What is AskYourTeam?
AskYourTeam is designed to lift organisational productivity by asking critical questions about how the organisation is performing. It’s a means to continuously involve the people who know best (those doing the jobs) on how best to improve things and then create transparency and accountability for leaders to act on this.
AskYourTeam is a complete system that is all about: getting feedback, measuring progress and involvement of your people on ALL of the most proven drivers of organisational success. But it’s not just about getting results. It’s a ‘do-er’ by crowd sourcing insights on what’s working well and revealing challenges in the business to support you to develop action plans on the right priorities. It enables you to make the best fact-based, data driven decisions on what the organisation and every team can focus on to make the biggest impact on your business objectives. Importantly, it’s a system that can be used throughout the organisation by leaders of every team as frequently as you want (at no cost) by supporting retesting instantaneously, and in real time, allows you to measure progress to celebrate success and move on, or course correct and refine action plans.
AskYourTeam Methodology
How do we know we’re asking the right questions?
AskYourTeam’s methodology shifts the organisation’s focus from the traditional employee engagement survey that is concerned about how people ‘feel’, to directly asking them what they think about how to improve the effectiveness of organisation, and provides modern, actionable solutions to drive the bottom line.
AskYourTeam analysed contemporary academic and professional research to understand what the world’s most successful organisations have in common. A wide range of approaches and well-known leadership models were reviewed including Baldridge 7 Pillars, Continuous Improvement, European Foundation for TQM, Kaizen, Lean, Plan Do Check Act cycle, Global Excellence, Kaplan and Norton Balanced Scorecard and commonalities were distilled into 13 common themes. These themes cover traditional measures of engagement, such as leadership, culture and performance development as well as strategy, internal communication, business processes, project planning, implementation and review, information, organisational learning, customer focus and suppliers.
The AskYourTeam methodology was developed in conjunction with the University of Waikato’s Institute for Business Research to measure the performance of each of these factors referred to as Categories. In the base instrument, a suite of 64 critical questions have been designed to measure how your organisation is performing in each of these categories.
We note that there is always debate with instruments of this type as to the appropriateness of individual assertions, and the appropriateness of the suite of assertions but we are confident that the mix in the AskYourTeam system will provide an accurate analysis of, and insights into, the key drivers of organisational success.
The methodology, instruments, and questions have been reviewed against academic and professional literature including every article published in the Harvard Business Review since 2015. It’s also been independently reviewed and validated by the University of Waikato’s Institute for Business Research bi-annually since 2014.
Why the Harvard Business Review?
The rationale for reviewing the Harvard Business Review from 2015 to now was that even if the key ideas did not originate within HBR, then HBR would end up reacting to these ideas and therefore HBR can be used as a proxy for the overall management literature for this period.