People, performance and prosperity

For over 20 years, Clear Picture Corp.’s CEO Scott Burton has been helping clients around the globe find better ways to attract, acquire, develop, manage and retain the right people. With a solid track record in developing and implementing people strategies and solutions that improve long-term business performance and generate bottom line impact, Burton’s thought leadership has reshaped how industry leaders view, value and invest in their most precious resource – people.

HRM. You call yourself an ‘employee experience information service provider.’ What does this involve, and what are the organizational benefits of conducting employee surveys?
SB. Clear Picture was one of the original pioneers of online employee surveys, but we want to move beyond being merely a survey processing company; we’re looking to transform survey results into business results. Many survey companies can provide the client with a set of reports based on their survey administration, but clients today are looking for more value than this. Consequently, we’re working towards creating focus for our clients around the key issues that impact their goals and initiatives, creating the insight necessary for leaders and executives to take action to ensure they’re creating an environment where their people can be productive, challenged, rewarded and satisfied.

HRM. So what are the best practices for building a survey that can generate the kind of results that can be turned into business results?
SB. Utilizing best practices means focusing clearly on the clients’ needs; being able to walk the client through a process that quickly establishes what those needs are is very important. We know what questions to ask to identify client requirements, and also what solution components to bring to the table based on those requirements. We also assist them in developing a communication plan to generate as much participation from employees as possible, and brand the survey process so that it ties in to other changes that might be going on within the organization and links in to organizational goals.

Allocating the right resources (i.e. having the right staff with the right skills in the right roles) is very important, and it is also critical that we help management demonstrate their commitment to the whole survey process – if you ask people for input, people expect to have their views listened to and for appropriate action to be taken to address any issues. Honest feedback is essential – anonymity must be retained and the survey must ask the right questions in the right way, with plenty of open-ended questions that give the ‘story behind the statistics’.

Last but not least, we recommend that an employee survey takes place on an annual basis; this demonstrates a long-term commitment and encourages leadership to measure against benchmarks to continue to make improvements. There’s always an opportunity to improve the process.

HRM. And how successful have you been in generating actionable information that can have a real impact on the bottom line?
SB. Our data tells us that these surveys are predictive of downstream results. Employees that are challenged, engaged, motivated and rewarded across the employee lifecycle are going to create higher levels of productivity, customer-satisfaction, quality and innovation – all of which impact the bottom line. In today’s business climate, employees represent the most important asset for making organizational change happen and enabling the organization to accomplish its goals. The question facing all executives is: how do they best optimize these assets?

We provide key impact analysis and executive scorecards to help create insight for action – not only for the executive, but also to help executives decide how to mobilize their leadership cadre going forward.

HRM. Can you explain more about your action management solution and how this is enabling companies to make their action planning simpler and more effective?
SB. Many companies talk about taking action as a result of the surveys, but few of them actually have a defined solution for this. We offer both a set of automated tools and the support of a consulting team to help focus an organization, its management and its employees on taking specific action to address specific issues. Our action management module is built on the same platform as our survey solution, so whatever data we generate from our survey solutions can immediately be imported and utilized in the action management module.

HRM. Looking ahead, what are likely to be the most important developments in the HRO marketplace?
SB. The HRO marketplace is experiencing some dynamic changes, and outsourcing represents a rapidly evolving option for HR leaders. I’m not predicting that everyone will outsource everything, but people will have more choice regarding what they outsource and what level of outsourcing they want to perform. I believe companies will choose to outsource more of their employee survey process as time goes on to take advantage of the benefits (objectivity, confidentiality, leveraging expert resources, action management, cost-effectiveness, etc.).

I also see technology playing a much bigger role – not just in terms of online surveys being accessible to people 24/7, but also in terms of being able to sort through databases and analyze and interpret the data to create insight and action.