Wondering whether your customers are getting the best from your company in spite of the economic environment? Surveys are a traditional way to find out. This includes employee surveys, since they help us understand how well employees are able to shift their attention away from job concerns and to customer care.
Take these two traditional employee research questions:
Q. Would you recommend your company to a friend or family member?
Q. Would you stay with this company even if you were offered a comparable job elsewhere?
It’s been common knowledge for a while now that these survey questions provide a rough baseline for measuring employee commitment. Commitment that, in top performing companies, means the customer comes first. That’s why I was shocked to hear this following story at Thanksgiving dinner. We had finished eating, were sitting back and settling into the real table talk of the day. Amid talk about the best recent movies and visual effects (some of diners work in the “biz”), work worries started emerging.
One couple who work at a Silicon Valley Fortune 100 technology giant is normally pretty quiet at this point in the conversation. Not this year.
Formerly an award-winning workplace, their company just reported the results of the annual survey with a notable surprise. Only around 25% of employees responded positively to the two questions listed above. Things have been pretty rough apparently. Among many other things, it seems that layoffs have been so frequent in the past year that employees check each Monday to see if anyone has scheduled the conference rooms normally used for such announcements.
And there are rumors. It is believed that leadership discussed an industry opinion piece saying that 20% results for these survey questions should be expected at this point in time. You can imagine the emotion in this long-time employee’s voice when he told us that his leadership thought the poor survey results could be ignored.
My friend’s belief that his company is complacent about the survey results is very worrisome, not just for this company’s future, but also for the future of so many other companies in similar situations. Companies with fewer resources who are facing powerful challenges to employee commitment – are they throwing in the towel, too?
It is unrealistic to think that in such a tough environment, employees could be as satisfied as they were in better times. However, experience (and research) shows that when trust is breached, employee disappointment in the company lingers long after work conditions improve. We also know that when trust in leadership goes south, employee “passion for the brand” of the company can be damaged far into the future. It takes a long while to patch up any relationship after one partner has let the other partner down.
Would you recommend this company to a friend or family member? This question is tantamount to asking whether you would recommend the company to a customer. If only 25% of your employees say yes, don’t be surprised when your customer satisfaction ratings decline and linger there.
Margaret O’Hanlon is founder and principal of re:Think Consulting. She has decades of experience teaming up with clients to ensure great Human Resource ideas deliver valuable business results. Margaret brings deep expertise in total rewards communication to the dialogue at the Café; before founding re:Think Consulting, she was a Principal in Total Rewards Communications with Towers Perrin. Margaret earned her M.S. and Ed.S. in Instructional Technology at Indiana University. Creative writing is one of her outside passions.
Margaret, great post and observation!
What's frightening to me is the long term, insidious impact on overall productivity levels in our country due to a workforce that has essentially checked out.
Most economists do not see a quick rebound in the economy anytime soon. A few are suggesting that the economy will not return to "former levels" for up to five years!
Mobility for the severely disgruntled will be limited, the end result being that many workplaces will be housing disengaged, unhappy employees who are not giving their best on a daily basis. Just what we need to compete effectively in the global marketplace!
Robert Edward Cenek
www.cenekreport.com
Posted by: Robert Edward Cenek | 12/03/2009 at 07:57 PM
Robert, I hope you have taken a look at Ann Bares Compensation Force blog today, to see the numbers of employees who are ready for a new job. I share your concern about the challenges to our competitive abilities.
Right now, it seems like business leaders are "sub-optimizing" the efforts put into employee relationships with the mistaken belief that nothing can help. That's fatigue talking, just when the business (inc. the employees) needs leadership.
Posted by: Margaret O'Hanlon | 12/04/2009 at 01:01 AM
Terrific post. You are precisely correct when you relate the tragedy of management thinking they can ignore the survey results because they are "standard." How sad. Yes, repeated layoffs are demoralizing. But it's the lack of COMMUNICATION that feeds most into the demoralization, not the act itself.
Also, Gallup's excellent recent research on engagement found one simple factor – direct manager style – can profoundly impact employee engagement. To summarize:
• Managers who focus on employee strengths have 61% engaged employees and 1% actively disengaged
• Managers who focus on employee weaknesses have 45% engaged employees and 22% actively disengaged
• Managers who ignore their employees have 2% engaged employees and 40% actively disengaged
More on this particular research is available here: http://globoforce.blogspot.com/2009/11/strengths-weaknesses-ignored-how-are.html
Posted by: Derek Irvine, Globoforce | 12/05/2009 at 08:17 AM
Derek, thanks so much for sharing solid data. We all need to spread this around, and get it to the execs. Other recent data from Watson Wyatt indicates that companies are cutting back on communications about the business (commitment down from 48% to 28%), pay (commitment down from 33% to 19) and benefits (30% commitment holding around 27%).
I think we'd both say -- how much does it actually cost to communicate with each other and how much does your revenue suffer when you don't. (There's even more telling research on that from Watson Wyatt.
Posted by: Margaret O'Hanlon | 12/05/2009 at 04:31 PM