Preventive Care For Your Business
by Rick Galbreath, SPHR
rick@performtogrow.com
If you were having chest pains, would you avoid going to the doctor because the news might be bad? That would be silly, right?
Now, when times are bad, is precisely when you need to know what all your employees, not just the vocal minority, are really thinking. What aspects of their work lives are working well for them? What are their specific concerns? You want to be sure that your employees know you are listening; that you care enough to ask. It is easy to invite their opinions when everything is going well, but more meaningful when people have real concerns.
It is especially important that your employee opinion survey be well constructed and administered in times of uncertainty. Bad information now can make an unhappy situation worse. Unfortunately, I often find that surveys are either poorly constructed or poorly administered. Both problems diminish the usefulness of the results; both can be easily avoided.
While catharsis is a good thing, poorly-constructed surveys that merely allow employees to vent aren't going to provide what you need. Start by thoughtfully considering the kind of information that you can use. It is often best to work with a professional to help you design your survey process and document to uncover the most useful data. Anyone can make up questions. A professional surveyor can help you ask questions more effectively; questions that are less ambiguous, better targeted.
Well-administered surveys always include participant orientation. We often assume that employees will automatically understand how to do a good job completing surveys. The reality is that if you don't make sure your employees understand the goal of your survey and how to best use the opportunity to provide feedback, you end up with more angst than answers. We've done numerous experiments where we gave the same survey to two groups of employees - one group got a good orientation; the other the normal run-of-the-mill instructions. The results are consistently and clearly different - good orientations always produce better quality feedback. Additionally, participant interviews indicate that the additional time in orientation boosts employee confidence about the confidentiality of the document (another excellent reason to use an outside professional) and management's commitment to actually use the results to make a difference.
Collecting quality feedback from employees is always the right thing to do; it becomes even more important when you are having significant business concerns.
Rick Galbreath, SPHR, is president of Performance Growth Partners Inc., a full service organizational improvement firm specializing in strategic planning, meeting facilitation, HR audits, corporate outplacement services, customer service assessments, customer service training, supervisory training, employee surveys, employee handbooks, teambuilding programs and training, on-call and project based HR consulting services, employee retention programs, executive coaching, manufacturing process and operations improvement consulting, employee retention, performance improvement programs, interim executive placement, keynote addresses, business turnaround consulting, and a wide range of other services. Contact PGPi at (309) 664-7741 or e-mail rick@performtogrow.com
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