Your workers are getting about three-fourths of what they want from you, according to BLR's first National Employee Attitudes Survey report.
A few months back, BLR launched its National Employee Attitudes Survey. The program offers organizations a free employee attitudes survey if they sign up and give their workers access to the questionnaire. BLR collects the data, then sends to participating companies a custom-written report on their results and how they benchmark against national averages. Since there are now nearly 20,000 questionnaires in the works or complete, BLR decided to give everyone a look at the national results.
The survey was built around four areas crucial to worker morale: Teamwork, communication, quality of company operations, and employee personal development. In each area, the survey had a number of statements, such as "My department has a high level of teamwork" or "My manager is fair and even-handed" and asked employees to use a 0-10 point scale to rate, first, agreement with the statement, and second, how important the matter was to the worker. The latter is because BLR's experience (10 years of using the same survey at BLR) shows that companies don't always work on what their people want them to.
Key Findings
Before we summarize key results, there's one number you should know. It's a decimal called the Agreement/Importance (A/I) Index. The closer it is to 1.0, the more aligned company performance is to worker expectations. The overall A/I index for all questions is .75. That's why we say workers are getting only about three-quarters of what they consider important. Here's a look at the four areas:
Communication: Overall, communications within companies are just OK (.75). Workers know what's expected of them (.88) and how their jobs fit the big picture (.91). But things break down once communication leaves the individual department. Employees positively pummel how well change is communicated among departments (.58) and companywide (.64). They feel they're not getting the information they need.
Teamwork: Employees think they know how to be team players (.98!) but that their organizations don't play well as a team (.68). Departments do somewhat better (.82), but there's lots of room for improvement to match workers' lofty assessment of themselves as team players.
Company Operations. Employees are middling in their approval of their work practices and resources (.79) and of the fairness of their managers (.81). They do feel their managers are caring (.87). As to their peers, they're grudgingly approving of their co-workers' efforts (.82) at doing good work but absolutely beaming over their own commitment to quality. (.98), which they feel is not sufficiently recognized (.76).
Personal Development : Many feel there is someone at work who supports their growth (.80) and that they've had a chance to improve their skills (.80). However, they're not as satisfied with what their employer does officially to help advance their careers (.75).
If the survey has a bottom-line question, it's this one: "How likely would you be to recommend your workplace to friends and family?" The result is pretty positive (.86). So despite some grumbling, it's not a bad picture, but one that could stand improvement.
What's BLR's advice to participating organizations to get that improvement? Review the results with managers and supervisors, first . Make sure they are in the loop. Then, as the information is communicated to employees, look at areas in which scores are lower than the average and probe for "why?," "what do you think this means?," and "can you give examples?" The answers are often different than you might think.
How like the national scores might your own results be? You can still find out. Go to http://compensation.blr.com/NEAS for full information about this ongoing survey program and a chance to sign up. We plan to issue a new set of results every quarter.
