All businesses strive to improve their existing work processes in an effort to reduce costs and offer better quality products or services to their customers. These businesses also try to maintain their business processes at peak performance levels at all times. This helps them in maximizing productivity and staying ahead of competitors. It also helps them in facing up to organizational challenges, which may include VOC (voice of customer) and ROI projections (return on investments).

However, overcoming these challenges may not always be easy because they involve achieving continuously changing targets rather than achieving a specified fixed target. This is why Six Sigma concepts stress the importance of employee contributions, which can be harnessed through employee assessment tools and techniques.

Employee Assessment—How Does It Work?

Employee assessment is used for generating quantitative metrics, which are referred to as ‘employee ratings’. Businesses that plan to employ this rating technique are required to utilize internal and cross-organizational surveys that help in assessing employee perceptions in context of their existing work environment. For making things easier for employees, these surveys are often divided into two different parts, namely the preliminary and the comprehensive survey.

In preliminary surveys, only a few employees are selected and interviewed. The interviews are conducted in an informal environment to allow employees more freedom to voice their true opinions about the existing work conditions. The feedbacks provided by the employees are then utilized for comparing the present situation with the created metrics, point by point.

How To Conduct Preliminary Surveys?

While conducting preliminary interviews, the interviewers need to ensure that they are asking the right questions related to the work environment of the person being interviewed. Given below are some of the most common questions asked by interviewers during preliminary survey interviews.

v      Has Six Sigma implementation helped in reducing their workload?

v      Has it improved their immediate work environment?

v      Has it helped in reducing process time?

v      Has it helped in curbing or eliminating process variation?

v      Has it helped them in realizing the fact that reducing defects saves their time?

v      Has it helped them in changing their perceptions about the organization?

Preliminary surveys may not be able to provide the full picture because it is a sample survey involving only a few employees of the organization. However, the surveys do help in revealing two important things. The first revelation is probably related to employee assessment whereas the other relates to the perception that the employees have about the project itself. 

The next step is to conduct a comprehensive survey but before embarking on such a mission, it is necessary to analyze the preliminary survey in context of the metrics created at the time of starting the project implementation. The analysis is conducted to check whether the implementations had a positive effect on the employee performance or not. Only after this, can the organization start with the comprehensive survey.

Comprehensive Employee Survey

For conducting comprehensive employee survey in a proper manner, it is important that the interviewing team consists of at least a couple Master Black Belts, a HR representative, and one senior person from the same department as that of the interviewee. Since most of the generalities had already been ascertained during the preliminary surveys, the interviewers can concentrate on asking questions that are more personal. The feedbacks are then recorded and depicted through graphs and charts.

Most people often associate employee assessment with downsizing, but this is probably the most common misconception. For ensuring the success of employee assessment initiatives, the interviewing team must ensure that employees do not have any such doubts in their minds. This way they will be able to gather realistic feedbacks and opinions, which in turn will help the organization in realizing its goals and objectives through Six Sigma implementation projects.