Best Time For Surveys
The best time for an employee survey is when you need to find out what’s going on in the organization. Indicators that you might be ready to gather this kind of information include:
- An increase in turnover.
- A decrease in employee morale.
- A drop in customer satisfaction ratings.
- An increase in accidents or safety violations.
- An unexpected change in sales.
- An increase in customer complaints or employee grievances.
- Your organization is planning, preparing for, going through, or has just recently implemented a change (or several changes).
In each of these scenarios, an employee survey will provide invaluable information about how your employees feel. Here’s why their feelings (not just their actions) matter:
If your employees are confused, anxious, upset, fearful, and/or distracted, performance levels will drop. Under these negative conditions, employees are likely to be spending their time and effort validating rumors, worrying about layoffs, hording information, and perhaps even sabotaging the change implementation efforts in order to protect the status quo (and their existing job). While their attention is focused on their individual concerns, the customers and the bottom line will suffer.
It’s difficult to fix a problem if you don’t know it exists. That’s why a survey can help you pinpoint the critical areas of concern so you can address them in a prompt and direct manner. Once those internal organizational issues are resolved, you can get back to work.
If you are considering the development and/or administration of an employee (or customer) survey, please check out How To Design & Implement An Effective Employee Survey or contact Kammy Haynes for a free consultation about your survey project.
3 Tips for Effective Feedback
When conducting an assessment program participants are entitled to feedback. The question is, "How much and what kind of feedback they should receive?" Here are some guidelines you should consider:
- Don’t just provide feedback on where a person should improve. Let them know what they are doing well. This will reinforce the desired behaviors.
- Feedback should be specific and prescriptive. If you tell a person that a behavior is ineffective, let her know why and what can be done about it.
- Provide a reasonable amount of developmental feedback sincethey can only tackle so many improvements at a time. If there’s too much, addressing it may seem like an overwhelming task, in which case the person won’t take any action.
For more information about providing effective and reinforcing assessment feedback, please contact Warren Bobrow.