Compared to the Fastest Company in the Slow Lane

Comparing the results of your employee survey with normative data is often seen as being valuable. However, upon closer and more thoughtful examination, such comparisons at best do little more than make nice slide presentations. At worst, they lead to complacency and can be destructive to your organization’s ability to achieve its objectives. Essentially all larger companies today conduct employee surveys. Many conduct such surveys at regular intervals, such as annually or bi-annually. Others do so less frequently, or only when a specific event or environment precipitates the perceived need ...

Have Employee Surveys Become Too Commonplace?

In most of today’s larger organizations, employee surveys have become commonplace. And, on the surface at least, that would seem to be a very positive thing.

Employee surveys, after all, are intended to be a form of two-way communication with members of a company’s workforce. They are intended to provide senior managers with invaluable insight related to how employees think and feel about their jobs and their futures. They are intended to help management assess and measure things that would otherwise be ambiguous, like degrees of “alignment” and “employee engagement”. They are ...

Overview

Like most organizational initiatives, employee surveys only appear to be simple. But in fact, developing, deploying, analyzing and responding to employee surveys require managers to think like psychologists, analyze like statisticians, and respond like sociologists.

However, as in many things, a good process that supports sound strategy is always the answer. There needs to be a fundamental shift in strategy in order to take full advantage of the ten critical success factors listed below.

The correct methodology provides the ability for any organization to get higher value than ever before. In order to do more than just a survey ...

If you’ve ever administered an employee survey, then you’ve no doubt spent the ridiculous amount of time and effort it takes to administer and create all of the reports.  And spent many a night lying awake, hoping for a resolution to come swiftly before the morning, but it never does.  If you don’t do employee surveys or don’t need to listen to the employees in your organization, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, so move along.  There’s nothing to see here.

Alright, now that they’re gone, I’m going to ...