The ethnographer
Ten minutes per person; invitations, scheduling, and reminders are handled. It opens with rapport, adapts, and asks about specific recent incidents.
10 min
per conversation, per person
800
words of first-person narrative heard, on average
20+
languages, spoken, by phone or web
48 hrs
from launch to the first returned conversations
It earns the sensitive part
A form asks people to rate themselves. The ethnographer asks for the last time it happened and reads the account. It opens with rapport, references prior conversations on return, and never asks for a score when it can hear the story behind one.
Honest about what it is
The ethnographer never pretends to be human. In practice that is the confidentiality pitch: people speak more freely to an ethnographer that sits outside the chain of command, and the discomfort of disclosure falls when the listener is a machine. Disclosure to the workforce is written, before the first interview.
In the language each person thinks in
More than twenty languages, spoken, by phone or web. It reaches the floor, the night shift, and the field, in their first language and their own voice.
Method in the prompt, substance in the pack
The method lives in the prompt; the topic pack carries the substance. A good conversation looks like this: the person talks about eighty percent of the time, leaves better than they came, and the unsaid surfaces in their own words.
The most honest interview your company runs is the exit interview. By then the honesty costs you the person. The instrument is the ethnographer people confide in while they still work for you.
Next surface
Topic packs→