Workplace Assessments: A Departmental MRI

I underwent an MRI last year to help diagnose neck pain that wasn't going away on its own. Being 2024, I was able to register to receive the images and clinical report by email well before doctor's appointment to receive the results and treatment options. By then, I'd already made a lot of hasty conclusions that wouldn't have done much to help the pain in the neck. My amateur radiology mixed up a lot of meaningless visual noise for something important, while completely missing the main issue that my doc pointed out with ease.

In the workplace, we sometimes find ourselves in the same spot - with a lot of images of teams from certain perspectives, a variety of good and poor quality data, and substantial room for misinterpretation and misattribution of root causes - especially when some folks in your organization may have begun referring to a team as a 'pain in the neck'.

A workplace assessment can be the right intervention to help leaders step back and obtain actionable intelligence that can help diagnose conflict and point the way to helpful treatment options.

Workplace assessments combine elements of workplace investigation, dispute resolution and organizational behaviour concepts to gather the subjective perspectives of a group, categorize them into themes, and offer pragmatic recommendations. The Fermata Workplace Solutions process typically involves the following elements:

1. Client Intake: we discuss the catalyst or culminating event that prompted a request for service. Culminating events typically involve informal complaints without a clear complainant, anonymous complaints, frontline leader observations of heightening conflict, or rapid changes in team effectiveness (absenteeism, medical leaves, poor engagement scores, low productivity or diminished service levels).

   
   

2. Stakeholder identification and engagement: we identify the people and institutions (unions, labour committees, etc.) who have a significant leadership role in the current conflict management system (the way conflict is worked out, officially and otherwise), and seek their buy-in to a process that offers confidentiality and a channel for direct actionable feedback.

   
   

3. Psychological Health Survey: We utilize the research methods of Harvard research Amy Edmondson to identify hot and cold zones of workplace psychological safety, with questions that include whether the employee perceives that it is safe to make a mistake on this team, and whether anyone on the team would intentionally undermine their efforts. The responses provide quantitative data and an opportunity to individual narratives.

   
   

4. Interviews: Team members are interviewed confidentially to provide their personal workplace narrative, with the assessor prompting participants for individual experiences resolving conflict successfully and where they may have observed problematic or harmful unresolved conflict. Interviews typically begin with frontline staff and conclude with leaders.

   
   

5. Report: the assessor analyzes the quantitative and anecdotal data, categorizes it into themes, and provides recommendations.

What are the benefits and alternatives to an assessment?

Workplace assessments can allow organizations to respond fulsomely to the presence of serious workplace conflict issues even when the concerns are hazy, anonymous, dated or otherwise difficult to action through a workplace investigation or formal management response (coaching, discipline). This process can also be employed as a corrective action after a team have gone through a formal workplace investigation. While the completed investigation focused on a particular set of allegations, and may have stirred up anxiety and concern in the team, the investigation closure may not have gotten to the root causes of conflict within the team. An assessment gives team members a broader opportunity than a witness interview to describe their working experiences and contribute to a non-disciplinary set of solutions.

Leaders benefit from receiving a clear set of recommendations and from the workplace culture benefits of including the team in the solutions to their challenges, giving subsequent management decisions greater legitimacy and chance of buy-in.

What kind of recommendations come out of this process?

While some assessment methodologies suggest that communication and conflict resolution training are always the right intervention, we prefer to take a team-specific approach to each and every assessment. While workplace assessments rely upon certain subjective data, the perceptions a team shares in an assessment is their reality, and the results can drive specific operational recommendations as well as traditional conflict resolution initiatives such as training, mediation and facilitation. Past assessments have recommended:

• Redefining the role of the "Lead Hand" position to clarify their authority level and expectations (Industrial sector)

• Facilitating an all-staff discussion to land on what 'trauma-informed' means to that team, and cease employing it as a tool of internal power - 'I'm trauma-informed and you are not'. (Social service sector)

• Re-examining vacation and scheduling procedures to remove or mitigate incentives that had rationally led employees to call in sick instead of using the vacation approval process, or to request vacation last-minute. (Developmental service sector/healthcare sector)

• Reviewing Board Governance Bylaws to clarify the governance versus management role of Directors and the Chair (NFP sector)

In addition to these operational recommendations, assessments often point to the benefits of a team charter, group mediation/facilitation, or two-party mediations between individuals central to a perceived conflict.

Workplace assessments are your departmental MRI: an opportunity to gather various scans and images of your team, along with a 'workplace radiology' report summarizing the data and offering potential courses of treatment. Leaders act as the ultimate workplace clinicians, taking an assessor's diagnostic data and selecting the interventions that are right for organization and team.

Interested in a workplace assessment at your organization? Click here to schedule a consultation: Meet