Employee polling, productivity, knowledge sharing, Guttman-Poll, business case

The input from managers and employees is vital for strategic decision-making. Yet, these people already have enough on their plates if not overwhelmed by their daily to-do lists. We measured how employees in an organizational transformation could save time by stopping to work on non-priorities and stopping to reinvent the wheel by sharing knowledge. First, we designed a new survey scale replacing a Likert survey to ask people for input objectively, reducing interpretation bias. Next, we analyzed survey input from over 32,000 respondents in more than 900 teams in 150 different organization transformations. To free up time, we compared were respondents' planned improvement deviated from their management priorities. To work smarter, we focused on knowledge sharing: how could one employee that already had improved on a specific topic help a colleague that still had to improve? On average, we found a productivity increase of 75 hours, or €2,500.- per respondent. This productivity increase of 75 hours required two things: an average time investment per respondent of max. 15 minutes to answer a questionnaire and an algorithm to indicate 1.) what priorities to focus on and 2.) which colleagues could help with each of these.

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