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Measurement Services

Employee Opinion

Well trained, quality employees are one of your company's greatest assets. Measuring your employees' perceptions of your organization on a regular survey cycle can help you to reduce turnover rates and avoid costly training of new employees.

Knowing the perceptions of your employees about training and policy issues such as safety, discrimination and harassment can provide the information you need to proactively educate employees and perhaps prevent costly legal matters.

A number of key workforce trends have emerged.

And what about the ROI? Let's talk numbers:

Employee Satisfaction Surveys - When companies understand employees' concerns, employees stay longer because they want to and the company avoids costly turnover, allocating more resources for growth in areas such as marketing, sales and customer service. What's more, truly loyal employees will go the extra mile to make customers happy and recommend the organization to prospective employees.

Results - The information garnered from employee satisfaction surveys can give you the management knowledge that directly impacts the bottom line and fosters positive employee relations in any or all of the following ways:

Do Employee Opinion Surveys Really Work? .......YES - When we interview Managers who conduct employee opinion surveys and ask the question, "Why do you do this?", most say they are listening to employees in hopes that they can improve the organization. Employees know reality. I do not see how a manager can run an organization without having accurate feedback from the people who are actually serving the customers - if employees are to be effective and pleasant with customers, they need to feel good about the organization and the people that they work with.

An EOS gives the management team an accurate picture of reality - Management teams usually have a gut feeling about what is right and what could be improved in their organizations. What they do not have is objective, measurable data that provides an accurate picture of what their employees think is going well and what could be improved. It is one thing when a manager thinks there might be a problem with cross-departmental teamwork or the level of service that is provided to customers. It is quite another thing when the management team knows that 60 percent of all employees state that teamwork is low in the organization.

Management teams who take action on the results usually see improved morale - When management teams do something with the feedback from the survey, they send out a message that management really does care and they value the opinions of employees. Recent, a senior management team agreed with employees that they needed to clarify the organization's vision and goals. This took several meetings to analyze, define, and clarify the company's vision and goals. Employees were encouraged to provide input and to ask questions. This one definite action by management let employees know that what they say does make a difference.

An EOS helps build relationships between managers and their staff - If there are relationship problems between certain managers and employees, the survey pinpoints the precise area that needs to improve and the depth of the problem. An EOS provides every manager with specific feedback about the department. We worked with a manager whose feedback indicated that the manager did not hold employees accountable. The manager decided to meet with each employee on a monthly basis and give honest feedback on the employee's performance. When a manager is willing to use the feedback and change behaviors in some of the lowest rated areas, relationships almost always grow stronger.

An EOS produces hard data to measure an organization's progress - It is common knowledge that you get what you measure. An organization is able to review the first survey, compare it with their most recent survey, and discover how effectively they are improving.

An EOS provides management with a tool to hold people accountable - There are times when an organization becomes aware that they have a leader who creates significant relationship problems for the organization. The EOS provides very specific quantitative data that gives a manager feedback regarding which specific areas need improvement. With this information, the manager can require accountability for actions and request appropriate changes in behavior.