Jan 15, 2012

What do with the employee satisfaction survey results

Great! You're interested in how your people feel about your company. Have you taken any steps about it yet or are you currently running a survey?

There are few things any employer should know about when, how and what to do after before kicking off a questionnaire. With the send button, there will be consequences.
  1. If you can fit the whole team around a table, choose the option "Let's talk face to face"
  2. If you cannot, make sure there aren't a 3rd world war around the corner as that is going to mess up the results
  3. Make sure who ever handles the raw data can do just that: handle it
  4. Arrange a soft room with a bunching bag for the management if necessary to show negative emotions
  5. You will have time to handle and communicate the responses
  6. You have both motivation and time to make an action plan, in other words, make changes to where deemed necessary
The good thing about such surveys are that you show interest in understanding how people feel. But it's important to understand why you want to ask such questions in the first place. What is your goal and how do you plan to use the results in order to reach your goal. This will help you also form questions that provide you valuable responses.

5 tips for the formula of a questionnaire
  1. Make it fun to respond to
  2. Keep it simple and short, avoid open ended questions as much as possible
  3. Guarantee anonymosity
  4. Keep the wording simple and ask few people to test drive it to make sure everyone understands the questions in the same way
  5. Use scales that are easy to comprehend

How to deal with whatever comes out of the Pandora's box
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, with the send button, there will be consequences. When you decide to go ahead with a survey, you are expected to communicate the outcome back in a speedy manner after the round has closed. For this reason a simple survey works wonders for you as it is easier to handle and put the results together. Here are my advice for what steps to take once you've got the results:
  1. Plan how and who will communicate the overview of the results 
  2. Present; what's on a good level, what could be better and what issues cannot be changed
  3. Make sure the top management is present when results are communicated. Nothing signals better the lack of disrespect towards staff opinions than a CEO who has something better to do.
  4. Decide on 2-3 action points and communicate the points and a schedule for them
  5. Communicate regularly how your work on the points is going forward (status updates) and once you are ready, communicate that shouting out loud. Then make sure you keep communicating the status updates and deliverables regularly. This way you will gain trust for the survey method for the next round.
  6. If one of your action points for some reason will not head towards the goal, make sure you explain this to all staff. Don't just forget about it or try to hide it. It was important for your people and it should be important to you as well.
Don't keep the worm in the box, take it out and do something with it!
Susanna


 

Jan 9, 2012

Great Place to Work race comes to Finish in few weeks - Is your company in it?

Paid a visit to the Finnish Great Place to Work Institute today. The New List will be published in less than a month's time and based on my own experience, about 150 employers in Finland are living exciting times. According to Panu, who is the CEO of the Finnish organisation, the trust index keeps crawling up year by year making the competition ever so tough. If you succeeded well last year does not mean you will this year as everyone has worked hard to be even better this year around.

Me on the left (you didn't guess, right?) and Panu Luukka, CEO of Great Place to Work Institute Finland on the right

What does "being better mean" in this race?
First of all, I think it's fair to say, the companies who participate in the survey are not taking part on it only to succeed in the public race. They are participating in it to get prove their leadership culture rocks and rolls, to become benchmarked against others and to gain insight into how others lead.

Even though the goal should be to be on the top of the rank to make participation an investment worth while, success means the company has done not something, but many things right in order to engage talents to their organisation. It's a good "competition" for HR people, we don't have anything else to measure our success in our jobs so well than such a survey.

 
Leo from HR 2.0 with Panu engaged in discussion at the new GPTW Finland office

It has a huge impact on HR's job, CEO's job and People's jobs

Participation in the GPTW survey was major part of my job in my previous workplace before becoming an entrepreneur. I'm a big fan of the survey as it is an excellent tool to make me do my job really well as an HR. I really saw the impact of great results in the development of our employer brand, engagement of people and abilities to attract talents. As a result, the company made great financial results.

Great Place to Work -survey is really not just a survey. The survey results are the epitome of the leadership culture of an organisation. Benchmark results are a prove you're taking the People Promise seriously, you're working on it continuously and you want to have the best there are to work for you.

When you get the best people, you want to make it a sound & profitable investment, so you take care of your investment, nurture it and make it grow for you. That should be of a CEO's interest.

How does it have an impact on people's jobs then? If the employer wants to attract and keep the best, employer provides such working environment where the best have the best oppotunities and possibilities to bloom. I've always wanted to work in an environment where I can make the most of my career for a win-win situation.


Lot of money can buy a good word but is it credible and have you got it?

The problem with this "lot of money" is that HR departments never have it. So what can we do to get a great employer image, a brand of a good work place where all the best want to nest?

We start working from inside out.  

             
Inside out gives you a lot of embassadors
Great work places are made of the following:
  1. Simple, clear vision
  2. Solid leadership foundation and culture you can call your own
  3. Lot of (I mean LOOOOOOT of) internal communication and marketing coming from all angles and adobes 
  4. Values that are lived on a daily basis and everyone knows how to
  5. Appreciation
Working on these aspects with a great passion, your people will have many great stories to talk about to their friends. The word starts to spread naturally, without a marketing budget. Word of mouth coming from past and existing employees are the most credible statements affecting employer image. As people will talk, why not offer them success stories to talk about.

Passion for great work places and employer images

I have worked with building a solid foundation of a great place to work. I know what it ate, what makes it tick and what it requires from everyone - CEO included. And most of all, I know the effect it has on success of a business. Now that's really tasty! It's such an exciting circle that feed's itself once you get in it. But you have to want to get in it and work for it. If it was an overnight task, we wouldn't be reading so much about the difficulties to find and engage talents. 

Just to make sure you got it:
  1. Make a great place to work your HR priority
  2. Get the best of the best in and step ahead of competition
  3. See, feel and live the experience of how well a great place to work can attract and engage the talents
  4. Hear the happy steps of a happy CEO as he evaluates his excel
  5. Be proud of your accomplishments that make you an HR every success driven CEO wants
I'm excited to see what companies made it to The List this year!

Susanna

Jan 7, 2012

Have you got an attractive and engaging people promise?

I picked up few interesting reads from Waterstone in Manchester over New Year's. "Purple Your People" is a book by Jane Sunley and it pretty much focuses on attracting the right people that can make the business very succesful. You do know that it's people who will or won't make your business great?
Can you pick up the talent from the crowd?
We all agree on great ideas, innovations and capital being critical to a succesful people, but so are people. Yet we don't tend to think too much about the people, what kind of people we really need and why would anyone want to work for us, much else give their best for us. What are you willing to give back? 

The importance of people has been clear for me obviously for a long time, after all, I've made a pretty successful career out of dealing with people - talents and otherwise. But it really striked me when my company went through our first financing round last year. I spoke with many investors then (and since) and each one of them highlighted the critical importance of team (i.e people) when making an investment. Someone said in these words: "Even a wonderful idea can suck if the wrong people attempt to make it. Yet an average idea can become a success with a great team." So my word of advice for all those companies who aim to make it successful: invest in your employer brand and keep your hands tightly on the talents you find. It's the people who make your brand.

5 tips on starting the job of becoming an acknowledged great place to work
  1. Place the same importance on getting your company known as a superior place of work as you would do on getting your customers know about your excellent products or services
  2. Investigate, understand and clarify your "People Promise" (as Jane Sunley calls it) = Your employees' experience about your company as a workplace
  3. Your People Promise must be a clearly articulated offer, that is continuously communicated and delivered within the organization
  4. This job can not be an HR start up and initiative, it's an internal movement inhaled and exhaled by all managers
  5. Once you got it straight, your employees will start to act as your marketing department communicating your distinctive People Promise outside the organization
So how do we do this?
  1. Ask your most long term employees what has made them stick with your company for all those years
  2. Ask all of your people what are the things that make them proud working for your company
  3. Ask what are the top 3 things they would change if they were the CEO
  4. Analyze your strenghts and weaknesses as an employer
  5. Make a combined decision and effort to start working on your great place of work -strategy
  6. Set up 2-3 initial goals and work on those
  7. Communicate plans, actions and results. Like on and on until everyone working for your company tells you they already know. 
  8. Measure results, get feedback, set up new goals together with the staff. 
From a long term experience I can assure what a difference great employer brand does for finding and keeping the talents, and thereafter building on a success of an enterprise. Building such a reputation takes a solid plan and time. It will not happen over a night and for it to actually materialize, it has to be someone's priority in the company. That someone has to understand people, leadership, communication and marketing.

We at HR 2.0 are currently working on an exciting project in which one of our customer's is going to find such a person with our help. This is a project that started with a question: What kind of people promise are we offering? We've figured out what actions and activities supporting the people promise already exist, who is responsible for those, what kind of actions are required to meet the goal of getting a great employer brand, what kind of person we need to fulfill the goal and what will his or hers job be about. Next step: recruitment. I hope I will be able to share this exciting story with you one day! Until that, have a great place to work as your new year's resolution.

If you're interested in picking up few ideas on employer branding, check another article we wrote about the topic.


Kind regards, Susanna