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Understanding and Developing Your (People) Assets (3/4)

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In today’s third installment of our white paper on Understanding and Developing Your (People) Assets, we begin to look at how current levels of staff satisfaction can be measured, both in terms of the key questions that need to be asked, as well as how they are best framed. The final section of this paper will be published next Tuesday.

Measuring Staff Perceptions

Attracting and keeping good staff is critical to business success. These approaches have highlighted the importance of understanding employee satisfaction and therefore raise issues about how to measure, monitor and improve this within an organisation. A staff satisfaction programme involves 5 steps:

Fig 4: Measuring and Developing Staff Satisfaction

Employee research is the first step in undertaking a programme to improve the working experience of staff and the user experience of customers. It gives employees a “voice” and enables areas of dissatisfaction to be identified.

Employee research methods

Common approaches to measuring satisfaction use a combination of qualitative and quantitative research designs. Although there are a number of “off the shelf” staff survey packages available for purchase, most companies choose a bespoke project design either conducted by an external agency/partner or the in-house HR team.

Qualitative research methods take their roots in the social sciences and are often used in early consultations with staff in order to identify the issues which are of greatest importance, to staff and management alike, which need to be measured. What is important about this consultative stage is that staff have the freedom to express openly and honestly their views about their experience within the company/organisation and what they are seeking, and the survey needs to be reflective of this. The approaches that can be adopted are internal focus groups, depth interviews (face-to-face or on the telephone), online groups and forums.

Quantitative research methods involve samples of large numbers and measurement. It is usual for staff surveys to be census surveys, inviting all staff to participate. The questionnaire is developed from the issues which have arisen from the consultative stage, and the questionnaire will comprise mainly closed questions. The most common distribution route for the staff survey is now the e-survey with paper or telephone options for staff who do not have an e-mail address or access to a computer.

The Questionnaire:

Employee surveys will normally cover the key areas impacting on the staff experience. These are likely to include:

• Leadership and direction
• Communications
• “Local” line management
• Staff development opportunities
• Company working culture
• Facilities and environment
• Conditions of service

The rating scales used will usually be determined by the sensitivity of the measurement required. There is no definitive or “correct” way to measure satisfaction, but all scales need to be translated to a numerical scale in order to analyse the results. Some surveys use verbal scales and statements ie

Whereas others will adopt a numerical scale of satisfaction where the highest score is “very satisfied” and the lowest score “not at all satisfied” ie

Questions need to be carefully worded to avoid ambiguity, and if any indicative benchmarking is to be carried out (see section on benchmarking below), the context of the questionnaire must be considered and exact wording of the benchmark question used, in order to make the comparisons.

Reporting will usually be in the form of mean scores of satisfaction and the percentage of staff satisfied, examined across different classifications of staff eg age, level of responsibility, department, location, etc. Additional statistical analysis using correlations, regressions and Chaid analysis can be carried out to identify issues which are driving satisfaction and loyalty, and the relative impact of these issues on satisfaction. In order to carry out this analysis it is necessary to ask particular questions within the survey related to overall satisfaction and recommendation of the company/organisation.

Ensuring the highest response rate:

When carrying out staff consultations and surveys, getting staff on board can be one of the greatest challenges. Poor response rates, insufficient or unclear information and a failure to use the survey to drive actions are just some of the disappointments that are reported. Attention to several issues surrounding the survey can facilitate a positive response:

• CEO involvement and support eg invitation to participate comes from the CEO
• Publicity campaign prior to the survey
• “Heads up” e-mail alerts and team briefings beforehand
• Strong and present management support for the survey
• “Survey weeks” – including support and open access areas for completion (if also used for staff who do not have dedicated computer access)
• Strong internal distribution strategy for paper surveys
• Incentives at the personal level eg prizes etc
• Promise to share headline results very shortly after survey close (bulleted points emerging from survey on topical issues)

If external agencies are used to design and deliver the survey, they too can play a part in ensuring a high response rate:

• Use of recognisable logo associated with the survey
• Assisting the composition of an inviting introductory letter/e-mail
• Ensuring the survey looks attractive and makes answering the questions enjoyable
• Attention to questionnaire wording and length
• Targeted reminders (only to the non responders)
• Survey helpline (especially for electronic surveys)
• “Stop and Save” e-survey options (survey does not need to be completed in one go)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 at 9:04 am and is filed under Carol Ann Morgan, White Papers, Employee Satisfaction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.