Conducting Surveys to Gauge Residents' Thinking and Placate Critics

Surveys simplify matters — if they are done right. They can be useful for branding the building; prioritizing capital projects; distinguishing the wish lists of the old and new guard; adding amenities; hiring/changing staff; and creating a greater sense of community. Pollock should know: She's worked in market research for 10 years and is research director of Pollock/Spark, a consulting firm that works with leaders of creative businesses. The most important elements in creating a successful survey, she says, are:

• keeping it simple

• asking key queries in different ways to eliminate "question bias" (if you get the same answer to two differently worded but similar inquiries, then you've gotten a reliable answer)

• following up with shareholders on the results. Nothing makes shareholders crankier than feeling left out of the loop. Release the survey results as soon as you can

In her lobby redesign survey, Pollock tackled the issue of taste from several angles. "The questions were: 'Do you believe that your home begins at the door of your apartment or the door of the building? How do you feel about your home? What kind of feeling do you want people to have when they come to your home?' … One of the questions included a little stick figure with an empty thought bubble over its head, [and captioned,] 'This is a visitor walking into the lobby. Now, what's he thinking? What's he thinking after the renovation?'

"By [using humor and] tackling the issue of what individual shareholders wanted to see, by finding out what they were comfortable with first, the survey elicited a surprising consensus: Most of the shareholders wanted a lobby that was elegant, but unpretentious."

Asking the Right Questions

Asking not just the right questions but questions in the right way can neutralize objections, Pollock says. "If you don't ask the right question, you don't know what problem you are solving." The most important thing about a well-crafted survey is distinguishing between types of questions:

• fact-finding
• opinion-gathering
• course-setting

"You have to get people to imagine things they haven't thought through before," explains Pollock. Designing a good survey is like playing volleyball. "You do the set up and then the spike. You ask them an easy question to get them thinking about it, and then you can ask them a hard question."

One key mistake boards make when writing surveys is asking open-ended, emotion-oriented questions such as, "What do you think of the super's work ethic?" Or, "How much should we spend on a lobby renovation?" Stay away from such queries and focus on more tightly worded questions that elicit original ideas that can be instituted, such as, "What amenities should the building add?" And, "What will increase the building's curb appeal?"

"If you ask questions like ‘What do you think of the board?' you are going to get answers you don't want to read, and answers you can't use. If you ask a question like, ‘How much money should we spend on the lobby?' that's a bad question. You don't know how much money you have to spend [and] not everyone understands how the financials of a building work."

Your survey should include a few silly multiple-choice answers to break the tension. And remember: It's extremely important that your survey ask the key question, about whatever issue is most contentious, in several different ways.

Implementing

To encourage as much participation as possible, keep your survey short, and hand-distribute it each shareholder with a request to return the completed forms to a box in the lobby. Two important points to motivate participation are:

• It should take no more than five to 10 minutes to complete

• It should give an incentive to participate (the chance to win a $20 gift certificate to Barnes & Noble, for instance)

Note: While you'll use survey results to inform your decisions about how to proceed as a board, the survey isn't a vote — it's a way for the cooperators to have their ideas heard. A well-designed survey demonstrates to shareholders that the board is listening to them, and it can largely neutralize even the loudest critic. Stay focused on the threefold purpose of the survey: to collect facts, gather opinions and discern what course the shareholders believe the board should be steering.

"The first advantage of the survey is to make people feel heard," Pollock says. "Little things build up unless you find out what people are thinking. A survey makes people feel heard. It makes them feel understood."

Adapted from Habitat February 2009. For the complete article and more, join our Archive >>