# Why MAP built a bespoke employee survey with Leanne

- **Episode:** [127](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/127.md) (2024-09-12)
- **Type:** other
- **Tags:** employee-survey, bespoke-survey, hr
- **Time:** 28:12–33:20 (start 1692s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/127?t=1692](https://truthliesandwork.com/127?t=1692)

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[28:12] Leanne Elliott: But come back
[28:12] Al Elliott: Yeah, come back. Definitely come back because Nudge isn't as good as this. So come back. I'll cut that out. Keep that in. Welcome back. Now, Leanne has worked with MAP for a few years and seen them grow to a team of 34. Now, MAP decided to use our own RX7 tool to measure their culture. As I said at the beginning though, this isn't an advert for RX7, although you're very welcome to buy it from us if you want. But if you, like our guests, think that an off-the-shelf employee survey tool just isn't going to cut it, then here's confirmation that you're not alone
[28:46] Leanne Elliott: We'll rejoin the interview where Al asked Paul and Amanda why they chose to develop their own bespoke survey tool
[28:52] Al Elliott: You chose to work with a business psychologist, which is my wife and co-host Leanne, and then she developed a bespoke tool for MAP. I'm curious, why do you just— why did you want something that was bespoke rather than just an off-the-shelf survey? There's plenty of things out there where you could just go and pick up for like £4 a month per employee. I think a lot of it came from the employees themselves. Like, they felt like they were ticking boxes and answering questions just to be part of a survey rather than things that were relevant to them. So our team got to a level of maturity where, you know, we can talk about it more as we go on, but they start— they've become very self-sufficient and very wise where a lot, you know, they give us honest feedback. And the feeling was is that there was You know, surveys for the sake of it, poll surveys that spat out questions that sort of made you realize, oh, this is just a, this is just a box-ticking exercise. There's not a lot of thought into this. This is not, this is not Paul and Amanda. This is not MAP. This is just a survey. So I think generally it was that. And then secondly, there were questions specifically that we wanted to answer, and we wanted somebody independent to ask them, um, around the time it was It was during the COVID bubble, if you like, and the hybrid working question mark. So we wanted to put some questions in there, but we wanted to be quite smart with them as well. And I don't mean deceiving, I mean smart with them. Like, if you just ask somebody, what do you prefer, working remotely or working in the office? It's not a very smart question, it's too simplistic. So we would ask questions like, Do you think the younger, inexperienced members of the team benefit from you being in the office? And how much time do you think they would benefit from you being in the office? Is it 1 day a week, 2 days a week, 3 days, 4 days, 5 days? So we put questions like that and made a much more comprehensive survey to be able to dig into each of the areas and do them justice rather than just—
[30:52] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[30:52] Al Elliott: you know, ask what I felt were too simplistic questions otherwise. So there was a lot of thought between ourselves and Leanne that went into, right, what, what are we really trying to get from this? What are the questions we're really trying to answer? And then ask them in a smart way that got us to that point
[31:08] Leanne Elliott: We'll always remember the first survey that we ever did with Leanne, and one of the results that came back was the perception that we put profit above people. And me and Paul would Devastated is an understatement when we heard that, but it's about understanding that's their perception, and that doesn't necessarily equal the reality of the situation. But how do we bridge the two things together?
[31:31] Al Elliott: And we took a move after the second survey to get that explaining actually done by the team rather than us. So, when Amanda came up with a concept there, we might think, oh, that's because they don't They don't know that we use salary grading structures, or they don't know that we're doing this, or don't know they're doing that. Whereas actually, you speak to Tim, oh no, no, that's not what we meant. We meant this other thing. So what we've done is we've put it back on the team this time to create a little focus group for them to expand on the outcomes of the survey and to get really clear on what they mean, and then to also look at the solution as well. So rather than us coming with our Capes and, you know, the superheroes solving the problem. It's to ask them to not only solve the problem but to actually better identify what the problem is in the first place. Because you can still, even if you ask 100 questions and they're really deep questions, you can still jump to the wrong conclusions. So they've got to take the time now to develop what those problems are and to help find the right solutions to it. And then this is what I think upset me and Amanda so much, is because we're so We give so much autonomy to people and it's very rare we say no to anything. It's like if we knew what you wanted, the reality is we're just going to say yes because you're all doing an amazing job. We're really happy with the culture and a lot of it is maintaining what we've got and we trust you. So you let us know what you want, come to us and let us know what that is. And 99 times out of 100, we're going to say yes because of the people that we've got. It's very unlikely that anything silly is going to come out of that. I think this is such an important aspect of doing any kind of work like this is that you are going to, you're going to hear some tough things. So for someone who's about to embark on this, um, not necessarily RX7, but any kind of getting feedback, what advice would you give to them if they're worried about getting this tough, honest feedback?