By BLR Founder and Publisher Bob Brady
BLR’s CEO ponders improving communications at our company (and yours,) and asks for your help in a way that can benefit all concerned.
Every year for the last 10 years, we’ve surveyed our employees about their jobs and the company—an attitude survey. To a very distressing degree, the item we regularly rank lowest on is “company communication.”
For many years, I interpreted this to mean that management was doing a poor job of communicating company goals to employees, and so we worked at improving this. The result? Little or no change. But we kept trying, again, with limited success.
Finally, we smartened up and began asking the employees, “What do you mean by ‘poor communication?’” The response clued us in to something that we hadn’t expected. Management wasn’t the only culprit. Employees generally said things like, “My co-workers send me work that doesn’t’ have everything I need, and I have to ask them for it.” Or “A process gets changed, and I’m last to hear about it.”
Intrigued, we changed the survey to break the “communication” question out into three components: “company communication,” “departmental communication,” and “interdepartmental communication.” The results? In general, people think their own teams are doing pretty well, the whole company slightly less well, and other teams, even less.
What we’ve “discovered” is that “communication” is more about peer-to-peer working relationships between departments than hierarchical communication between management and staff. (Not to say that management isn’t still responsible for the culture and processes involved.)
This may be the way it is and always will be, but we’re experimenting with a few simple processes that will encourage inter-departmental teamwork.
For example, at performance appraisal time, we suggest that employees ask their internal customers and suppliers (co-workers who are either upstream or downstream in the work process) what they should “continue doing, start doing, and stop doing.” They can use the answers to develop plans and goals.
Have we cured the problem? Not completely, but knowing that it is a problem is itself empowering.
The survey
The survey we use consists of a few basic questions, asked two ways: “How important is this to you?” (importance) and “How well are we doing?” (performance). It’s important to get answers to both questions.
You may find that you’re very good at things that no one cares about and poor at things that are very important. A simple ratio will give you insight into how well you are doing with the things that are important to employees. Divide importance by performance scores. The closer you are to 100%, the better you are.
We do the survey every year at the same time (to reduce the influence of seasonality), and then we publish and share overall results with employees. Management and supervisors get more detailed reporting that breaks the results down by status, years of employment, department, and other demographic categories.
While management and HR look at the ratios, we report on the “percent favorable” to the rest of the organization, since this is much easier for people to understand.
What have we learned? That the three most important things for employees are: departmental teamwork, having a manager who is fair, and knowing what is expected of them. We also found that there was less than 10% variation in the importance scale but a 41% difference in the performance scale. For the record, we’re best at departmental teamwork and worst at interdepartmental communication. (Sounds like silos, I know.)
Help Us Benchmark, and We’ll Help You
As we’ve done these surveys, we’ve often wondered, “How are we doing relative to other employers?” Because if we’re worse than the average on any item, it’s a signal that we could do something about it. To that end, we’re considering asking our customers to have their employees fill out our survey form on the Internet (20 questions, about 15 minutes). We’ll process the information, on a confidential basis, and send you an overall report of what your employees think, absolutely free, as a thank you for helping us. (More detailed versions of the report would be available at a nominal charge.)
Meanwhile, we’d be aggregating the data for all the companies that took part, which we’d publish as group benchmarks for the business world in general.
Would you be interested in participating and getting a free report on your employees’ attitudes? If so, please e-mail me at Rbrady@blr.com. I will get back to you with particulars.
In one of the companiesI worked in as an HR Manager – several years ago in South India – I couldn’t help noticing that managers and other staff, invariably, kept talking about what “THEY” should be doing so as to improve organisational effectivenes. It was always the great big THEY (Management) and not WE or I.
I read this as a great message to indicate that there was a huge fund of operational knowledge and wisdom floating around the organisation. The problem, of course, was how to get to that fund.
What I decuided was to send round an unstructured circular to all heads of departments asking them and their and their staff to send to me – directly – their views on ANY subject – and, if possible, a suggested course of action – that they felt could lead to improving corporate and individual performance.
I was amazed at the response which covered almost all aspects of how the company was functioning – from HR, Finance, Communications, Corporate Planning, Industrial relations, P.R., etc.
With this flood of information, my Divisional staff and I collated these comments and ideas as separate background papers for use in a Workshp which was entitled “Organisational Effectivenes”.
The participants for that Workshop were chosen from a group of Young Managers who had all had excellent P.A. ratings: the reason for this was that these young men would be corporate leaders in the not too distant future – and their views could help the company move in the right direction.
To cut a long story short, the outcome of that Workshop was a great document which the Board of Directors and top brass of the company utilised to form a new Corporate Strategy which led to considerable improved performance.
I’m not too sure if this comment – sorry, my experience – is relevant to your piece, Bob, but I thought you might find it interesting, if not useful.
Satish Patel
Management Consultant