Many organisations use standardised or uniform questions or assessment criteria across the entire organisation, irrespective of the decisions made, or risks and compliance obligations inherent in the work performed by different groups or roles (cohorts).

Perceived Benefits:

Standardised questions/content make surveying and reporting more straight forward
Results may be compared across an organisation
Sentiment may be compared across an industry
Content areas can be limited in number to reduce survey/assessment size

Observed Shortfalls:

'Risk' ends up being evaluated as an abstract concept and people may be thinking about different risks or situations in their response (impacting interpretation reliability)
Ignores how different professions are expected to manage key risk classes, controls, or compliance obligations
Doesn’t consider expected differences across organisational hierarchies (e.g., leaders vs. individual contributors) or for different risk / compliance needs (e.g., AML and Integrity have different reporting / escalation protocols to ‘risk’ incident escalation)
Cannot explore risk-taking and the influence of culture on required organisational outcomes; standardised content is better suited to evaluating perceptions of formal risk management practices.

Provocation: Surveys that don’t offer tailored questions to different role groups or cohorts are primarily box-ticking exercises, arguably more for the benefit of teams running such activities.

Explainer: People across organisations contribute to strategic goals in different ways. The associated risks and compliance obligations supported in their work can be fundamentally different.

These differences play out in many ways and require nuances in behaviour by seniority, accountability, delegated authority, business or service unit, profession, and job family. In asking the same questions of everyone through evaluations, expected cultural nuances for different role cohorts are not evaluated. Resulting reports become a dull abstraction of reality.

The term ‘managing risk’ carries different meaning for various role cohorts, making reliable interpretation of perception data challenging. Many roles typically are not fully engaged in all risk-related activities. Junior roles operate within an environment where risk is largely mitigated through strict adherence to procedures and inherent controls - speaking up becomes a key focus. In contrast, senior roles demonstrate more nuanced behaviours in risk-taking, decision-making, and risk management that often are not observable by the entire surveyed workforce.

While many organisations have adopted employee listening strategies, they typically only support the scheduling of engagement / pulse surveys. Listening should allow deeper exploration of the key constituents of culture in support of understanding their influence on requried organisational outcomes.

The Flip: Tailor survey content to reflect the strategic, risk, and/or compliance expectations relevant for the groups of roles being evaluated.