ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR – ASSIGNMENT II

ADVANTAGES AND
DISADVANTAGES OF USING
REGULAR ATTITUDE SURVEYS
TO MONITOR EMPLOYEE JOB
SATISFACTION
ASSIGNMENT -II

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ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR – ASSIGNMENT II

Prepared By : George Mathew

Ist Year MBA (HRM)

Employee Attitude Survey

A systematic investigation of the views and opinions of those employed by an organization

on issues relating to the work of that organization or their role within it. Employee attitude
surveys may be conducted by means of questionnaires or interviews. They may be
undertaken occasionally or at regular intervals and may be used to make a general
assessment of employee morale or focus on a specific issue such as the introduction of a
new policy. Goals may be to identify or gain an understanding of problems so that action to
resolve them can be taken, to encourage employee involvement and commitment, or to
assist in planning, implementing, and evaluating new initiatives.

A large group of employee surveys deal with employee attitude and satisfaction levels.
While employee satisfaction surveys deal with employee satisfaction level in different sides
of the job, employee attitude surveys measure the attitude of employees towards certain
change, culture elements or even employee attitudes toward the company's strategy or
even management style.

Employee attitude surveys measure the motivation level as well as employee attitudes
towards management, brand, the company at large. They can also be focused on specific
topic or conjuncture such as employee attitudes toward a merger, an acquisition, brand
change or any major event within the organization.

Employee attitude survey needs a questionnaire to measure attitude variables. Sample

questions in attitude survey to employees would ask something similar to the sample listed
below.

1. There are some conditions concerning my job that could be improved.

- Strongly agree –agree –undecided –disagree -strongly disagree.

2. My job is like a hobby to me.

-Strongly agree –agree –undecided –disagree -strongly disagree.

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ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR – ASSIGNMENT II
Most of the time it would seem very complicated to create and administer employee
attitude surveys especially for HR managers with limited technical skills. In order to reduce
your burden and also save you a lot of time and money you can utilize the services of
Survey software such as Surveyo. Surveyo™ comes packed with readymade sets of survey
questionnaires making the whole process way less complicated

Employee Attitude Surveys Pinpoint The Problems

While there are many factors that can affect employee satisfaction, an attitude survey can
pinpoint the main concerns of your employees. Once you understand how your employees
think and feel, you can begin to revise policies and procedures to better meet their needs.
You'll greatly improve employee retention and motivate your employees to produce higher
quality work.
A few of the main factors that affect employee satisfaction are:

• Job security
• Communication between employees & management
• Lack of training
• Compensation
• Job burnout
• Ill-defined tasks
• Poor working conditions
• Lack of support
• Lack of advancement opportunities
• Feeling unappreciated

Employee attitude surveys measure your employee's opinions on all aspects of the
workplace environment including:

• Overall satisfaction
• Management/employee relations
• Corporate culture
• Career development
• Compensation
• Benefits

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ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR – ASSIGNMENT II
• Recognition and rewards
• Working conditions
• Training
• Staffing levels
• Safety concerns
• Policies and procedures

Whether you need an employee attitude survey designed from scratch, or have an existing
survey that needs to be administered, Infosurv takes extraordinary measures to ensure
validity, reliability and bias reduction. Our goal is to help you compose a highly relevant
survey instrument that will yield sound and valid conclusions while achieving the maximum
survey response rate possible.

An employee attitude survey is a planned procedure which enables an organisation to

obtain the opinions of its employees on a particular issue or on the organisation itself, so as
to take account of them in the planning process or make changes beneficial to the
organisation and individuals alike.

Advantages of employee attitude surveys

Employee attitude surveys: provide data which can be used in problem-solving, planning
and decision-making encourage employee involvement which improves morale and
motivation allow management to hear employees' opinions of which they may not otherwise
be aware provide an effective communication medium, or a sounding board. Disadvantages
of employee attitude surveys

They: require a good deal of time to carry out and evaluate

incur significant costs in planning, implementing and evaluating

can generate suspicion about the "real" reasons behind the survey,

and "hidden agendas". Action checklist

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1. Define the scope and coverage of the survey

Identify the subject on which employees' opinions are to be gathered. Be as precise as

possible and be clear on how you will deal with views once they have been given. Bear in
mind that a survey entitled, for example, "Introducing teleworking" may give rise to all sorts
of anxieties or expectations.

Decide who is to be included in the survey--all employees or one department or site, or one
age group or one type of employee (such as full-time permanent staff only).

2. Decide who is to run the survey

Appoint an agency to run the survey. This may be your own personnel department if you
have one which is large enough, or a special working party drawn from all levels in the
organisation. Consider contracting the work out to an external consultant if you feel you
lack the necessary expertise internally; this will probably be more expensive but it may help
to persuade staff of the impartiality of the process and that the results will be acted upon.

3. Select a survey method

Two principle survey methods are available.

* Questionnaire--to be filled in by the employee. Questionnaires are particularly useful when

there is a large number of employees to survey and when the information is of the "Yes/No"
type.

* Face-to-face interviews with the employee. These can be on either an individual or group
basis. As the contact is interactive, attitudes can be probed more deeply. The disadvantages
are that interviews are time-consuming, are impractical for large numbers, can suffer from
inconsistencies and produce results that are difficult to quantify.

The choice of method is dependent on the numbers to be surveyed, the type of information
needed and the resources available.

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4. Determine the questions and procedures

The questionnaire (or guidelines for interviewers in the case of face-to-face contact) should
be formulated. Points to look for include:

* are the questions clear and unambiguous?

* will it take the employee a long time to complete?

* do the questions totally cover the subject?

* will the information obtained be easy to analyse?

* is confidentiality assured?

Ensure that the questions are not discriminatory in any way and take into account any likely
problems with literacy or understanding terminology.

Devising questionnaires and holding interviews are not tasks for the enthusiastic amateur. It
is worthwhile taking advice.

5. Pilot the survey

Select a number of employees and ask them to complete a questionnaire or undertake an

interview. Ask them if they had any problems in completing the survey, and find out if they
prefer to think about it at work or take it home. See whether the information obtained is
what was being looked for. If necessary, make modifications to the questionnaire, or provide
extra training for the interviewers.

6. Explain the exercise to all employees

It is crucial to ensure that the workforce understands the reasons behind the survey and the
benefits it will have for them. This will alleviate any fears they may have and should result
in a higher response rate. Depending on the nature of the survey, you may wish to explain

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to any employees not participating why it is being carried out.

7. Implement the survey

Distribute the questionnaires or arrange for the interviews to be held. To avoid loss of
impetus, leave as short a time as possible for the survey to be completed (allowing
sufficient time for those employees on annual leave). Ensure that help is available to deal
with any possible problems. It is advisable to ask employees to return completed
questionnaires to an outside agency to persuade staff of the confidentiality and impartiality
with which their replies will be treated.

8. Collate and report results

It is essential to communicate the results of the survey both to senior management and
employees if distrust and suspicion are to be avoided. In the case of employees it is usually
advisable to provide only a summary as they may not wish to read a lengthy document.
Make sure employees are told of promised plans of action resulting from the survey.
Benchmark the results externally, particularly in the case of regular surveys which monitor
trends. (Remember, however, that the survey may be so specific that a comparison is
impossible). Survey analysis is a specialist task and you may therefore wish to contract this
to an outside agency.

9. Evaluate the survey method

Evaluate the survey itself, for example the response rate and any difficulties which arose.
Take these into account when planning and designing a follow-up or other surveys.

10. Follow-up survey method

It is often desirable to undertake a second survey once the plans of action have had time to
take effect, to see whether the changes introduced have made improvements. In cases
where little or no action is called for this is unnecessary.

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Dos and don'ts for undertaking an employee attitude survey

Do

Pilot the survey before full implementation.

Report results of the survey and plans of action to all employees.
Benchmark with employee surveys undertaken in other organisations if possible.

Don't

Implement the survey without careful planning.

Forget to note any problems in undertaking the survey so improvements can be made.
Use the survey for a "hidden agenda".
Useful reading

Step by step employee surveys

As the importance of staff motivation on the bottom line is becoming increasingly

appreciated, attitude surveys are becoming more common. Surveys can be a great way of
gauging the opinions and level of satisfaction of your employees. By working with your
employees to make targeted improvements, you will help to improve morale and
productivity whilst reducing the risk of losing good employees. It is advised that you run a
survey once or twice a year.

What are employee surveys?

An employee survey can vary from a thorough systematic study of the attitudes of your
employees towards all aspects of their employment, or may focus on particular aspects on
which you require feedback, either because you suspect there is a problem, or because you
are contemplating some change.

Why run a survey?

The advantages are many, and can be summarised below. Surveys can:

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• provide you with a useful organisational healthcheck to identify problem areas
• help you to address specific issues - some of which you may already be aware, but
they can also give you the evidence to address these and the information you need in
order to do so
• provide evidence for changes in policy and practice
• provide a forum for suggestions - which are often detailed and usually practical
• be an internal marketing exercise
• be a useful tool for raising awareness
• help to avoid burying your head in the sand - by pretending issues don't exist, or
ignoring these. (And once committed to raising the issues, it is vital that you take
action on them!)
• identify areas for organisational development - by defining the organisation's
strengths and weaknesses as perceived by the employees, they can show which
managers' strengths to build on and weaknesses to support. Can also help to detect
training needs and obstacles hindering performance and advancement.
• help staff to feel valued - by demonstrating concern and respect for your employees
and their views, the psychological contract will become or remain healthy. Morale can
be given a real boost if staff perceive effort is taken into seeking their feedback.
• test other communication devices within the business
• provide a benchmark against which to measure improvement
• uncover grievances whose existence was unknown to higher management. Even if
nothing can be done to alleviate these, it may improve matters simply by explaining
the reasons for things being the way they are.
• provide a useful safety valve - by providing the chance to release pent up feelings
• help prioritise issues - sometimes very minor changes may have major improvement
in terms of staff perception - the survey enables you to see what they feel is
important.
• If changes are going to be made, employees are more likely to accept these if they
feel that they have had a say in advance.

What are the pitfalls?

Surveys can also:

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ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR – ASSIGNMENT II
• raise staff expectations with a resultant negative effect on morale if they feel that
they spent time and effort replying but no-one listened/accepted their views. There is
no point in raising expectations unless you are prepared to try to fulfil these. So never
include issues on which you are not prepared to take action and ensure that you feed
back responses and explain actions from them (even if the action is to do nothing).
• take a lot of time if done internally.
• provide discontented staff with an opportunity to 'have a go' at senior management.
• become a millstone - ie you commit to it annually but nothing has changed. It also
becomes very clear to staff if no action has been taken - and you can no longer use
the excuse that you didn't know!
• be seen by some managers as a threat if they feel insecure - will the information be
used against them?

How to overcome the obstacles

Firstly, all of the above pitfalls can be managed and are really only excuses from those who
don't want to bother - they don't affect the validity of doing the exercise!

You will need to have a good employee communications system already in place - if not,
employees may be negative and cynical, and the results will be unproductive. And in order
to get a meaningful response, you must stress a guarantee of anonymity, confidentiality
and non-attribution. Without trust you will not uncover the perceptions you need to be
aware of.

Finally, be sure to carry through! If people give up time to complete a survey they can
reasonably expect:

• to be given feedback on the results, and

• to see a positive plan of action to address some of the key issues.

Why Employee Attitude Surveys Fail

Many of the causes of unsuccessful survey efforts can be traced to the conditions under
which management does surveys. Often Human Resource executives initiate employee
attitude surveys in order to discover ways to improve the work environment of their

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employees. However, too often senior management's full commitment to the process and to
making meaningful changes has not been obtained before hand. As a result, management is
not prepared to act on the survey findings. In time, as these organizations continue to do
surveys without providing feedback and/or acting on the findings, employees become
increasingly dissatisfied and cynical about management's motives.

A second common unsuccessful scenario is that management wants to find out how the
organization is doing compared to other similar organizations. If the organization scores
more or less average, management feels there is no need to make changes; and even when
the results are poor, management often rationalizes that considering the circumstances in
which the survey was done (business downturn, high turnover, etc.) they did not do so badly
and no changes are made. In either case the problem is that there are always some areas of
dissatisfaction and to raise expectations by doing a survey and then to not make any
improvements is demoralizing.

In yet other companies management conducts employee attitude surveys in order to find
scapegoats. In this case, management uses an employee attitude survey to find the areas of
greatest dissatisfaction and then fires the managers responsible for those areas. In this
situation too the morale of both employees and managers will decline.

The only good condition for doing an employee attitude survey is when senior management
(and not just the HR department) wants to find and solve the problems that employees are
facing in their work environment.

Advantages and Disadvantages of the Survey Method

Strengths:

• Surveys are relatively inexpensive (especially self-administered surveys).

• Surveys are useful in describing the characteristics of a large population. No other
method of observation can provide this general capability.
• They can be administered from remote locations using mail, email or telephone.
• Consequently, very large samples are feasible, making the results statistically
significant even when analyzing multiple variables.

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• Many questions can be asked about a given topic giving considerable flexibility to the
analysis.
• There is flexibilty at the creation phase in deciding how the questions will be
administered: as face-to-face interviews, by telephone, as group administered written
or oral survey, or by electonic means.
• Standardized questions make measurement more precise by enforcing uniform
definitions upon the participants.
• Standardization ensures that similar data can be collected from groups then
interpreted comparatively (between-group study).
• Usually, high reliability is easy to obtain--by presenting all subjects with a
standardized stimulus, observer subjectivity is greatly eliminated.

Weaknesses:

• A methodology relying on standardization forces the researcher to develop questions

general enough to be minimally appropriate for all respondents, possibly missing
what is most appropriate to many respondents.
• Surveys are inflexible in that they require the initial study design (the tool and
administration of the tool) to remain unchanged throughout the data collection.
• The researcher must ensure that a large number of the selected sample will reply.
• It may be hard for participants to recall information or to tell the truth about a
controversial question.
• As opposed to direct observation, survey research (excluding some interview
approaches) can seldom deal with "context."

Employee Satisfaction Survey - Sample Survey Questions

Feedback

I receive useful and constructive feedback from my manager.

I am given adequate feedback about my performance.
I receive feedback that helps me improve my performance.
I have an opportunity to participate in the goal setting process.
Employee performance evaluations are fair and appropriate.
My supervisor gives me praise and recognition when I do a good job.
When I do a good job, I receive the praise and recognition I deserve.

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Teamwork

Teamwork is encouraged and practiced in this organization.

There is a strong feeling of teamwork and cooperation in this organization.

Quality and Customer Focus

People are held accountable for the quality of work they produce.
The quality of our products and services are very important to this organization.
In this organization we maintain very high standards of quality.
This organization understands its customers' needs.
This organization is extremely focused on its customers' needs.
Customer needs are the top priority in this organization.

Mission and Purpose

I have a good understanding of the mission and the goals of this organization.
I understand how my work directly contributes to the overall success of the organization.
My job is important in accomplishing the mission of the organization.
My supervisor provides me regular information about the mission and the goals of this organization.
I am familiar with and understand the organization's strategic goals.
Doing my job well gives me a sense of personal satisfaction.

Compensation

I am paid fairly for the work I do.

My salary is competitive with similar jobs I might find elsewhere.
My benefits are comparable to those offered by other organizations.
I understand my benefit plan.

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I am satisfied with my benefit package.

Workplace and Resources

I have the resources I need to do my job well.

The necessary information systems are in place and accessible for me to get my job done.
I have all the information I need to do my job effectively.
My workplace is well maintained.
My workplace is a physically comfortable place to work.
My workplace is safe.

Communication

Information and knowledge are shared openly within this organization.

Communication is encouraged in this organization.
My manager does a good job of sharing information.
Senior management communicates well with the rest of the organization.

Opportunities for Growth

I have adequate opportunities for professional growth in this organization.

I receive the training I need to do my job well.
My manager is actively interested in my professional development and advancement.
My manager encourages and supports my development.
I am encouraged to learn from my mistakes.
My work is challenging.
My work is stimulating.
My work is rewarding.
I have a mentor at work.

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Work/Life Balance; Stress and Work Pace

The environment in this organization supports a balance between work and personal life.
My manager understands the importance of maintaining a balance between work and
personal life.
I am able to satisfy both my job and family responsibilities.
I am not forced to choose between job and family obligations.
The pace of the work in this organization enables me to do a good job.
The amount of work I am asked to do is reasonable.
The organization has reasonable expectations of its employees.
My job does not cause unreasonable amounts of stress in my life.

Fairness

My manager treats all his/her employees fairly.

The organization's policies for promotion and advancement are always fair.
Favoritism (special treatment) is not an issue in raises or promotions.
My manager is always consistent when administering policies concerning employees.
I am always treated fairly by my manager.
Everybody is treated fairly in this organization.

Respect for Management

I respect the senior leaders of this organization.

I respect my manager as a competent professional.
The leaders of this organization know what they are doing.
Our senior managers demonstrate strong leadership skills.
I am very satisfied with my manager.

Respect for Employees

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My manager always treats me with respect.

My manager listens to what I'm saying.
This organization respects its employees.
My manager values my talents and the contribution I make.
My talent is valued at work.
The organization values the contribution I make.
My coworkers care about me as a person.

Personal Expression/ Diversity

People who challenge the status quo are valued.

I can disagree with my supervisor without fear of getting in trouble.
I am comfortable sharing my opinions at work.
We work to attract, develop, and retain people with diverse backgrounds.
People with different ideas are valued in this organization.
My ideas and opinions count at work.

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