As Pope observed, hope springs eternal in the human breast. (This month's survey of the month seems to confirm this.) So, in a spirit of hope in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, we wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

There is some debate as to who it was that first suggested that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Deming apparently pointed out that you shouldn’t try to run an organisation by managing only the things that can be measured. I say that having decided that some issue is important to the success of a venture and should therefore be managed, measuring it will make managing it a whole lot easier, and more effective.

There is plenty of evidence that improving Employee Engagement leads to improved corporate performance, so managing Engagement is certainly important to any organisation’s success.

To help clients to get to grips with engagement, we have teamed up with 4humankind, training specialists who concentrate especially on helping clients to improve employee engagement, to develop a new two-day training event entitled Employee Engagement: Why does it matter and what can we do about it?

The two days will be facilitated by Leah Conway of 4humankind, and David Lusty of Quantify, and covers the business case for managing engagement, and the practical steps required to measure, improve and monitor it. Initially, we have scheduled two events; 22 & 23 February 2012 and 27 & 28 March. Full details of the programme are here. To reserve a place, please email or call us.

David Lusty Principal Consultant Quantify London

For a complimentary initial consultation, please call David Lusty, Quantify London on 020 8704 1296 or email him at Or call Sue Alderson, Quantify Yorkshire, on 0845 241 3450 or email her at

A2Z - Understanding our clients' needs and delivering bespoke, cost-effective solutions

On this day

Historical events on or around the date of this newsletter.

Usually, they are just events that caught our eye. Occasionally, there might be one which is relevant to research, surveys or statistics, but we make no promises.

Stewart Stone spent his early career in finance and HR before moving into operational sales roles with several well known recruitment consultancies. He then specialised in talent management focussing on resourcing and learning and development, and spent eleven years with a global recruitment business, the last five at Board level.

Stewart is the founder of Enhancing Potential, a global talent management consultancy that provides bespoke coaching, training and recruitment solutions to a broad range of organisations from small start ups to global businesses.

Stewart writes:

TALENT MANAGEMENT IN CHINA

Enhancing Potential was engaged at the end of last year by a large global recruitment business with offices throughout China, including Hong Kong and Shanghai. During the first trip meetings were held with the senior management team in both these locations and considerable time was spent building a picture of the very different marketplaces. From there a Training Needs Analysis was conducted, and a series of short “taster” workshops run for different levels of consultants as well as the management team.

Topics that were high in demand from the consultants were business development and candidate control, particularly offer management. One to one coaching for the senior management team was very productive and provided a useful steer for future leadership development.

Based on these findings, the second part of the project was all about delivery through back to back workshops for researchers, consultants, team leaders and the management team together with further coaching. Whilst there was a passion to learn more on the topics the consultants had identified, there was initial caution towards role plays and group work, as they were more used to a lecture style of delivery. Virtually all the people trained were native Chinese, however language was not a barrier as most people had a good grasp of English.

China is hugely expanding and exciting marketplace, and our client was keen to provide learning and development to engage and retain consultants to grow the business. The thirst for knowledge and self improvement was massive. The marketplace for experienced consultants is very competitive with most companies battling to grow their business through a mix of experienced hires and through the Resourcer route. It was great to attend a client event in Shanghai and see clients genuinely buying into the quality of service that our client was providing.

To learn more, please visit Enhancing Potential

Visit our sample web survey. This imaginary employee survey demonstrates the speed and flexibility of our web system and describes the many aspects which can be arranged to suit you. It provides a quick tour of Quantify services you may choose to use, and links to selected outputs illustrations.

If you know anyone who is considering a survey, please forward this email to them and suggest they have a poke around in our sample survey.

• Your Customer Satisfaction Survey
• Your Employee Satisfaction Survey
• Your Internal Customer Satisfaction Survey
• Your Management Feedback System (360° Feedback)

These e-books are full of practical advice and checklists for planning every stage of the project. Most people will find something useful in them. To request your copy, at no cost to you, please click here.

These tips are drawn from our popular and successful one-day seminar, Developing, Authoring and Designing Survey Questionnaires.

Forthcoming open course dates are on the web page.

We also offer a seminar about analysing and interpreting the results of surveys.

Use statements rather than questions.

Last month’s tip was “Keep it brief”. A short questionnaire is almost always preferable to a long one.

A good way to make a questionnaire shorter is to stick to the same response frame as much as possible. You can often do this by expressing questions as statements which people can agree or disagree with. The three statements

can all be responded to using an agreement scale. If you put them as questions, though, each will require a different response frame. Is your contribution recognised? might require options Never, Hardly ever, Most of the time, Always, whereas How do you rate your working environment might need options like Very uncomfortable, Uncomfortable, Comfortable, Very comfortable. Expressing items as statements usually

• Takes up less space, keeping the questionnaire smaller, and less daunting
• Allows the informant to respond without having to take in a new response frame for each question, making completing the survey much less effort

Both these characteristics will help to improve response rate.

David Lusty
Quantify London

For a complimentary initial consultation, please call David Lusty, Quantify London on 020 8704 1296 or email him at Or call Sue Alderson, Quantify Yorkshire, on 0845 241 3450 or email her at

Sue Alderson
Quantify Yorkshire

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