Organizational Diagnostics

When to Survey ... and When NOT to

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Employee surveys are usually driven by the simplest and most honorable of motives:  to understand, to encourage discussion, to give employees input to key company issues.  It is disheartening when such a straightforward effort goes awry.  And unfortunately most employee surveys create more motion than movement.  Often the cause of the stumbled effort is a failure to consider carefully whether there was a valid reason for the survey in the first place. Employee surveys can satisfy a number of purposes:

To identify how to improve employee condition
Enlightened companies understand that the well-being and morale of their employees contributes directly as well as indirectly to their bottom line success.  Employees with low morale or little optimism are unlikely to deliver innovative product design, collaboration across departments, or strong customer service.  A survey can isolate the highest leverage points for enhancing the work environment.  For example, an employee survey might underscore the need for training for supervisors, or for better cross-divisional communication, or for more executive visibility, or for better decision-making practices, or for enhanced conflict management templates.

Assess status of infrastructure
Strategic planning efforts often take for granted the ability of the company to communicate well, handle conflict, make stable decisions, come to consensus, or respond to frequent market shifts.  All of these depend on processes or behaviors that can be defined and measured through an employee survey.  It might be that a strategic plan is vulnerable simply because employees lack the skill training or accepted templates for handling common interactive situations.

Test organization's readiness for change
New strategic initiatives, mergers, divestitures, and downsizing all take their toll on the resilience of an organization.  We have seen organizations so entrenched and brittle that even the changes necessary for survival are resisted.  Installing SAP, TQM, taking on a new acquisition, or moving to new quarters could easily be the "last straw"; an employee survey can be used to gauge whether an organization can support the demands of new change efforts.

Explore customer (or non-customer) perceptions of company
Although customer service has become the mantra of the 90's, many companies have little direct feedback from those they serve.  Customer surveys can easily become useless rituals, when only vague questions of satisfaction are asked.  There are strategies, however, for eliciting richer information from customers.  Asking how your company compares to their "best known other alternative" and to their "ideal vendor" gives you a clearer picture of where you stand in the competition for their loyalty.  Truly valuable customer satisfaction surveys also require that the data can pinpoint the work procedures that need to be modified.  Often this requires more intelligence given to the front end of the effort than the traditional tear-off reply card satisfaction survey.

Gauge progress of improvement efforts
When your company has invested substantial time and money in an improvement effort (better meetings, demand-flow technology, TQM, SAP, management development, etc.) an employee survey can be a valuable tool for assessing the return on the investment, as well as the soft spots that need additional attention.  Asking employees how well a project fared can also greatly enhance the credibility of leaders who are often notorious for playing in the abstract but not dealing with the realities of faltering implementation.

For all the good reasons for conducting an employee survey, there are several potent reasons for abandoning any such effort:

The political situation is too raw
Open warfare between divisions, a fight for succession, a pending downsizing, or a merger going sour all indicate the primary need for political stability.  Any attempt to solicit information is likely to be distorted by employees' felt need to avoid risk, take sides, or be loyal to their group.  The first need is for someone at the highest ranks to clarify issues and priorities.  In such cases, an employee survey can be a method for avoiding the issues rather for dealing with them.

There have been previous survey disasters
If your company has a history of failing to use survey results, or there have been highly visible violations of confidentiality, then your next survey effort will be contaminated, and possibly beyond repair.  Any survey effort rests on the credibility of those chartering the effort; if that has been less than adequate in the past, a new survey is not likely to fill the gap.  It may be more important to go back to the repeated themes in previous surveys and demonstrate the courage to implement solutions first.  Employees can tell when executives are simply hoping for an answer they like rather than having the vision to deal with the answers they get.

The real need is for open communication within groups
Sometimes collecting data through a survey is only a timid attempt to avoid the direct confrontation or communication that is really needed.  Strong frictions in a company could mandate that the players speak to each other directly to find a new understanding of their situation, one based on thorough understanding of the others' point of view.  Sometimes it is critical for employees to witness such a meeting even if they are not active players.  The strategies of team building, facilitation, negotiation, and even mediation may be more appropriate than surveying.

The survey is only driven by curiosity with no genuine decision focus
Some executives think of doing surveys almost as a ritual.  Or they find themselves in a new situation and want to "get the lay of the land".  For example, a new VP of Sales for a national sales force may want to assess the status of his/her sales force.  But there must be a commensurate willingness to use the data.  If a survey of the national sales force shows up widespread feelings of disconnection with the home office, the VP of Sales should be open to modifying communication strategies, ease of access, home office rotations, or other strategies to increase the tenuous link to the sales force.  If you ask employees about their concerns, they rightfully expect that something will be done