How Successful Organizations Focus Their Surveys

The focus of employee surveys has evolved from an emphasis on employee happiness to one of emphasizing strategy deployment and change management. Successful organizations have evolved integrated survey strategies that combine elements of all of these to provide the organization with the real-time measures necessary for continued success.

Employee Satisfaction. Most surveys of the 50's and 60's were focused on employee satisfaction. This focus became too limited in the 70's and 80's when concerns of retention and entitlement were displaced by trends such as organizational downsizing and the redefinition of the social contract between employer and employee. In the 90's, employee satisfaction re-emerged when the tremendous growth of new and existing industries combined with shrinking birth rates created work force shortages. This led to concerns regarding the attraction and retention of employees. Add in the importance of the relationship between employee and customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction was once again of major interest.

Organization Effectiveness. In the 70's and 80's organization effectiveness was the vogue of survey practitioners as organizations began to focus on operational excellence, quality and process improvement. The emphasis shifted from meeting employee needs to understanding and servicing the needs of the organization. Employees were to derive satisfaction from participating in a highly successful organization and from a sense of "earning" their job every day through dedication and exceptional performance.

Facilitating Change. As the pace of change in the marketplace quickened and the need for constant innovation and reinvention forced organizations to be more dynamic, change facilitation became an important purpose for organizational surveys. Now involving people in managing the process of change rather than the status quo was critical in organizations. The belief was that employees in the future would draw their satisfaction and their security from being effective agents of change, not from organizational stability and predictability.

Strategy Alignment. During the late 80's and into the 90's organizations began to discover the power of strategic partnership and values alignment in bringing people together in highly focused enterprises with strong cultures and value systems. Now commitment to a common purpose, endeavor and set of values, not institutional loyalty, provided the glue for dealing with the uncertainty of continual change and also acted as a compass for guiding decision making and individual behavior.

All of these approaches have value. When undertaking an employee survey program one of the first steps should be determining the best mix for your organization in the context of your culture and goals.

Related Topics:

• Employee/Climate Surveys
• Surveys in Strategy Alignment
• In-Depth Analyses