Employee satisfaction surveys are a pain. They are tough to administer. If you get administration wrong you may get sketchy results. You get piles of data that can be hard to interpret. In the worst cases companies get “paralysis of analysis” and don’t report results back to employees. In these cases a survey can actually create frustration instead of fix it. Which all begs the question: Why do an employee satisfaction survey in the first place? What are the true benefits of a survey process? If you’ve read my book The Next 52 Weeks or my free ebook “Satisfaction Survey Success Secrets” you already know that I believe surveys are a valuable tool. Nevertheless, these criticisms are certainly fair. I’ve had many conversations with potential survey clients about why frustrations like these led them to stop doing surveys altogether. But a recent survey project we did for a client illustrates dramatically that a satisfaction survey project, done correctly, can predict – and help respond – to union organizing activity. Here’s what happened. A large client of ours did a satisfaction survey project with us. They surveyed 17 locations around the country and we recently reported back their results. Like any multi-location survey they had some locations that fared better than others, and within each location there were some departments that performed well and others that did poorly. Each report we sent out showed how each location compared to the corporation overall, plus how each department within that location compared to the location overall. In addition, each report breaks out our proprietary vulnerability factors for third party interventions like union organizing or employment law complaints by department and location. One thing we noticed as we did our high level review of the results was that one location was somewhat lower than the overall average. When we looked at that location more carefully we saw that one department in particular – the maintenance employees – were much more frustrated than employees in other departments. Their scores on our third party vulnerability factors were the lowest in the company. I probably don’t have to tell you what happened next. Unfortunately at about the time we were reporting the results to the various locations we received an NLRB petition. Care to take a guess as to which of this company’s 17 locations got the petition? Any idea which department the union sought to represent? The unfortunate part of the story is that the company did not have a chance to respond to the survey results before these workers sought out union representation. However, they did respond immediately to the petition by asking one of our former union organizer consultants to go in and talk with employees about their situation. Armed with the survey results we were able to quickly assess the issues and talk intelligently with employees about their situation. The petition was withdrawn a day after we began meeting with employees. I’m not suggesting that we did this on our own. It was a team effort. The company leadership, both locally and from the corporate HR group, played an important role in quickly responding to the needs of this upset work group. But the upshot is that the survey results both predicted the union organizing event and also helped the company respond rapidly and intelligently to the issues in that department once the petition was filed. I know that surveys can be painful (although I’m working on an “80/20” version of our survey process that should make this easier than ever – stay posted for details on that). Most of the time surveys don’t predict an imminent petition like this survey did. But the process absolutely does work, both to predict organizing vulnerability and to quickly identify high-leverage opportunities to respond.
