You may not have a best friend – but do you belong?

While in Phoenix last week, Mark French, President, Dr. Beth Collins, Superintendent and myself met with staff as part of quarterly “Let’s Talk”, an informal way to hear the minds of our employees.  We took advantage of the meetings to share recent results of our employee survey.  The survey has been with us for six years and proven to be of value in making internal changes as deemed by our employees.  To the hard work of everyone at Blueprint Education (@BlueprintEd), we’ve moved mountains by improving overall employee satisfaction.  The hard work by all has proven to build a strong, cohesive team within our organization.   

The foundation of our survey comes from the book First Break All the Rules based based on the framework The Measuring Stick.  The framework does a nice job breaking the questions into groups using a climbing metaphor that has four camps:

• Base Camp = What do I get
• Camp 1 = What do I Give
• Camp 2 = Do I belong here
• Camp 3 = How can we grow 

One particular question that receives a lot of attention has something to do with us asking if employees have a best friend at work.  It’s worth writing this blog for the reasoning behind this question to understand the logic behind extreme questions.

….First you probably noticed that many of the questions contain an extreme “I have a best friend at work” or “At work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day” When the question are phrased like this, it is much more difficult to say “Strongly Agree, or “5” on a scale of 1 to 5.  But this is exactly what we wanted.  We wanted to find questions that would discriminate between the most productive departments and the rest.  We discovered that if you removed the extreme language, the question lost much of its power to discriminate.  Everyone said “strongly agree” the best, the rest and everyone in between.  A question where everyone always answers “Strongly Agree” is a weak question.

As we climb through the survey before reaching Camp 2 we are answering difficult questions of ourselves and of others hopefully, giving us strength.  Our perspective widens and we look around and ask “Do I belong here?”.  We may be extremely service oriented asking if everyone else is as service driven as I? or perhaps we define ourselves by our teaching skills, are we surrounded by people who push the envelope as we do? Whatever our basic value system happens to be, at this state of the climb we really want to know if we fit.