Conducting employee surveys within your organization presents opportunities for you to show employees that you care about them and their needs. At the same time, it provides employees an avenue for providing feedback about the company, culture, management, tools, resources, training, and more.  For survey results to be most effective, employees need to trust that they can provide candid feedback in an anonymous fashion without retribution.

Even more important than conducting these surveys is to act on the results – and then to hold managers accountable for creating action plans and executing on them. However, is it a good or standard practice to compensate managers based on their employee satisfaction scores?  This is a practice that is difficult to support, given the following complications caused by providing incentives to managers based on the satisfaction of their employees.

1. Any time you tie survey results to a bonus plan, managers will waste time and energy trying to find fault with the overall program design, survey questions, or data quality – instead of taking the candid feedback at face value, taking ownership, and putting the feedback to work. 
2. Tying compensation to employee feedback also leads to situations that I refer to as the “car dealer syndrome,” which includes gaming the system, bribes, and other seedy behavior.
3. The potential to earn more money because of these results can also lead to retribution for low scores and poor feedback; employees need to know they can provide feedback without fear of recourse for negative feedback.

If you want to reward your managers, use objective measures, such as employee turnover, that can’t be tinkered with.  If you feel the need to reward managers, do so based not on the scores and the feedback, but on the execution of action plans created as a result of the feedback.

Having said all that, I do believe that company executives should certainly have a portion of their bonus plans tied to both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction scores.  Creating a customer-centric culture begins when you first focus on your employees and make their satisfaction a priority.  This culture can only be created and driven by those at the top.

According to the Conference Board research group, employee job satisfaction in America is at a 22 year low with the largest percentage of workers suffering from poor morale and low productivity (http://bit.ly/4ViPWr).

The study reports the low job satisfaction stems from:
• Fewer workers consider their jobs to be interesting.
• Incomes have not kept up with inflation.
• The soaring cost of health insurance has eaten into workers’ take-home pay.
What really stood out to me was a quote from one of the research participants who said he wished bosses would take time to listen to worker’s ideas – and their difficulties on the job.

Many companies today are focusing on listening to their customers to find ways to improve customer service and drive product innovation. However, your employees represent the whole of your company’s brain trust. Many of our customers have also set up Voice of the Employee initiatives with the goal of identifying ways to improve employee morale, better engage their employees, identify ways to save money, improve procedures and in short, do things better and faster.

Since the same tools used to survey customers can be used with your employees for little or no incremental cost, you might seriously consider setting up a Voice of the Employee program.

We would love to hear your comments and thoughts on this.

• 78% of the survey respondents strongly agree or agree that their top management listens and responds to employee feedback.
• However, while most companies say they listen to employees, few solicit real-time feedback. For instance, 38% of respondents only solicit employee feedback once a year, 10% solicit feedback every six months, 16% solicit feedback once a quarter, and 18% solicit feedback monthly. By comparison, 3% solicit employee feedback weekly, and 9% solicit feedback daily.
• In addition, 79% believe engaged employees are very important or important to their company in creating a sustainable competitive advantage.

What’s interesting about these survey findings is that there have been several media articles published recently on the fact that employees are stressed and suffering from poor morale due to the recession, and that once the economy rebounds, there will likely be a backlash against employers. So in order for companies to create and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage once they economy rebounds, they not only need to be actively listening to their employees now in real-time to address and resolve any concerns that they have, but also start putting some strategic measures in place to retain their best and brightest employees.

For more information on these and other survey findings, download the report at: www.allegiance.com/voereport

Chris Cottle, VP of Marketing, Allegiance