Every year we chat with many of our clients about throwing their hat into the ring to be considered one of Kansas
City’s “Best Places to Work.” The award is a nice badge of honor for any company, but (and there is always a but) we never, ever recommend companies use a “Best Places to Work” survey tool to define them. Like all things, there are benefits and pitfalls of surveys. Invariably, if a company doesn’t win, we talk about the reasons why.
You’d think that failure to win truly means it is not a “Best Place to Work,” but in our humble opinion, that is far from the truth. We’re privileged to handle human resources for companies across the Kansas City metro that are great places to work despite the fact that they didn’t win a coveted award. How is that possible? Bottom line, you can’t even come close to judging whether or not a company has a great work environment using surveys that cram a square peg in to a round hole.
These surveys require that your employees go online to answer a group of pre-set questions developed by an online survey company. This is the same company that is willing to sell you your survey results after the fact. These are the answers your employees gave while they were on paid company time, which are supposed to help you understand why you won or lost. Ah, the joys of free enterprise.
Judging from the results we’ve seen, the survey results aren’t worth your or your employees’ time, effort and expense. There is room for employees to comment as they answer the survey questions, but are you really able to evaluate the reasons they are happy or not from a canned questionnaire that focuses on what the survey tool feels is important, versus what’s important within your unique culture? We don’t think so.
That’s why we created a program called The Cultural Roadmap. If you want to know how your employees are feeling about working for your company, how about simply asking them? Having a real, live, fluid conversation with them about the great things, and the not so great
things happening in your organization generates much more relevant, useful information than any canned survey can do. You can ask follow up questions, dig into issues, get their ideas and concerns, and generally give them a voice about what’s broken and what’s awesome about hanging out with you every day.
At the end of the interview sessions, we create a report that outlines all the good things, bad things, and opportunities you have to truly become a best place to work.
Then we take it a step further; we give you a list of priorities and a Roadmap with timeline detailing how to tackle the things that will enhance everything you do within your business within four quadrants – Service, Clarity, Purpose and People. And if you want assistance in executing these goals, well, here we are to roll up our sleeves and help. We suspect your online survey company isn’t going to help you with that.
Yes, you can take an online survey to define your company, but wouldn’t it be better to be a best place to work because you put intention and effort into it? There isn’t much sense having that fancy logo displayed in your office if your employees don’t believe in it and live it every day, now is there?