Collective perspective

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Knowing how staff feel about the organisation for which they work – what it’s good at and what it needs to work on – is, one would assume, paramount for good business and employment practices. 

Which is why most larger businesses run regular surveys. After several years specialising in employee insight, however, these surveys and their findings left Michael Silverman thinking they were a waste of time. Too quantitative and numeric, they didn’t contain enough qualitative or open-ended questions to gain useful insight. 

A psychologist by training, Silverman worked in academia before moving into research at Ipsos Mori and, then, into client research as head of employee insight at Unilever. 

“Other areas of research were moving on and doing cool things, but even in a company like Unilever – where it is up to the minute with consumer insight – its employee research wasn’t, ” says Silverman. “I had this conflict that I was working ...