Cairo Walker
- May 10
- 3 min read

How to Master Your New Normal - A Practical Research Tool

Updated: May 30

Step Two of a Four-Step Framework that looks at the shape of our organisations as we come out of lockdown and planning and support the move to a new era.

Amanda and Cairo co-present the framework in a workshop series as part of m365May.com - join us every Friday at 9am through the month of May 2020. #M256May

Resources:

15 minute overview of the session (below)

Research Questions - Interviews and Surv

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Research - Interview and Survey Questions (eXcel)

Research Questions - Interviews and Surv

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Research - Interview and Survey Questions (PDF)

Research Categories and Questions Infogr

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Research - Interview Categories and Questions (INFOGRAPHIC | PDF)

Survey questions PDF Infographic

.pdf

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Research - Survey Questions (INFOGRAPHIC | PDF)

If you tuned in last time, you'll know that we started the session with a story about innovation being born out of the lockdown constraints.

For this session, the story is about good leadership during this pandemic period.

As the COVID-19 crisis started to gain traction, the American based CEO of a global consumer products organisation created three guiding principles that would govern all decisions made during the crisis.

PERSONAL SAFETY BEFORE PROFIT - the CEO assured staff, that they and their families came before sales - meaning that the highest priority was ensuring their working safety - getting sales staff off the roads, reorganising how manufacturing was resourced, transitioning customer service into staff member’s homes.
PROTECTION OF CASH FLOW - no discounts for large orders, no deliveries if any payments were in arrears (things that would have been acceptable in normal times). It was about protecting the organisation’s cash position.
CONTAINING COSTS - no recruitment, no travel, minimal expenses and even bringing some outsourced functions back in house. etc.

These three principles have underpinned every decision.. managers have made over the past few months.

This example of strong, decisive and empathetic leadership, reflecting a culture that focuses on their staff is a leadership success story

Research Your Organisation during Lockdown

Use our resarch tools to help you build a good picture of what happened in your organisation through the lockdown period. Approach research with as a high-level light-touch activity. You'll be amazed at what you can achieve and the information you'll gather from just a single one-hour interview with the 'right' person.

One-on-One Interviews

To help you with your research we’ve identified around 20 topics to explore, and grouped these into the following five areas:

Strategy
External Factors
Internal Corporate Departments
Internal Core Business
Culture

Some of the topics may be less relevant to your particular organisation than others, but with some creative variation …they will give you an idea of what needs to be looked at.

Survey to Staff

Use our draft survey and build your survey into your survey tool.

Here are a few free or reasonably-priced tool options for surveys.

Survey Monkey | TypeForm | Google Forms | Zoho Forms | Survey Gizmodo

We have kept the number of questions low, deliberately … so as not to intimidate staff. The questions look at what the changes meant for their role, what were the challenges of WFH, …what were the positives and the negatives of the experience… and what would they like see continue in the future.

Types of Research

While you may be able to answer some of the questions yourself, you'll likely need to engage others to get complete picture of your organisation, it's staff, customers and business through lockdown.

There a variety of methods you might use, but the following techniques will be most useful in for this reasearch.

The survey - Covered above. Surveys are good for getting limited information from a wide range of people.
Individual Interviews - information-rich; one-on-one interviews allow a deep-dive into a particular topic or aspect of the research.
Facilitated Discussion / Workshops - get a group of people together to explore different aspects of one of the questions.
Gathering a few stats/ analytics - it's good idea to add some quantitative data to your research, this could include things like:

what were your customers looking for on your website
how were staff using your intranet, etc.
all valuable information to include in the research

Take the time to document your research or even record the discussions that you have. What you get out of these sessions… will be important for others in the organisation as well as for capturing organisational history as it happens.