When conducting measurements within an organization, it is important to track changes in order to take action and see the results of efforts. The structure of the organization changes over time, and our goal is therefore for the results to be as useful and valuable as possible now and in the future.
In Quicksearch's services, the responses for employees in a department will remain in that department at the time of response, even if the employee later changes departments. This means that historical responses do not move when an employee changes departments.
When there are many organizational levels, conditions may sometimes change. Quicksearch has a best practice for how to handle departments moving hierarchically, being split, or merged. It is important to be clear and consistent with the results we present, even if the conditions are adjusted over time. The reader should easily understand, interpret, and act on the results without risking comparisons between apples and oranges.
Quicksearch's experience is that we handle trends consistently when changes occur.
- If a department remains unchanged and is included in multiple measurement occasions, a trend for the department is reported.
- If a department is new, there is no previous trend, but one will be established at the next occasion.
- If a department is renamed but otherwise remains intact (e.g., Department A becomes Department B), a trend is reported, and the department's name can be updated historically. Thus, we rename Department A to Department B historically for future benefit from the results.
- If a department is split (e.g., Department A becomes Department B and Department C), the conditions are no longer the same, and a trend cannot be obtained at the department level. If the new departments (B & C) are hierarchically at the same level as the previous one (A), a trend can still be interpreted higher up in the hierarchy, but not by the person responsible for only Department A or Department B.
- If two departments are merged into one department (e.g., Department A and Department B together form Department C), the conditions have changed, and therefore, a trend is not possible at the department level. However, a trend can be inferred higher up in the hierarchy.
- If a department ceases to exist, the historical responses will remain at the hierarchical level where they were previously, but new responses will not be collected, and future trends will not include new responses for the department. No new results will exist for natural reasons, and no user will have direct access to the department's results as it no longer exists.
Our focus is therefore for the results to be as useful as possible now and in the future rather than trying to present things exactly as they were in the past with old conditions. We have chosen to focus on the results as an improvement tool rather than historical reporting.
During major restructuring, it is of interest to follow the results at the department level if it remains intact, but also to get an idea of how the new organization would have looked historically in the hierarchy.
Therefore, we allow for restructuring of the structure for historical results to provide a better overview of how the organization as a whole develops, while intact departments can retain their results. However, this comes at the expense of maintaining hierarchical results in older measurements exactly as they were at the time of measurement.