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INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | | SEPTEMBER 29, 2000 NET JOURNAL How Did Our Staff Survey Go? Don't Ask A long delay and lack of thorough preparation left some employees leery and confused
 This week we began our second companywide survey. The idea is to allow our team members to comment on what they like, don't like, and what management should do to improve. After the great results of our first survey, completed in March this year, I looked forward to the new feedback we would get from the 100-plus people who hadn't been around to participate in this type of forum.
But like everything else around here, the key to success in any initiative is proper planning and communication. And that wasn't necessarily the case this time. Back in June, I sat down with the vice-president for corporate growth, the CEO, and the human resources director to brainstorm how we should implement the new survey. Right off the bat, we determined that we should use an external company. That would ensure confidentiality of answers and help provide a standard base to build future surveys on. After interviewing three leading outfits in this field, we decided to work with the Hay Group, a well-known and respected HR consulting company. THOROUGH REVIEW. What should the focus be? We thought we should repeat the general temperature check with everyone. We also decided to ask how people felt about our directors, vice-presidents, president, and CEO, and how they were doing in their jobs. If we were going to really grow, then the senior-management team needed honest feedback on how to improve. It all sounded great back then, at least in theory. Then came the implementation, and Murphy's Law took over. First, the date the survey was to be conducted ended up being delayed almost six weeks. This created a whole host of problems. The initial delay came about because we wanted to do the survey once everyone was in our new premises. Unfortunately, the move took much longer than planned. Meanwhile, we reorganized the leadership in almost every department. Now, the survey's effectiveness in evaluating senior management was in jeopardy because most team members were working under new vice-presidents and directors, and would not have had enough time to form a meaningful opinion on their performance. This situation also created problems for team members who wanted to make comments about their old managers but did not know exactly how to do so in the survey's current structure. CONFESSION. And then, mea culpa: I didn't do a good job of briefing the executive team. Since the survey's design had been completed almost two months prior, I assumed all the vice-presidents were aware of what was going on. However, after we held an "all hands" meeting to introduce the survey , I discovered what a strange position I had put the company's leaders in. Many of the senior team were approached with pointed questions on the survey after the meeting but had difficulty answering them since they didn't know all the details. Finally, many privacy issues came up. The survey was designed to be completed online and go directly to Hay, which would review the answers and batch them in unidentifiable groups for feedback to myself and the other executives. However, this wasn't made clear during the "all hands" presentation. This left people feeling that Hay Group could trace any negative comments to the individual -- and rout them back to management. That wasn't the case, of course, but it reflected the problems that arise when all issues are not properly communicated. Thus, what started off as a good idea (and still is one) could well have become supporting evidence for any worker who didn't think management was very good. Luckily, once the issues surfaced, we had numerous meetings as a group to address them, and we changed the survey. That included making most demographic questions optional, allowing people to complete paper surveys, and providing our team members immediate access to the HR director and his staff in case of any problems. These short-term corrections appear to have gotten the survey back on track. But even before the results are tallied, the experience already told me two things we need to work on: More communication and team-member involvement.  By Scott Kucirek  | | |
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