So Now We Know What Your Workers Think of You … And We’re About to Find Out Again!

By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady

You may recall my writing up a storm recently over a new BLR/HR Daily Advisor project called the National Employee Attitude Survey.

The program offers your organization a free employee attitudes survey if you simply sign up and give your workers access to the questionnaire. We collect the data, then send you a custom-written report on your results and how they benchmark against national averages. Preliminary reports are going to participating companies even as I write. A more detailed final report will be sent later.

Well, since there are now nearly 20,000 questionnaires in the works or complete, we decided to use this column to give everyone a look at the national results. Call it a portrait of the American workplace, as seen from the worker’s side of the paycheck.

The survey was built around four areas crucial to worker morale … teamwork, communication, quality of company operations, and employee personal development.

In each area, we made a number of statements, such as “My department has a high level of teamwork” or “My manager is fair and even-handed” and asked employees to use a 0-10 point scale to rate, first, agreement with the statement, and second, how important the matter was to the worker. The latter is because our experience (10 years of using the same survey at BLR) shows that companies don’t always work on what their people want them to.

The Agreement/Importance Index

Without getting into all the math, let me summarize key results for each of the four areas: But before I do, there’s one number you should know. It’s a decimal called the Agreement/Importance (A/I) Index. The closer it is to 1.0, the more aligned company performance is to worker expectations.

The overall A/I index for all questions is .75. That’s why we say workers are getting only about three-quarters of what they consider important. OK, let’s look at the areas:

Communication: Overall, communications within companies are just OK (.75). Workers know what’s expected of them (.88) and how their jobs fit the big picture (.91). But things break down once communication leaves the individual department. Employees positively pummel how well change is communicated among departments (.58) and companywide (.64). They feel they’re not getting the information they need.

Teamwork: Employees think they know how to be team players (.98!) but that their organizations don’t play well as a team (.68). Departments do somewhat better (.82), but there’s lots of room for improvement to match workers’ lofty assessment of themselves as team players.

Company Operations. Employees are middling in their approval of their work practices and resources (.79) and of the fairness of their managers (.81). They do feel their managers are caring (.87). As to their peers, they’re grudgingly approving of their co-workers’ efforts (.82) at doing good work but absolutely beaming over their own commitment to quality. (.98), which they feel is not sufficiently recognized (.76).

Personal Development: Many feel there is someone at work who supports their growth (.80) and that they’ve had a chance to improve their skills (.80). However, they’re not as satisfied with what their employer does officially to help advance their careers (.75).

If the survey has a bottom-line question, it’s this one: “How likely would you be to recommend your workplace to friends and family?” The result is pretty positive (.86). So despite some grumbling, it’s not a bad picture, but one that could stand improvement.

Advice to Participants … And Another Chance to Join the Survey

What’s our advice to participating organizations to get that improvement? Review the results with managers and supervisors, first. Make sure they are in the loop. Then, as the information is communicated to employees, look at areas in which scores are lower than the average and probe for “why?,” “what do you think this means?,” and “can you give examples?” The answers are often different than you might think.

Thanks to all who participated! Please send any comment or questions to our survey team at NEAS@blr.com,  or call us at (800) 727-5257, Ext. 2301.

FLASH! We’re running the survey again! It’s still free of all cost to you, and it’s even easier to sign up and run. To join us (starting on February 8, 2008) visit http://neas.blr.com.