By BLR Founder and CEO Bob Brady
Bob Brady invites you to take stock of employee satisfaction at your organization—and find out how you compare to similar employers—with the BLR® National Employee Attitude Survey.
Third edition
The former mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, was famous for asking people, “How’m I doin’?” He’d ask anybody and everybody, at any and all times. He’d most often get the equivalent of, “Fine, thanks for asking,” but he’d sometimes get information he didn’t know, and he often got a useful reality check.
At BLR, for almost 15 years, we’ve been asking employees, “How are we doing?” In our annual survey, all employees are asked about their jobs, their managers, and their views of the company. Each question is asked two ways, “How important is this to you?” and “How are we performing?” By looking at each score, and then computing an index (performance divided by importance), we get insights into the pulse of the company. We learn what we’re doing right, and, even more important, what we’re doing wrong. Whether the news is good or bad, it has helped us make better use of our number one asset—our people.
Over the years, we regularly compared results by department, by length of employment, and by role, both individually and year over year. This was very helpful information, but there was one thing missing: We didn’t know how we were doing versus other employers. Were our “good” scores really good? How bad were the bad ones?
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The National Survey
Enter the National Employee Attitude Survey. In 2007, we offered all of you the opportunity to use the survey for your workforce, free of charge. We then compiled the results and were able to see how we, and those of you who participated, compared. (For the record, we’re better than average, but way below the very best. It was both gratifying and humbling. We’re working on it!)
For us, the most surprising finding involved “communication,” which was always our lowest score. However, when we compared ourselves against other employers, we found that communication is one of our better qualities. It was very enlightening, and helped us focus on other areas where we were poorer than our peers, like teamwork.
This year’s survey, which was done in the face of some pretty grim economic circumstances, showed that, as a company, we are continuing to improve in our employees’ eyes. They appreciate the fact that we’ve been honest and forthright even as we challenged them to improve sales while reducing costs.
Not to say that there weren’t some departments that offer “improvement opportunities.” One in particular showed declines that concerned us. We had suspected as much, but the survey helped us pinpoint areas on which to concentrate.
Improvements
Last year (2008), we improved the survey by introducing a more comprehensive report in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, preloaded with overall and employer-specific data, and pre-formatted with reports that show overall results, plus detailed analysis of each question. The cost of the basic report stayed the same (free), but we introduced a premium report that gives a much more detailed analysis.
Response was overwhelmingly positive, and we’ve now launched the third cycle with a new, improved version. Key improvements are:
- Support for multiple locations
- Segmentation by “role” (executive, manager, supervisor, etc.)
- Segmentation by your departments (you define your departments)
- Segmentation by external function (e.g., HR, Purchasing, regardless of internal department classification)
With this E-pinion, I’m inviting all of you to take advantage of this offer. You can help your organization improve and, by adding your data to the database, you can improve the quality of the information for all participants.
Using the survey
Signing up and using the survey is quite simple. You go to the link at the end of this paragraph and enroll your organization. It is simple, requiring less than a half dozen items of information. You then get a link that you e-mail to employees. They click on it and take the survey. (A paper version is available for employees without computer access.) You can see a sample of both the paper and Web version when you register. We give you a couple of e-mails to use as reminder follow-ups, and then, when it is complete (normally after 2 weeks), we send you a link to download your complimentary Excel report. It includes all your data, including employees’ written comments, as well as analysis. Go here to review or sign up for the survey.
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Participation
So far, more than 966 employers have participated, and we have 49,616 employee responses in the database. The size of this sample gives us the ability to compare different employee groups at a pretty granular level.
In these economic times, is there a reason that you wouldn’t take advantage of our offer to get a no-charge employee survey? Sign up today.
As always, I’m happy to answer any questions or take any comments. You can reach me at Rbrady@blr.com.