Each week in this newsletter I take a question from a reader. This week let's dive into this question which came in from an internal communications manager in Germany:
“Hey your content is so helpful, thank you so much. My question is about ways to listen to employees. I like the idea of doing short focus groups with employees once a quarter so I can get a better sense of what they’re thinking and what’s working, but I’ve never done a focus group before and I’m not sure how to start. It feels intimidating!!!”
Well goodness you absolutely sent this question to the right person, it’s your lucky day. Because I’m a sociologist and social researcher by training and this kind of thing is absolutely my jam. I spent four years in Trinity College University learning the ins and outs of social research methods, including focus groups.
A focus group is simply a facilitated conversation in a small group of people. You have 1 facilitator (that's probably going to be you) and then a group of say 5 - 10 people, a pre-determined topic to explore and a plan for what questions to ask. It's very simple but it can go horribly wrong if you're not prepared and you aren't able to facilitate or guide the discussion effectively.
Personally, I’m a big fan of focus groups. I’ve run hundreds of them throughout my career and have always felt they are a vastly underrated and under-used listening tool in our world of internal comms. Because while employee surveys are great at giving you stats and snapshots of what's going on, surveys typically don’t give you the nuanced insights you need for effective internal communications.
But focus groups WILL give you this. They are a brilliant tool to use when you want to really listen deeply to your employees, really understand an area very well and generate practical ideas for improvement.
More than that, having honest, open discussions in small groups allows you to build relationships with employees and also demonstrate empathy, helping employees to really feel listened to and appreciated for their contributions. It's an absolute win-win in my book.
So let's talk about this in today's newsletter. I'll give you some practical advice to get started on designing and running focus groups in your organisation.
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Make a plan for your focus group
Ok here's the first thing: focus groups are pretty easy to do once you have a plan and some structure in place. Running a focus group with employees CAN feel intimidating, you’re right. But you can make it feel less scary and less intimidating through active design time; in other words by putting in some time and effort into designing the experience really well and having confidence in your approach.
Here are some of the things you should be considering when designing a focus group.
Group size
Let's start with the basics: the size of the group. If I'm running a focus group, I'm probably going to invite about 10 people on the understanding that some will drop out at the last minute or simply not show up. That's totally normal and you can plan for it in advance by inviting a few more people than you need. Ideally you'd want to have around 6 - 8 people in your focus group. This small size keeps it manageable and gives everyone an opportunity to speak and share their opinions, and it is also big enough to allow for varied perspectives.
How long should a focus group be?
You also want to think about the duration of your focus group. In my experience, it's hard to get people to commit to a meeting that is longer than 60 minutes, because you're competing with their day job and everyone is busy. So I'd recommend having a focus group for 45 - 60 minutes. You'd be surprised at how quickly that time will pass, especially if you want to go into any topics in depth, which is why it's so important to have design time in advance to get very clear on what you want to ask and why.
How to pick participants
Next, think about who you're going to invite to participte. Are you interested in the perspectives of people in a particular department? Do you want a mix of employees from around the whole company? Are you mostly interested in hearing from managers? Think about your target audience first and work backwards from there.
If you are doing a wide mix of employees from different departments, different levels, different tenures and so on then I highly recommend creating groups where people are at a similar seniority level. This will help to create more psychological safety in the group by reducing the power dynamics. I mean think about it from your own perspective, are you more likely to be honest and candid in a focus group when it's all peers at your level or in a group where there are senior leaders listening to what you're saying? It's worth thinking about these group dynamics in advance so you can design the experience for people to speak as freely as possible.
Sampling methods
In terms of actually selecting people to participate, there are a range of ways you can do this. You can ask managers to nominate people from their teams to take part. You can ask employees to volunteer. You can go through lists of employees and randomly select people to take part. Again it depends on your desired audience and it also depends on your company culture. Whatever your sampling methodology is, try to make it representative of your target audience and have a mix of men and women, older and younger, long-tenured and short-tenured etc. You also want to be careful you're not only talking to the super enthusiastic, super engaged people who always volunteer for stuff - you want to hear from a diverse group of people so you can really understand what's going on. Sometimes the crankiest people are who we need to hear from.
Mistakes to pre-empt
When you're designing your focus group, it's worth thinking about some of the common mistakes and pitfalls that can happen so you can actively plan to avoid them or mitigate against them.
Now after many many years of running focus groups, I've found that the biggest challenge that comes up again and again is this: extroverts or loud people will dominate the conversation. If you have a group of 8 people and you allow 2 people to dominate the entire time, then you've left 6 people with a terrible experience and you also really haven't done your job, which is to listen to ALL of them.
So think about this in advance. How will you redirect or manage people who want to speak all the time? A simple way to do this is to call on people to answer specifically, so rather than saying "What do you all think about X?" and waiting for someone to speak up, you might say "Hey Susan, what do you think about X? I'd love to hear your opinion. You can also very bluntly and directly say something like "Thanks Brian but I'd love to hear from someone else in the group, maybe Neil can you share your view?" You need to be able to very confidently manage the group and make sure everyone gets a chance to speak.
Another challenge that is kind of related is that some people will remain deathly quiet and may not speak up at all. Maybe they're introverted (like me), maybe they're shy, maybe they're feeling intimidated by others in the group. But remember, your job is to listen to ALL of them otherwise why are they even there? So don't be shy to call on people by name, keep a close eye on who is contributing and who isn't, make sure you are actively encouraging everyone to speak.
Okay I got this far, realised I was at about 1,000 words and yet I was only scratching the SURFACE of what I want to share about focus groups. I haven't even touched on things like:
- What is a focus group guide and how to create one
- The dangers of groupthink and how to avoid it
- What kind of questions to ask in a focus group
- How to ask questions to elicit rich, deep insights
- How to analyse your data after the focus group
- How to combinate focus group data with survey data
- How to run an effective focus group on Zoom / Teams
- How to take notes when you are facilitating a focus group
The list goes on - turns out I have a ton of stuff to share about focus groups. Should I put all of this together in some sort of live workshop or video course? Is anyone interested in an in-depth tutorial on this topic? If you are, email me back with the words "focus group" and I'll start working on this if there's a demand for it.
I'll leave it at that for today, my word count is getting away from me!
As ever, thanks for reading and stay curious,
Joanna
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