In this project, I wrote the survey questions and created the report with the support of the senior researcher. My manager at the time was an expert in political polling, and I learned a ton from her about best practices in sampling and survey design.
The survey intended to uncover the state of innovation in government agencies. At the time, open office design was a new trend, and there were a series of high-profile articles about how Silicon Valley companies were trying to redesign the office to spur innovation. By contrast, there were long-held stereotypes about government agencies being sluggish environments where underperformance results in a department transfer more often than a termination. We wrote questions to discover how and whether agencies were undertaking concrete initiatives to create a culture of innovation that rewards high performers, which is important for recruitment, talent retention, and employee happiness.
I wrote the following blog posts to further promote the gated report, highlighting key findings and successfully driving downloads:
This study was underwritten by Accenture. Like many research projects I worked on at GBC, this required a balance between maintaining objectivity and the highest quality in the research, but delivering headlines and takeaways that the client would be pleased to see. The need to balance these two things resulted in a lot of time spent parsing the exact phrasing of the questions, and debating the exact phrasing of our conclusions so as to accurately represent the findings.