Whether your business is related to food service, communications, staffing, or anything in between, chances are that hosting a focus group can drastically improve how your business operates. While these specific types of meetings can deliver amazing benefits to your company, it can only do so if you are properly conducting the focus groups. So, let's take you through what is involved with developing the ideal employee focus group.
Get a Goal
As with anything your business does, there should be a clear and distinct goal that your focus group is trying to accomplish. Whether that is determining levels of employee engagement within the company and ways to improve upon it, or finding out what kind of benefits plan would be ideal for everyone, it is important to make the point of interest clear. From there, employees can look at this goal and understand exactly what should be involved in the meeting and what they can expect to be asked.
Stick to Small
One thing that everyone, including both experts and regular consumers, can agree on is that large meetings are objectively awful. They are bad for the people who are stuck in attendance, and they are also bad for the company. When a large amount of people are present, it makes many of the attendees feel like they either do not have to participate or cannot participate because there are plenty of others who are already talking. Keep your meeting to around 10 employees and you should get optimal results.
Pick the Right People
Once you determine the size of your focus group, it is time to pick the specific employees that will attend. You can either do this randomly or with some forethought, but the important thing is that you get a good balance. This does not refer to personalities, race, or gender, although those are always important to be mindful of. Instead, this refers to their role within the company. You want to make sure that for larger issues like an employee benefits plan discussion you do not have half of the attendees coming from only one of your five different departments. Create a nice, even mix so that you can get as accurate of a representation as possible.
Create the Questions
This is obviously a vital step in planning an employee focus group, otherwise you have employees sitting in a room trying to come up with subpar questions on the spot and wasting everyone’s time. Be sure to develop around 5-10 questions and make them open ended so they encourage discussion. If you just wanted yes or no answers, then you could have easily sent out a survey. Once you have successfully completed all of these steps, then you will have a plan in place to host an awesome employee focus group.
If you want to learn more strategies to developing stronger workplace communication, then contact us today.
