Portland Program
August 23, 2005

Get Perspective On Your Surveys:
You Will Never See Surveys the Same Way Again!
Brad Fishel

Organizations love to use surveys to assess many crucial, intangible, hard-to-measure aspects of work life, such as employee satisfaction, management practices (360’s), training results and more. Leaders base many decisions and practical actions upon these survey results.

Yet surveys asking people to rate things have serious, under-recognized limitations. Here is the problem. We all understand how one rater can be tougher or easier than another and give different ratings to the very same condition. This happens because they apply different perspectives, different frames of reference. But what if the very same people become tougher or easier from one survey occasion to the next? People may change their perspective in the interim; in fact changing people’s frame of reference or expectations is often the intended or unintended effect of change efforts. When this happens, traditional survey, pre-post measures of change can be seriously misleading. It is not clear whether changes in ratings show changes in the actual conditions, in people’s perspectives, or unknown amounts of both. Relying on such surveys is risky business.

Adding Hindsight ratings (“looking back, how was it then?”) to surveys is an innovative approach to disentangle change in perspectives from change in conditions. More than just reducing confusion, when these separate findings are used in combination, the survey results gain much more power as a diagnostic tool and as a guide to action.

Speaker

Brad Fischel, PhD
PGE

Brad is an organization and management development consultant at PGE.

He has over 25 years experience working in roles of independent consultant, manager of a corporate management development department, and internal consultant. He specializes in working with leaders and management teams to do planning, performance scorecards, organization design, problem solving, implementation of changes and improvements, and in building and leading management development programs and workshops.

During his career, Brad has had a special interest in the use of surveys to assess employee attitudes, training results and management practices (eg. 360’s). He has developed an innovative use of Hindsight Ratings to improve the validity and power of surveys. He published an article on the topic, titled “Get Perspective on Your Surveys” in Training Magazine, February 1998.

Brad received a Masters in Education from Stanford University and a PH.D in Counseling Psychology from the University of Oregon. Brad volunteers on the boards of the Portland Schools Foundation and Cedar Sinai Park and teaches leadership to educators at Lewis & Clark College.

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