Setting Up Your Integration Pulse Survey

Set the Frequency

Take your 30 minutes of planning to internalize how often you feel an Integration survey will be valuable to yourself and your Leadership.

If you have a rich history of acquisitions, then a matrix like in Table 1 below can be helpful to see where your current Integration falls. There is not a scientific method to determining the right number of Integration surveys. Mostly, the decision rests on your culture.

The most common pitfall I see are IMO’s who fail to plan and execute an actual pulse survey. Excuses for not doing it vary from “not having enough time” to “it wasn’t a priority.”

Both excuses are unacceptable since the opportunity cost of not planning ahead or escalating the importance is far greater than the cost of the acquisition itself. Additionally, the timing of the survey is something you will never get back. 

Communicate

Communicating about the survey can be done passively or assertively.

The passive approach is to put the survey as a slide in your kick-off deck then speak to it.

More assertively is to write a proactive memo about the importance of the survey, their participation, and the resulting Leadership actions.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each which are listed below. In either choice of communication, their dependency rests on your culture and how the teams will receive it.

Think Holistically About Your Questions

I hate to start this section with bad news but it’s better to do it now.

Your first efforts to write your survey questions will fail. The pitfall is quite simple – you will overthink it.

All too often, IMO’s forget what they did in Step 1 which was to define the frequency. Having more than one survey on your calendar means that the first survey does not have to be all encompassing.

As a matter of fact, it is better for the surveyants that it isn’t. Remember that you want the pulse surveys to be short yet progressive. Let me explain.

Keeping the surveys short

By the time you get to the first survey, your Integration program is months, if not weeks, into the effort. This means lots of heavy work underway and far less patience for yet another management overhead task.

Am I right?

So what you want to do is make the survey less of a burden. Typically keeping the survey between five and ten questions is a good amount.

Also, if you can keep to the 70/30 rule then that’s good too – 70% of the questions are multiple choice, and 30% are open ended. Having a good portion of multiple choice gives the surveyant the feeling of efficiency.

Yet the open ended questions allows you to capture the stories and color commentary as well.

Keeping the surveys progressive

For rounds two and three of the survey, again keep to the motive of short surveys.

However, you can now leverage some of your learnings from survey 1 as context for your questions. For example, the table below shows you how the progression of the same questions over time.

Put Pen to Paper

As for the survey questions themselves, remember to keep the questions specific to the Integration with a grounding on these common areas:

• Communication
• Inclusion & Belonging
• Career
• Leadership confidence
• Program management
• Team dynamics
• Systems access
• On-boarding

It is not necessary to touch on all these topics for your survey. It is important, however, to match these topics to what you defined as your objective to measure.

There will be times when you want to add more questions. During the draft stage, it is OK to have as many questions as you can write. At least you can use these questions as the beginning of a question repository.

However, resist the urge to actually implement all the questions. Take a step back to pick the best questions that will help you measure the Integration. Remember, your motives are not to overburden your surveyants. It is more important that they finish the survey.