Ask an Expert: Joe Espana, Organizational Diagnostics

Come on be honest, how many of you in corporate organisations run an annual employee satisfcation survey?  And what do you do with the findings?  I can't tell you the number of times I have worked with organisations that say to me "Joe, we really love our staff survey.  It provides us with lots of useful information, but we don't really know how to address some the findings that we want to improve".

The answer is you are looking in the wrong place.  Very often, organisations take the results of the annual staff survey, break it down by division, function or team and ask the manager to communicate their particular results and engage their teams in meetings and workshops to try to find actions that address the particular findings.  These don't tend to work very well in terms of affecting any substantive ans sustained improvement.  Why is that?  Well, lets assume that by engaging employees, we have addressed the commitment levels, and lets say that people actually want to improve their level of dissatisfaction with a particular element in their working lives, by addressing the issue simply at the level of the presenting data won't get you the results you actually want.

 The failure of many employee satisfaction surveys is that the only provide presenting results.  A simple statement of perceptions about a particular issue.  More often than not they don't provide any correlation data about what are the elements of organisational behaviour which are driving the results of the survey.  If an organisation is serious about developing itself and cares enough about how their employee feels about any given subject, in order to do someing about it, they have to get to the root cause of the issue and understand the company systemically.

What is far more useful is having an employee survey that is based on a construct of organisational behaviour than enables a deeper understanding about why employees perceive their company the way they do.  This is the difference a doctor might look at between a presenting sympton and the underlying cause of the illness.  A pain in the arm could simply be due to muscular, skeletal problems, or even a issue with the nervous system - or the patient could be having a heart attack.

Lets take a simple example from the world of business life:  Working with a major global technologies firm, I was asked to consult around improving employee engagement.  In this particular example they had previously had very low satisfaction scores in their employee survey around communication and compensation and benefits.  At first they said that these two areas or the most commonly lowest scoring in any company, which led the organisation to continue its efforst to communicate and explain how the company benchmarked against the market average.  Yet despite these efforts they were still scoring poorly in subsequent staff surveys.

When we investigated further, however, what we found were the drivers of these perceptions which, in this particular case, stemmed fromthe way that the performance management process was being experienced, and what staff perceived their bosses focused on at work.  A bit more diagnosis uncovered that staff did not experience consistent, high quality peformance management reviews, with feedback that was well delivered, balanced and fair.  Managers did not clarify performance expectations, and were very inconsistent in the way bonuses where both aligned to organisational and individual objectives.  This inconsistency, parly due to lack of managerial skills, meant that bosses where not dealing with peoples feelings and perceptions about the fairness of both the process in its application and indeed the equitability of the reward and compensation structures.

A bit further diagnosis revealed that when staff complained in their survey that communication was poor in the company, what was driving this perception was the way managers communicated and translated the company strategy and goals as they effected particular departments and functions. There was little cohesion between cross-fucntional teams, with many team objectives seemingly conflicting with those of other teams.

These issues were relatively easy to address, focusing as they did in greater cross-functional collaboration and simplifying the quarterly business updates so that teams and individuals could make better sense of how the company was performing, where the key areas of focus lay and helping individuals understand 'why' they had particular objectives.  After much effort across the organisation and with managers in particular to both upskill and change certain behaviours, the annual staff satisfaction survey showed dramatic improvements across several elements.

Staff staisfaction surveys, therefore, while being useful as a single snapshot in time of perceptions among the workforce, don't always provide diagnostic information that can lead to efficacious action at several levels within the company.  What is needed is an instrument based on a construct of organisational effectiveness and that can give root cause analysis, describing the relationship between variable elements.

 That reminds me I must ask my staff jow they are feeling about things.  Just off to put the stethoscope on.

Joe Espana

Performance Equations

Joe,

Does your practice extend to the imapct of the four generations in the workforce?  If yes, what opportunites and challenges do you see and what are companies doing about them?

Colleen