Employee Opinion Surveys
Our Experience with Employee Opinion Surveys
PHILOSOPHY AND EXPERIENCE
The famous hall of fame baseball player Maury Wills once said “You can’t steal a base without taking your foot off of the base you’re on.”
Goals: Employee Opinion Surveys can serve as a powerful tool to move an organization forward on the path towards creating organization health and excellence. They also provide metrics for performance assessment and goal achievement.
Experience: The Gavares Group has developed and administered hundreds of employee opinion surveys (EOS). Employee Opinion Surveys are designed to assess organization climate and culture, as well as employee attitudes toward specific functions and processes.
Data-gathering and Feedback: The information gathered in the EOS serve as a snapshot in time of employee perceptions and the extent to which conditions characteristic of successful organizations are present in your organization. During the data feedback process, the goals are to develop understanding and ownership of the data and results.
Results-Oriented Action Plans: We then help the organization leaders, managers and supervisors to develop results-oriented actions that responded to the high-priority issues. The data can then be used to help drive organizational changes across key areas.
Two-Way Communication and Engagement: Engaging in two-way dialogue, partnership, and collaboration between senior management and employees will help create readiness, trust and engagement, which in turn will help with successful improvement efforts.
“If you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
Liz Barat was instrumental in designing the competency instrument used in our Leadership Academy.
Employee Opinion Survey - A Case Study
Case Study Background
Survey-Driven Change Initiatives
Survey-Driven Change Initiatives
Internal OD Team: John served as manager of the internal organization development team in the City of San Diego’s 1500-person Public Utilities Department from 2007 to 2016.
3 Surveys in 5 years: During this period, John and his team developed and administered the 2010, 2012 and 2015 Employee Opinion Survey (EOS). Over 70% of the workforce completed the 2010 and 2012 assessments.
Persistence: As a follow-up to 2010 & 2012 Employee Opinion Surveys, a 2015 EOS was administered, which included the 13-question Gallup survey items. Over 80% of the workforce completed the 2015 EOS.
Survey-Driven Change Initiatives
Survey-Driven Change Initiatives
Survey-Driven Change Initiatives
Action-Research Model in Action: The EOS served as a vehicle for two-way communication with employees and organization change on important issues.
We initiated proven and novel leadership and organization initiatives that contributed to the improvement in the Department’s leadership, culture and level of employee engagement.
Here are some of the organization improvement initiatives:
- Executive Team Initiative
- Department Branding
- Rewards and Recognition
- Leadership Development
- Strategic Planning
- Executive Mentorship
- Work Process Reviews and Optimization Studies
Breakthrough Results
Survey-Driven Change Initiatives
Breakthrough Results
Quantified Results: Results of this 2015 EOS are noted below. The organization made improvements in twelve of the fifteen survey themes.
- Divisional Cooperation (+11%)
- Recognition (+8%)
- Communication (+8%)
- Safety (+4%)
- Empl. Engagement (+4%)
- Manageable Workload (+4%)
- Diversity and Inclusion (+4%)
- Integrity (+4%)
- Performance Mgt. (+3%)
- Customer Service (+2%)
- Training (+2%)
- Teamwork (+2%)
“Even if you’re on the right track,
you’ll get run over by it if you just
sit there.” – Will Rogers