Focus groups and action planning

To increase employee engagement, shape your organisation’s culture, or lift your employee lived experience, a stand alone employee survey is not enough.

For real change and a clear path forward, it’s important to uncover the root causes and prioritise the improvement opportunities. Focus groups allow you to drill down into specific issues and brainstorm ideas for change. Action planning workshops are just that – sessions where actions are identified and initiatives that will have the greatest impact on the lived experiences of your employees and their performance are planned.

Deep dive into real issues with focus groups

Insync’s focus groups are structured workshops with a group of your employees. Typically, our focus groups are used by HR or management following your employee survey to drill down into specific issues and to brainstorm ideas for improvement.

Focus groups can also be used before a survey to identify the themes for investigation in your upcoming employee survey. There is scope to include focus groups in all employee engagement or employee experience programs.

Benefits of focus groups

• focus groups are a resource efficient way of generating information that is specific, relevant and actionable
• the dynamic of the group discussion generates rich information, as participants’ insights encourage others to open up and share their ideas and perspectives
• focus groups provide information directly from your employees who can provide insights about actual conditions and situations
• your Insync facilitator extracts diverse employee opinions and ideas and is viewed as being independent, encouraging staff to talk more openly

Action plan for the future

Once you and your employees have identified opportunities for improvement, you need to swing into action.

Action planning workshops are typically conducted with your leadership team. The aim is to identify and gain leadership buy-in to a small focused number of initiatives that will have the largest impact on the relevant item and on the performance of the organisation.

Action planning workshops are comprehensive and normally run for three to four hours. They are usually held with up to 12 people but we have conducted workshops in the past with 70 senior leaders by using break-out groups. As with focus groups, action planning workshops are normally restricted to three to five priority areas. Focusing on a small number of initiatives will generally lead to greater impact on your organisation’s performance.

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