand feedback as it comes in
- Present results back to the business on Monday morning, along with remediation plans for key issues
Approaching it in this way shows that leadership is listening and reacting to the concerns of the team in an incremental and continuous manner. As issues evolve, they are dealt with, and staff see the benefit of engaging with the survey.
To discuss your business aims and needs in detail, please contact us.
Is Signals anonymous
Signals is completely anonymous.
When the company adds Members into their Organisation's account, we take three data points:
- Your name – We use this to address you in the survey SMS messages.
- Your company email address – We use this to contact you within the company environment (like the welcome email) to pass on verified communications from the organisation.
- Your mobile phone number – Formatted with its international code, we use this as the system-user-ID for the Member, and to send you surveys.
From this data, we use the mobile phone number, which normally looks something like this: +61407123456 And apply a cryptographic process known as 'salting' to obscure it, turning it into something like this: f0e178dd19a561436873790b91dc44c8.
But is it actually really anonymous
There's no way for your company, or the administrator or any user within your organisation to trace the communications back to the original phone number, email, Slack and identify the sender. All information is separated and obfuscated from the source.
There's no way for Signals itself to connect the dots between a question and a response.
Why a binary question?
The most commonly asked question we get is, "can we have a middle ground rating / rating scale?" We have done extensive testing and the scale responses drive the majority of respondents into the middle, which provides no value to leadership when reviewing the feedback.
The binary scale forces an "on balance" assessment of the week and the sentiment tracking shows the overall performance of leadership in addressing the issues they can and improving the responses.
Signals is designed to extract the best and most actionable data for leadership teams to work with and improve their business. Although rating scales are often more comfortable, and certainly more commonly used, they are not the best way to measure performance and drive action from the management group through the business.
Creating a Survey
To create your survey, all you need is:
- A list of Members you want to send it to
- A question you want to ask them
- A start date and (if applicable) a cadence you want to ask it on. For example, weekly or monthly.
Once we have these details, you can confirm the schedule and we will take care of it from there. You'll be notified by SMS when your results are available or you can check back and see them come in live.
Survey best practices
The employee engagement survey process is designed to achieve a clear and honest flow of communication between the top tier of management, and the rest of a business they run. Through this, the leaders aim to learn about the concerns and experience of their employees, to react to issues and reinforce praise.
The feedback comes to the leadership team anonymised. This is important so that people can have a voice without fearing they will limit their career opportunities if they raise issues. Therefore, the information in the system should be more reliable than you would receive in conversations or through a normal survey mechanism.