Focus Group Check In

Historically, Human Resources have had an on-again, off-again relationship with focus groups. We haul the methodology out for diverse reasons--to test a new incentive idea, find out what employees mean by competitive pay, learn why employees feel they are being paid unfairly and so on. In most organizations, there is no regular schedule and no one who quality checks the way we go about them.

But this informal situation may no longer suit practitioners who live in the presence of HR and employee analytics. We are leaning on analytics more and more in our operations. If the methodologies are understood, funded and staffed well, we are producing statistical reports on correlation and causation. Answering questions in detail that we often speculate about like: "How do we measure pay equity?" "What factors influence decisions to resign?" "Has the new product rollout affected the number of promotions?"

These research practices are far more disciplined and professional than the focus groups we have leaned on.

While focus groups are a type of research, they do not have the power of analytics. Focus groups are considered descriptive research. They can be designed to provide systematic information gathering, but HR rarely works on that scale. Typically we do as few focus groups as possible. Random selection is translated into: whoever is available at the chosen time. As a result, our findings are interesting but rarely reliably representative of our employee population.

I think it's time to clean up our act. Focus groups, run well, can have amazing impact on the participants. I've also seen the results -- employee quotes and emotions -- have far greater impact than data on executive groups. And focus group findings are especially helpful in crafting new plan design and employee communications. Let's not run the risk of having them phased out, because we would lose a valuable source of listening, gaining insight and building employee goodwill.

We can improve our techniques to better align with the discipline of analytics. Start by making sure that we have a statistically representative selection of participants. (If you're not sure how to do this, Google can help -- so can the new employee you hired for analytics!) This will typically involve larger numbers of focus groups than in the past, but it will make our practices more rigorous. And, yes, we will hear the same comments repeated, but that will just strengthen our findings.

Once we have decided how many employees we need, select the participants randomly. Does the sample align with the demographics of your employee population? If not, randomly select replacements to round out the sample.

Make sure the findings can be compared across groups by organizing the implementation to emphasize consistency (so the results can be credibly grouped and compared). That means using the same introduction, the same discussion questions and the same conversation prompts in every group.

SOME data comes in handy but GOOD data can be used to make decisions. The era of data-based insights into the impact of HR practices is upon us. But this doesn't mean that in-person listening doesn't have a continuing role to play. And who knows, if you improve your focus group practices, you might earn a bigger role in HR and employee analytics conversations.

Margaret O'Hanlon brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at everythingiscommunication.com.

Comments

[Paul Pittman]

Well said, Margaret

[Dave Johnston, ABC]

There's a strong need for both. Statistical data analysis is great for learning WHAT employees think/act/believe. Focus groups help you understand WHY they think/act/believe as they do.

That said, executives prefer hard numbers to anecdotes -- even the most compelling ones. So it's essential to have hard numbers at hand when making your case.