POOR WORKFORCE MORALE
will negatively affect your "bottom line" in three ways:
1 High employee turnover
and it's associated costs:
To a great degree, voluntary turnover is manageable. Investing in retention solutions that result in even a small reduction in your organization's turnover rate can realize substantial reductions in turnover expense over the long term.
2 Decreased productivity and
increased waste.
3 Customer dissatisfaction and the
resulting loss of customers.
- Award-winning Questions
You choose from a list of proven questions to meet your needs. - Demographics
You decide the labels that
best fit your company or organization. - Traditional or Contemporary
You choose which response type is most appropriate for your workforce. - Opening &
Closing Dates
You select when your survey starts and ends. - Internal Comparison
You decide if you wish your raw data to be retained for period-to-period comparison.
Surveys cost money.
Unless you have money sitting around to burn, why craft survey questions that simply lead people to the answer you want to hear?
What about those questions that give you useless data?
WOW - all of that wasted money and energy getting answers you either already know or that won't open eyes to the opportunities to improve your organization or give you anything to act upon...
Remember, just because data exists doesn't make it useful.
Why not use the same questions that award-winning organizations have paid thousands of dollars to have written, the same questions they use over and over again. We have a proven list of questions obtained from these organizations.
We can help you know what to ask, how to ask it and what to do with the results.
When determining what demographic divisions (labels) will help you make solid business decisions from the results of your survey consider:
The size of the various demographic options - for example, if you decide to make a label called "Accounting Department" under the Department demographic but this department only has one or two people in it, these people may be hesitant to provide you with completely candid remarks for fear they could be identified by this demographic label. It may be prudent to group some areas together if the label you are considering has less than five to six people. If you decide to do this simply place all the groups together on one label with commas or dashes between the groups -- e.g. "Accounting, Audit, IT" may be one label. Another label may be "Sales and Customer Support."
The name of the label you select - When defining labels make sure that you name the labels something your staff can understand and identify with. Ask yourself, if you chose "Administration" as a label under the Department demographic heading, do the people in that "department" know that is what they are called?
Depending on the culture of your business/organization, you may elect to use traditional responses or contemporary responses. To choose the proper response type for your survey consider:
If your organization is more formal in nature (structured hierarchy, more written than oral communication, strong policies and procedures), traditional responses may fit your survey better. These responses are Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree and Strongly Agree.
If your organization is less formal in nature (somewhat flattened organizational chart, mostly oral communications, less structured policies and procedures), contemporary responses may fit your survey better. These responses vary from question to question but contain responses such as: No, Not at All, Somewhat True, Definitely, Absolutely True, etc.
Consider your workforce. Choose the response type that would make them feel more comfortable, thus encouraging them to give you maximum information from the survey.
When selecting the opening and closing dates of your survey consider:
The number of people who will take the survey - the larger the number the more time you may need communicate with the participants in order to fully prepare them to take part in the survey process (information, education, training, etc.).
The willingness of the people who will take the survey - you will need to contact the participants in some fashion to tell them about the survey and solicit "buy-in". The participants may want to understand "why" they should participate, that is "of what benefit is it to me?" A company-wide meeting or communication may be needed. Allow sufficient time to accomplish this step to maximize your participation.
The accessibility of a computer/internet by the people who will take the survey as well as their familiarity with computers - if all of the participants don't have ready access to a computer at their workstation or if some are not familiar with taking an on-line survey, you may want to allow some time to prepare a place/time for them to take the survey (in a training room perhaps) and to familiarize them with the process.
After you receive your first set of results, determine what changes you need to make in the way you do business to improve your results.
- Don't try to change too many things at once.
- Select only one or two changes or adjustments.
- Formulate a plan.
- Communicate what you will be changing and why.
- Make the change(s).
- Then WAIT.
- Approximately 2-3 months later, re-survey just the parts that should be improving to determine if you are achieving the desired effect.
- If your scores are improving in that area, continue with your plan. If not, determine what additional adjustments are needed then repeat the steps.
Award-winning organizations
- Measure
- Adjust
- Measure
- Adjust, etc.
Many surveys available today won't hold your raw data to see how you're doing in the areas of adjustments -
See-Hear-Speak.com will...
"I want to write my own workforce survey, is that a good idea?"
We don't recommend writing your own workforce survey for several reasons:
Find out why »
While you're probably a very good leader in your field of expertise, unless you've been trained to write survey questions, it's probably safer to use questions that have been tested over time by top companies and organizations around the world. You may save your organization time and money in the long run.
You want your employees to have confidence that the origin of their responses is kept confidential. One of the great temptations of writing custom surveys is to include information such as corporate/organizational logos, lingo or phrases that are frequently used only in your organization, and questions that pertain only to your firm. While at first glance this might seem good, to an employee who wants to be open and honest with their responses, this may cause concern that the collection of the data they supply is less than anonymous.
If you intend to measure the success or failure rate of the adjustments you make as a result of your data, you need to make sure that the collecting entity can and will retain your raw data for comparison purposes. Otherwise, at the very least you'll be increasing your own workload to do so.
