Is your organization focusing on your most valuable resources in these tense economic times?  It is critical that organizations continue to manage staff satisfaction and morale when shrinking revenues and budget cuts dominate executives’ conversations.  Organizations with satisfied employees are more successful at adapting to change and becoming more efficient.  In addition, these organizations will experience less resource waste due to productivity loss and economic impact associated with turnover.

In order to manage employees’ morale, first you need to accurately know their perceptions and attitudes.  Often managers incorrectly assume that little can be done to improve staff satisfaction when raises are unlikely and benefits are shrinking.  Conducting a well constructed employee attitude survey and using the feedback appropriately is a cost-effective strategy that leads to positive process and organizational outcomes such as employee openness, decision making, motivation, productivity, costs, and absenteeism.

Survey feedback is a powerful bridge between diagnosis of organizational problems and the implementation of problem-solving methods.  Survey results allow decision-makers to quickly understand underlying causes of organizational inefficiencies.  Once these causes are indentified, open conversations regarding these issues can begin and appropriate solutions can be agreed upon and implemented.   Often managers find that simple no-cost solutions like providing staff with more informal feedback and recognition or increasing internal communications are the only changes needed to meaningfully impact organizational climate and employee morale.  Without assessing staff’s attitudes, organizations can waste resources implementing solutions that are ineffective because they do not address the underlying employee-morale barriers.

The effectiveness of using employee survey feedback to obtain positive outcomes depends on the proper design, administration, communication, and use of the results.  A successful survey feedback program includes leaders that support and understand the process and contains a survey that focuses on issues important to the participants.  The values expressed by the survey should be congruent with those of the respondents and it should only include the constructs that organizational leaders are willing to address and change.  For example, if raises are off the table, then a survey should not ask employees about their satisfaction with their pay.  Once the results are collected, meaningful and actionable conclusions should be determined through statistical analyses. Supervisors need to play an active role in feeding back data to employees and helping them to work with the data to develop successful solutions to identified problems.

If you are continually asking your staff to do more with less, assessing employees’ attitudes and using the feedback to impact their motivation might be the best strategy to realize the desired organizational efficiencies.   Contact Measurement Resources Company today and learn how we can assist your organization with achieving its goals by implementing an employee survey feedback program.

          

Sheri Chaney Jones

President and CEO

Measurement Resources Company

December 2008

Giving the Gift of an Employee Satisfaction Survey: Using Employee Attitude Surveys to Boost Morale, Productivity, and Retention.

Measurement Resources Company

7639 Ashworth Pl. Columbus, OH 43235| 614.893.0773 | www.measurementresourcesco.com

 

 

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Sheri Chaney Jones

-President and Founder

Strengthening communities one organization at a time.