Shaping a learning process and realizing change: Reflection, interaction and cooperation through survey feedback (2007)

A chapter in the book Intervening and Changing: Looking for Meaning in Interactions (Jaap Boonstra and Léon de Caluwé, eds.) by the famous publisher John Wiley & Sons.

Survey research in organizations is popular. It is cheap and delivers a lot of relevant information, for instance about how an organization is functioning or employee satisfaction. Outcomes are easily quantified and compared. They give a picture of the state of affairs, of differences between departments and organizations and of developments with respect to a previous measurement.

But what do you do once the situation in an organization has been measured? It is disappointing to see how much time and energy is put into survey research and how little happens with the results. It seems to be troublesome to employ measurement information usefully, and survey research contributes only marginally to the actual improvement of problems.

This can be different. A special way of working with questionnaires is survey feedback. The aim of this chapter is to show what survey feedback means and how the intervention can contribute to organizational change. Survey feedback is a usable alternative to survey research. A clear added value is that the intervention gets a learning process going in which people reflect on the existing situation in the organization and develop solutions for problems together. That leads to a support base for improvement. Professional supervision by a consultant is one of the conditions of effective use of the intervention.