Voice of
the Employee Research
Once you have seen one employee survey, you have seen just about all of
them. Most appear to share the same set of questions, reflecting perhaps
hoary tradition or a simple tendency to "copycat." Even results
often seem about the same from company to company. Senior management is
convinced that the scores should be higher, but just how much higher is
anybody's guess. Middle managers are told to improve conditions in their
areas of responsibility but are uncertain about what to do. Sound familiar?
Why Does It Matter?
Advantage Management Systems reports that about one of every eight
employees leave their jobs each year. Each replacement costs about $4000
just to hire and train, with the costs due to reduced customer service,
productivity and quality amounting to far more. Moreover, many studies have
amply demonstrated the profound relationship between employee satisfaction
and customer satisfaction. Put simply, unhappy employees breed unhappy
customers.
The easy answer is to throw money at problems by raising salaries and
increasing benefits. But in fact, these expensive solutions often provide
little or no benefit. The key is to turn to your own employees to find out
what is needed to retain and continuously motivate your best people. That's
where we come in.
How We Work
We take a different approach-one that begins by gathering a profile of
the ideal employer from the employee point of view and that concludes with a
process that facilitates the effective implementation of improvement plans.
Our research typically begins with expectations mapping® which is a highly
specialized qualitative method used to gain a deep understanding of employee
wants and needs. Through interviews and focus groups we identify the issues
that employees believe are obstacles to superior job performance. This
information then helps us create a highly customized survey questionnaire
that measures the gap between the ideal and what employees perceive as the
actual work environment. The survey also measures and determines the
elements of the work environment that drive employees' commitment to:
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customers |
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their jobs |
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personal development |
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superior financial results for the
organization |
If you already possess appropriate customer research data, we can link
those results with the employee data to provide a "total systems"
view of the organization.
At the conclusion of the data gathering process we don't just hand you a
report and disappear. Since we believe that information must be used in
order to justify its costs, we facilitate action and implementation planning
meetings of your leadership team to present results. We can also provide
consultation and assistance with implementation, organizational change,
internal communications, executive and employee alignment, and the
development of ongoing tracking, measurement and research systems. And
through our partner organizations we can provide access to an immense array
of training programs, learning systems and tools, as well as to Future
Search and other large scale planning and change methodologies.
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