Survey Paranoia

Employee Surveys. You either love them or hate them. For those that love them, you probably feel that as a whole they usually do make a difference and call (management’s) attention to areas that need improvement in a company. For those that hate them, you might be rolling your eyes and dismissing them as a “corporate fluff” and assume the position that survey results never get acted upon. I’ve heard arguments for and against surveys, yet I truly do believe that they make a difference – if employees are truly honest in their feedback, which brings me to the topic at hand; paranoia. It’s quite common that regardless of how many times management assures the work force that the results are anonymous and confidential, the majority of folks still believe that their answers are somehow tracked and that they will derive some kind of punishment if they get overly critical.

People. Stop. Being. Paranoid. Confidential surveys ARE confidential. Usually conducted by outside agencies or companies, they are designed for anonymity. Answers are tallied up by an independent third party and the individual answers never shared with ownership or management. In addition, do you know how expensive it would be to track each person’s IP address, match it up with the survey answer and then set out to analyze the degree of criticism in a large work force? Even in a 50-person office, this would probably cost more than the survey itself. Owners or managers who put forth an employee survey are not interested in using it as a punishment or tracking tool. The goal is nearly exclusively always to learn more about the organization and what’s on the mind of employees.

If you just mindlessly find yourself clicking through a survey without much thought to your answers, you would do everyone a favor and not engage at all. Employee surveys are VERY costly to design, implement and analyze. They provide employees with an opportunity to stop complaining under their breath, and to put forth some actual engagement into improving their work environment. If you provide only positive feedback (yet in reality feel miserable about work), you are only sending a thumbs up message to management that what they are doing is working. Consider yourself fortunate if you get an employee survey as your management is clearly investing in you and hope you will do the same in return, by providing constructive, honest and engaged feedback. The goal for management and ownership should be to keep the survey results transparent and communicate an action plan for follow up (UPS does this very well). The feedback loop is thus closed where the employee feels empowered to give feedback because he/she is actually heard.

Being Nice

Recently my company hosted an event with a guest speaker that not only inspired me, but also validated what I've long held firm; nice pays off. Linda Kaplan-Thaler, the author of the bestseller "The Power of Nice: How to conquer the business world with kindness", spoke in front of a couple of thousand (probably somewhat jaded) executives where she transformed the crowds with humor, relevance and a genuinely valuable message. The book puts forth the notion that a) what comes around goes around, b) there IS a place for nice in the business world and c) you reap what you sow. It could easily be another typical non-fiction book filled with self-help buzz words and lofty vision, but it's not. "The Power of Nice" really speaks to a very simple concept; just being nice without being a pushover.

In my organization, a very large national Fortune 50, we sometimes forget to be nice to each other, the customer and/or vendors. Often it is believed that when one gets to be our size, one deserves the right to somehow be slightly arrogant or tough to please. To that I say "GET OVER IT!". Sooner or later the shoe will be on the other foot and you will pay the consequences when you are the one in some need or another.

I loved Kaplan-Thaler's speech. I loved her presence. I loved her NICENESS. However, more so than anything else, I loved that our CEO invited her to our quarterly meetings!

There is a lot of power to being employee centric, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The numbers speak to lower turnover, a boost in productivity, not to mention morale, and healthier employees (in an employee centric business model). We speak so much about customer centric marketing, advertising and sales, yet we often forget about employee satisfaction. Every happy employee creates one more happy customer. Southwest Airlines is a great example of that approach. A great blog on this topis is the Employee Factor and obviously there are a ton of great books on the topic as well.

What I don't understand is that the message is clear: Happy Employees Make For Happy Customers. So why are such few companies TRULY (I capitalize only because many talk the talk but few actually walk it) investing in employee satisfaction and team building? I would think it would be a no-brainer yet even at my organization we have many "old guard" managers, many of whom I work with, that believe "employee satisfaction" should be put within quotation marks like this because it's not a "real" word, or one without much credence. The Law of Scarcity seems to be more prominent than the Law of Abundance. If I could give a dollar for every time I have heard "they should be lucky to have a job" in my career, I would be a rich woman.

Somehow there is an upset on behalf of this type of manager that the employee today actually has the gall to feel entitled to medallion treatment. I always respond ... "no, we are lucky to have them". In order to change our fear based culture, it is my firm belief that the employer has to give first, with the disclaimer that if there is abuse on behalf of the employee, you didn't hire well in the first place and the trust or good will can, and should, be revoked.