Feedback, action essential to employee surveys

Increasingly, employers are surveying their workers in an effort to create more effective and productive workplaces.

Called "organizational assessments," "attitude surveys" or "cultural surveys," they all attempt to determine employees' perceptions of their work environment.

That may include:

• Quality and trust in management.
• The effectiveness of compensation and satisfaction with benefit programs.
• Organizational communication issues.
• Training needs.
• Safety and health concerns.

Employee productivity is strongly linked to an employee's perception of their environment. Right or wrong, perception becomes reality.

Conducting a survey typically sends a positive message to employees by showing that you value their opinions. A carefully crafted and properly conducted survey can reveal a wealth of information about employees' perceptions that a management team can use to improve the workplace.

Feedback and action

Surveys are often used after making important business decisions, such as a merger or an acquisition, for finding out how the employees feel about specific topics. Once you have determined the "why" behind the survey, you then can ask the right questions so your company can respond to the results.

Employee surveys

should be viewed as one step in a three-step process of survey, employee feedback and the management's action plan.

There are several basic guidelines for any employee survey process:

• You want to protect the anonymity of the respondent and keep the questions short and simple - roughly 20 to 30 minutes to complete.
• Use terminology that is familiar to all employees.
• Never ask employees to respond to questions that are "double-barreled" such as: "The pay and benefits are excellent at this company." Employees' responses to that question might yield an ambiguous answer: They may think their benefits are great, but their pay should be higher. Ask two questions and you will have actionable data to work with.
• Questions that seek responses based on a numerical or Likert scale (such as 1 to 5, with 1 meaning "strongly disagree" and 5 meaning "strongly agree") are easier to analyze than those using words alone.
• Open-ended responses can be difficult to analyze but are very useful to see an emerging need, such as supervisor training or problems that could expose an organization to legal action.
• Surveys should also contain negative statements. If a survey is filled with all positive statements, such as "My boss is considerate" and "I'm proud to work for this organization", the results can be unrealistically skewed.
• Specific questions that ask about observable behavior, such as "My supervisor sees that employees are properly trained for their jobs," avoids the "social desirability syndrome," which is a tendency to give all positive responses to please the inquirer.

Communicate results

Once the survey is completed and the results are tabulated, those results should be communicated as soon as reasonably possible. Management should communicate the results along with any plans to implement changes.

You will want to discuss and clarify the survey results. An organization should not feel compelled to "fix" everything that was perceived to be wrong.

It may be that you will not address a particular issue at this time. For example, an organization may decide for financial reasons not to change compensation or benefits. Acknowledging the major trends, both positive and negative, is the most important part of the feedback provided.

These three elements - survey, feedback and action plan - should be viewed as a process, not isolated events. It is better to tell employees what won't be done and why than to not address the survey responses at all. Management feedback is the key to the success of any attitude analysis instrument.

Mila Stahl is vice president and principal of the Human Resources Group, a Madison human resources consulting and recruiting firm.