Gather feedback from all staff at your company on how they believe management is handling the COVID-19 crisis because there have been rumours that people are still unhappy with the approach management has been taking. The staff have done two surveys on the topic already and virtual focus groups were held at the end of 2020 to see what people were thinking then; overall, the results from all of this were pretty negative. You're new to the company, so you weren't a part of those previous discussions, but from what you can tell, not much has changed about management's approach since the last survey.

Navigating the Noise

Consider the following questions about navigating the negative noise that might interfere with your task. Use your own experiences and how you think you'd respond if you were the staff too.

How might being under the stress of a global pandemic change for so long affect how people respond to questions about it?
How does your actual goal compare to what the staff might interpret your goal to be? If staff has been asked about this before and expressed a need for change, but no change happened, how might that affect the type of response you get?
How will the channel you pick to gather the information affect the response? Would sending a third survey be welcome or unwelcome? Will the size of a focus group change the response? Will an anonymous survey get different responses than a non-anonymous one?
How might you being new to the company change how people respond to you being the lead for this task?
How can you use the communication strategies to help navigate some of the noise that might affect your message?