Newsletter Archive
November 2006
WHO'S SATISFIED WITH THEIR EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION SURVEYS?
No one? It sure seems that way. McBassi CEO Laurie Bassi has frequent opportunities to address business audiences that include executives, HR professionals, and others responsible for an organization's people management. She often asks the audience to "Raise your hand if your organization uses an employee satisfaction survey." Typically almost everyone in the audience raises a hand. She follows with "Okay, now keep your hand raised if you're satisfied with what you're getting from your employee satisfaction survey." Every hand goes down.
Why are so many organizations spending so much money on satisfaction surveys that are so unsatisfactory? We would suggest that the primary reason is that these surveys fail to help organizations generate any fundamental improvements in what they care about most: their bottom line business results.
In too many organizations, The Annual Employee Satisfaction Survey is an exercise in futility. It typically generates a great deal of activity, possibly some new working groups, perhaps even a brief flicker of hope that this is the year that things will be different. Nevertheless, odds are the whole survey process will, in the end, once again yield few (if any) tangible results. No wonder no one's satisfied with the survey!
The ingredient that most organizations are missing is a clear understanding of the links between their employee satisfaction results and their business results. In order for your employee satisfaction survey to be useful, it needs to generate compelling, actionable insights. That means you must know which survey items are linked most closely to the specific business results about which your organization cares the most, as well as strengths and weaknesses across survey items. Believe it or not, this critically-important analysis of links to business results is actually a fairly straightforward task that yields valuable insights.
If you're interested in more details on how to improve the usefulness of your organization's survey, check out the free "how-to" guide available on our website. Download "A Guide to Using Your Human Capital Data to Improve Business Results", and start to become satisfied with your satisfaction survey.