The platform is primarily designed for typical hierarchical structures, where each employee has a single direct supervisor. If your hierarchy is atypical and, for example, some employees have multiple managers, we recommend exploring the alternatives presented in this article.
Recommended Alternatives
When multiple managers work together to fulfill the role of a direct supervisor for an employee, here's how the process can be adapted:
Employee Preparation in Advance: Employees should be encouraged to consider their management team as a whole rather than focusing on a single manager.
Questionnaire Revision: It might be useful to include more inclusive questions (e.g., "The managers I work with are easily accessible when I have questions"). The aim here is to understand if the management team is fulfilling its role and meeting expectations. If not, interventions can be made with the entire project management team to reinforce this practice.
Adapted Segmentation: Creating an attribute such as division or team could be useful. This would allow the examination of results according to different parameters that would be more relevant for analysis than identifying a single manager.
Targeted Audience by Question: It is possible to use the targeted audience function by question, based on a custom attribute, if you wish to keep conventional questions for a group with a classic hierarchy (e.g., administrative teams) versus another group with multiple managers (e.g., project teams).
How to Evaluate Each Manager Separately When Employees Have Multiple Managers?
In this case, it might be feasible to conduct a separate survey with a targeted audience.
Note that this would resemble a form of performance evaluation for the manager, which might send a contradictory message to the platform's objective and key messages.
What to Avoid
Now that we have identified the recommended alternatives, here is an example of an alternative to avoid, to give you a better understanding of the impact of certain options on the results.
Using the Attribute at the End of the Survey to Allow the Employee to Choose the Manager to be Evaluated through Their Responses:
The risk with this method is that some employees might choose the manager with whom they have a more favorable relationship, while others might choose the one with whom they have a less favorable relationship, rather than selecting the one with whom they have more interaction and whose role more closely aligns with a typical direct supervisor. This could pose a significant issue in data analysis regarding the representativeness of the results.