By BLR Founder and Publisher Bob Brady

Every year for the last 10 years, we’ve surveyed our employees about their jobs and the company—an attitude survey. To a very distressing degree, the item we regularly rank lowest on is “company communication.”

For many years, I interpreted this to mean that management was doing a poor job of communicating company goals to employees, and so we worked at improving this. The result? Little or no change. But we kept trying, again, with limited success.

Finally, we smartened up and began asking the employees, “What do you mean by ‘poor communication?’” The response clued us in to something that we hadn’t expected. Management wasn’t the only culprit. Employees generally said things like, “My co-workers send me work that doesn’t’ have everything I need, and I have to ask them for it.” Or “A process gets changed, and I’m last to hear about it.”

Intrigued, we changed the survey to break the “communication” question out into three components: “company communication,” “departmental communication,” and “interdepartmental communication.” The results? In general, people think their own teams are doing pretty well, the whole company slightly less well, and other teams, even less.

What we’ve “discovered” is that “communication” is more about peer-to-peer working relationships between departments than hierarchical communication between management and staff. (Not to say that management isn’t still responsible for the culture and processes involved.)

This may be the way it is and always will be, but we’re experimenting with a few simple processes that will encourage inter-departmental teamwork.

For example, at performance appraisal time, we suggest that employees ask their internal customers and suppliers (co-workers who are either upstream or downstream in the work process) what they should “continue doing, start doing, and stop doing.” They can use the answers to develop plans and goals.

Have we cured the problem? Not completely, but knowing that it is a problem is itself empowering.

The survey

The survey we use consists of a few basic questions, asked two ways: “How important is this to you?” (importance) and “How well are we doing?” (performance). It’s important to get answers to both questions.

You may find that you’re very good at things that no one cares about and poor at things that are very important. A simple ratio will give you insight into how well you are doing with the things that are important to employees. Divide importance by performance scores. The closer you are to 100%, the better you are.

We do the survey every year at the same time (to reduce the influence of seasonality), and then we publish and share overall results with employees. Management and supervisors get more detailed reporting that breaks the results down by status, years of employment, department, and other demographic categories.

While management and HR look at the ratios, we report on the “percent favorable” to the rest of the organization, since this is much easier for people to understand.

What have we learned? That the three most important things for employees are: departmental teamwork, having a manager who is fair, and knowing what is expected of them. We also found that there was less than 10% variation in the importance scale but a 41% difference in the performance scale. For the record, we’re best at departmental teamwork and worst at interdepartmental communication. (Sounds like silos, I know.)

Help Us Benchmark, and We’ll Help You

As we’ve done these surveys, we’ve often wondered, “How are we doing relative to other employers?” Because if we’re worse than the average on any item, it’s a signal that we could do something about it. To that end, we’re considering asking our customers to have their employees fill out our survey form on the Internet (20 questions, about 15 minutes). We’ll process the information, on a confidential basis, and send you an overall report of what your employees think, absolutely free, as a thank you for helping us. (More detailed versions of the report would be available at a nominal charge.)

Meanwhile, we’d be aggregating the data for all the companies that took part, which we’d publish as group benchmarks for the business world in general.

Would you be interested in participating and getting a free report on your employees’ attitudes? If so, please e-mail me at Rbrady@blr.com. I will get back to you with particulars.