Here is a quick people win for you. You’ll not only look more professional in less time than it takes to watch an East Enders or Neighbours episode, but you send a clear message to your team that you value them. 

Set up a free online survey using Google Forms, add some great questions and on the first business day of every quarter email your team asking them to complete this anonymous survey. Then, sit back and be prepared to be enlightened and more than likely, shocked.

Every time I’ve run this in my businesses I have been startled. More so when I first began them, but every quarter I always learn something, some more intelligence about what we’re doing right, and not so right.

It is humbling to read the raw thoughts and comments from the team when they know it is anonymous. Some people write in a way that we know who they are (it is quite obvious sometimes), but others (mainly the High Cs and Ss) appreciate the anonymity.

I found 12 or so of the questions for this tool from this gem of a book “First, Break All The Rules: what the world’s greatest managers do”. At the back of the book there are some great questions you can ask your team.

In our Kick-ass Manager course we list 17 questions we include on our standard quarterly anonymous team survey. Read more about that course here.

We recommend you send this quarterly survey to your team on the first business day of the month. Hitting this date every quarter not only makes you look more professional but it sends a message to the team that you value them, and their opinions count. Setting this up each quarter, tailoring it, sending the email then reviewing the responses takes about 27 minutes. That is less than ten minutes a month to understand how your team thinks the business, you as the leader, the management team and overall culture is going.

A good trick is to customize the Google Forms template a week before you need to send it, paste the new link into the email template (there is one included in our Kick-ass Manager course) and delay the delivery of the email so it leaves your outbox the morning of the first business day of the quarter.