The trends I identified from the employee survey were:
1. Employees have felt less valued consistently over the last four
years
2. Employees are not satisfied with the quality of their supervisors
3. Receptiveness to employee feedback must be improved
Based on those trends, leaders in the company need to improve at
Modeling the Way, inspiring a Shared Vision, and Encouraging the
Heart. There are many skills that will contribute to improvement in
these areas, but the most important to work on are effective and
open communication with employees, setting SMART goals (with
emphasis on achievable and realistic), and expressing empathy.
The reason for these skills is that the results of the survey are likely
symptoms of a deeper issue with workplace culture. Widespread
employee distrust of supervisors is probably not the direct fault of
the supervisors, but more likely due to pressure on them from above.
Changing this degree of lack of confidence in management must start
at the top - front line supervisors must be empowered to improve
their relationships with their employees.
These survey results make me think of a call center-type
environment, where immediate performance metrics are the only
thing that matters, things like call time and sales figures, with no
room for anything else. These types of work environments always
assign overly ambitious metrics, relying on constant turnover to keep
seats full rather than long term, satisfied employees. The pressure to
meet those metrics never comes from the front-line supervisors, they
are little more than messengers, but they end up bearing the brunt of
employee anger and frustration.
Changing that kind of culture can be hard, but if successful it will
have a huge impact on morale and productivity. Employees who feel
they can trust their supervisors, who feel that they are not always
one or two mistakes away from being fired, generally do better work.
Moving away from such strict adherence to metrics, or making them
more realistic, will allow employees to feel as though they are making
a contribution to the company's success.
