To make sure your start with the Livingroom platform goes as smooth and pain-free as possible, we’ve created a quick checklist with a few points to check before launching the first survey.

NOTE: Rushing into sending out your first survey is not a good idea. It is a good chance that it will end with a bad experience for you, as well as for the leaders and employees – it’s like trying to put together an Ikea furniture in few minutes without paying attention to the instructions. Please read the startup checklist and also complete this tutorial before involving other employees and/or leaders.

Below are some important points to check before launching your first Livingroom survey.

1. Appreciating Your Current Organizational Wisdom and Knowledge

While Livingroom is a platform that helps facilitate growth in your organization, it will not run on autopilot or replace the need for wise decisions and mature leadership.

Before starting to use Livingroom, it’s important to appreciate the wisdom that’s already accumulated in your organization. When HR personnel and managers are appreciated for the knowledge they already have, they are much more likely to be receptive and open for the insights and action suggestions that will show up in Livingroom.

Among the things you could do to appreciate the current organizational knowledge:

• Run one or more leadership and/or HR workshops and brainstorm on the key questions: In the past, what have we successfully done to improve our organization and engage our employees? What were our struggles? Where do we have our main growth potential?
• Write a powerpoint document summarizing some of the organizational learnings that your organization has accumulated and send it to your manager for review and commenting.

2. Think Through the Purpose of Using Livingroom and Formulate Clear Goals

Before you roll out Livingroom in your organization, it is also important to consider why you are doing it and what you want to get out of it. With the Livingroom platform you should be prepared to grow.

Are you ready for change? Are you as a company ready to listen to your employees? Are you willing to put in the effort needed in order to take the organization to the next level? Even more important, is the decision to implement Livingroom backed up by the top management?

As we always tell managers, they don’t need to do everything the employees ask for but be prepared to listen and at least make some effort to improve their organization. In the beginning, even small improvements would often be highly appreciated and seen as positive. Livingroom helps prioritizing your effort, making sure you focus on the changes that are really needed and within reach for your budget.

Based on our experiences, we recommend that you define at least 3 goals for what you want to achieve with Livingroom. Goals should be clear and specified. Examples of such goals are:

• Raising employee engagement with 5% over the next year;
• Improving employee productivity with 7% in the next 2 years;
• Increasing retention with 5 months within the next year.

Once the company has a clear and thought-through purpose for implementing Livingroom and has set up improvement goals, it is easier for the leaders to track progress and also choose the right improvement actions.

3. Practical Platform Setup - Adding Employee, Team, and Manager Data

To make sure the software is running smoothly, it is important that all relevant company, team, employee, and manager data is set up correctly and kept up to date in the platform.

These basic HR data are crucial and will directly impact the employee’s surveys. Livingroom’s intelligent dynamic surveys rely on correct information in order to provide the most accurate questions for every single employee. If the data is not set up correctly, employees might get awkward and unfitting questions. Make sure to double check that the information is set up correctly.

4. Plan Date Of Launch

Planning is always a good idea! Set a date for your first survey  and make sure that all internal practicalities are ready to go.

5. Run a Test Round

We highly recommend that you run a test round before launching your first official survey.

6. Communicate to Employees and Managers

We highly recommend that you – in a timely manner – communicate the collaboration with Livingroom Analytics as well as your intentions for running Livingroom before launching your first survey. By involving your employees from the start and informing them about the underlaying purpose, you will help create a more positive attitude towards the surveys. It is a good idea to also inform them about the planned launch date.

You can read more about proper and timely employee and leadership communication later in the tutorial (Communicating Livingroom Analytics to the Organization).

7. Plan a Follow-Up

As your calendar is already on the table, you might as well plan a meeting to discuss and follow up on the results gathered through the Livingroom Platform. Plan a management meeting for reviewing the results of the survey as well as discussing actions.

We also recommend that you prepare your managers for using Livingroom. For many leaders, using an engagement platform will be a new way of working with survey insights and actions. The focus is not on a written report. Instead, each leader can review his/her own results, work online with improvement actions, and communicate action progress to the employees. If you have the resources, we highly recommend setting up (a) 2-hour training workshop(s) with your leaders in advance, teaching them how to use the Livingroom platform in their daily leadership, and also providing an opportunity for dialogue and questions about Livingroom. The minimum requirement is giving them an introduction to how Livingroom works.

< Completing the Livingroom Wizard

Navigating in Livingroom >