Company Audits
What is a company audit?
Similar to a 360 Feedback process, it’s healthy to do a team audit periodically to figure out what’s working and what can be improved to keep your team productive and aligned with your business goals and values.
It’s helpful to have a third-party facilitator lead this process so that it feels safe for everyone to participate and to ensure that the purpose is to help the team learn and grow. You can choose someone inside of your team - but not the team lead. However, it may feel most comfortable to ask a coach to serve in this role so that everyone feels they can be honest without there being any negative organizational ripples associated with this process.
Company audit process
Much like the 360 Feedback experience, there needs to be a lot of alignment and communication about purpose and process. It’s helpful to have your leadership team align on how they conduct this process across any team so that it can be deployed for a specific team once a year or whenever it seems appropriate. We’d encourage you to have departmental or team reviews once a year to normalize audits so a team doesn’t feel scrutinized or judged when going through this process.
Company audit game plan
Much like the 360 Feedback process, you need to have a thoughtful rollout plan like this one:
Identify someone who can work with you to facilitate this process.
Align with the leader of the team about goals, processes, and questions you want to ask.
Introduce the team audit process to the whole team once a year; consider discussing it in an all-hands meeting and encouraging all managers to follow up with their teams.
Get the feedback questions ready.
Have your facilitator interview each person privately and confidentially with your questions.
Have your facilitator review and consolidate the feedback.
Create a report for the manager and team that anonymizes the feedback and suggests actionable interventions, if necessary.
Have your facilitator lead a discussion with the team lead to process this feedback.
Consider having the facilitator lead a discussion with the entire team to process this feedback.
Come up with a game plan for next steps.
Team audit questions to consider:
Strengths:
What do we excel at as a team?
Business goals:
How are we doing at setting goals and achieving them?
Are we getting the right stuff done?
Culture and values:
Are we consistently behaving in ways that align with our company culture and values? Explain.
Communication + collaboration:
How are we doing collaborating and communicating as a team?
Challenges:
What has been hard or difficult for us as a team this past period of time?
Overall feedback
What overall feedback do you have about this team?
You can do a light version of a company audit using an anonymous survey tool to pulse-check quickly. The problem with doing an anonymous survey, though, is that you can’t double-click on problem spots. It can illuminate big-picture trends, but it won’t let you know of acute problems in areas of the organization.
We encourage you to do a full version with a survey and interviews once a year to ensure you are getting feedback from all areas of your organization. It’s a great practice to share your findings with your team and board, as well, and to quickly take action on any items that surface that need leadership’s attention.