| Hard Measures for Soft Issues
Reprint from October, 2001 Issue of USIndustry Today "The FACTSurvey™ is a breakthrough method for significantly improving employee opinion research." The management at a 300-employee manufacturing facility needed help. Employees felt frustrated. Morale was down and so was production. This plant had results from past employee opinion surveys, but was unable to develop the steps needed to improve their situation. Determining these next steps would take more time and resources, and the employees were clearly disillusioned because no improvements were ever made although they were continually surveyed. That's when executives decided to try the FACTSurvey™ to get at the heart of the issues. The FACTSurvey™ proved to be crucial in helping them identify real solutions. Through the FACTSurvey™ this company discovered two critical areas for improvement: front-line leadership and consistent policies and procedures, especially the promotion policy. Using written questions, focus groups and one-on-one interviews, the FACTSurvey™ is a breakthrough in the science of assessing organizational issues, especially those considered "soft" issues. Unlike traditional surveys, the FACTSurvey™ can pinpoint the precise areas needing improvement and can provide action items for these areas. The FACTSurvey™ results are as objective and meaningful to managers as other measures, such as scrap and error rates. The Right Tool for the Job "The human- resources directors we have been working with to develop and implement the FACTSurvey™ are thrilled to have a tool that provides more than just opinions from employees-- a tool that actually provides strategies for improvement," says Dr. Edwin T. Cornelius, III, an industrial psychologist and president of Cornelius & Associates, a business consulting and training firm. The following example demonstrates the obvious difference between typical employee surveys and the FACTSurvey™. After prior experience with typical surveys, one company switched to the FACTSurvey™. In one pre-FACTSurvey™ study, the company's employees were asked whether they agree, strongly agree, disagree, strongly disagree or were undecided about the statement, "Employees understand the values of this company." In place of this, the FACTSurvey™ queried, "In the space below, list the values of this company." Based on the results from the first form of this question (57 percent of the employees said they agreed or strongly agreed with the statement), this company initially believed that most of its employees understood its values. After completing the FACTSurvey™, however, management saw that the employees did not understand these values. For example, only 23 percent of the employees identified safety as one of the company's values; when in fact, safety is the company's No. 1 value and always has been. Change Made Easy Cornelius developed the FACTSurvey™ after years of working with human-resources directors in organizations of all types and sizes. They were dissatisfied with the agree/disagree questions on traditional surveys, and wanted more information than 3.23 on a five-point scale could provide. They wanted results that could bring change to their organizations. With typical surveys, the results are vague, generalized and based on opinions. For organizations to get behind the numbers, they must invest a great deal more time and resources by holding focus-group sessions, employee meetings and strategy-planning sessions. Management can be unwilling to take these extra steps to make the data from the surveys more useful. This system is often worse than not doing a survey at all because employees lose faith in a process that yields no improvements. Cornelius created the FACTSurvey™ to provide results that prescribe interventions and that require considerably less follow-up effort and resources. Mead Paper is one manufacturer that recently undertook a FACTSurvey™. Mark Watkins, director of human resources, says, "The FACTSurvey™ gave us a way to reliably quantify aspects of our organization that we never thought possible. Cornelius & Associates' approach gave us hard measures for our leadership, culture and organizational strategies that we had only been able to measure through opinion surveys and interviews. Our hard-nosed engineers, researchers and manufacturing leaders recognize the value of gaining factual information to measure organizational effectiveness without relying on subjective judgments on an agree/disagree scale." The FACTSurvey™ is easy to administer in any organization. It causes few disruptions to ongoing operations because instead of surveying the entire organization, the FACTSurvey™ uses a stratified random sample of between 5 to 20 percent of the entire organization. The survey's consultants determine specific sampling numbers to ensure statistical accuracy levels of plus or minus 5 percent. Jim Lawler, now with Bose Corporation, oversaw the use of the FACTSurvey™ while he was at International Paper. "The FACTSurvey™ changed how we felt about our ability to assess and measure progress in communication, supervision, decision making, performance management, empowerment, training effectiveness and other areas of organizational development," Lawler says. "This approach is so logical and easy, I'm amazed that it's taken so long for someone to discover it." Custom Results The FACTSurvey™ is especially useful for companies that have experienced issues with previous surveys. It can be particularly valuable in companies with high turnover rates, spotty participation in past surveys, inconclusive data and few (or no) follow-up actions. Operational managers and other decision makers who have found previous surveys too subjective will support the FACTSurvey™'s more objective approach. So will companies in which employees were simply going through the motions on prior surveys because management required their participation. The FACTSurvey™ can be customized to fit each organization's unique assessment needs. Sample measurement concepts include:
In addition, more focused version of the FACTSurvey™ are now available. The Employee Retention FACTSurvey™ produced objective measurements of the causes of turnover, which can lead to the design of effective programs for employment continuity. Data from the Training Cost Effectiveness FACTSurvey™ shows which training programs are achieving strong bottom-line results and which programs are wasting time and resources. Using the Change Readiness FACTSurvey™, a company can quickly determine whether it is ready and willing to make the necessary changes to stay competitive. For years, businesses large and small have used traditional attitude surveys to get the same general, vague answers. To improve bottom-line results, however, organizations need concrete, actionable items they can work on immediately. The FACTSurvey™'s methodology precisely identifies the areas needing improvement, so training dollars are not wasted. The 300-employee manufacturer mentioned earlier discovered how effective the FACTSurvey™ can be. Within weeks after the results came in, the company launched training programs for front-line supervisors, and began to review and revise its policies. The company now feels that the money it is putting into training will actually improve its bottom line. It has already begun to see improvements in employee attitude. By producing more pinpointed and objective results, the FACTSurvey™ can help other organizations in the same way. © 2004 Cornelius & Associates |
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