Attitude Survey

Why Organizations May Need an Attitude Survey Process
You need to take the pulse of your organization.  You need to do it from top to bottom, with the ability to segment the data by organizational level and functional unit.  Maybe you're interested in checking out morale or job satisfaction levels.  Or maybe you want to know whether the organization is on track with a change process.  Perhaps you want to measure the level of satisfaction with the leadership they are getting, and you are willing to respond meaningfully to the data, with some ongoing effort to close identified gaps. Whatever you want to learn, our attitude survey process is designed and customized to do the job efficiently and expeditiously.

What You Stand to Gain
This process provides powerful leverage, for improving your organization's perceptions of its leadership, from the top to the line management level.

• It gives clear evidence of management's positive intent: what they are interested in, and in fact rely
  on, and what the people in the organization think and feel about their current and developing business climate.
• It gathers data that might otherwise be unavailable, especially if upward communications are blocked.
• It allows stratification of data by operating unit and by level in the organization, enabling identification of specific "problem areas" where improvement efforts will provide highest payoff.

Overview of the Process
We work with you in up to four dimensions:

Diagnostic: We (jointly with you) create an attitude survey and make it available to 100% of the organization, on paper forms, or on our website. We retain all raw data, enabling you to promise anonymity to respondents. We process responses and create statistical reports, with various indices and rating distribution profiles, segmented and stratified in ways you need, to provide the information you're looking for.

Intervention: These reports are fed back to the executive team, in a meeting, during which, a Human System vision is developed.  The data is analyzed to identify the high-priority themes, and a plan is laid out for passing on the data to the organization.

Inclusion: Employees are invited to participate in research, analysis, learning, and problem-solving activities and projects, to come up with solutions for the issues and problems highlighted by the survey.

Maintenance: Farr Associates' consultants, facilitate the forming and development of these groups until they achieve self-sustaining momentum. The survey can then be re-administered at a later date to check progress.

Human System Dynamics
The organization gets a clear, powerful message: "We value you, your ideas, and your commitment. We want to know what you see standing in the way of our success, and we want your ideas about getting rid of those barriers."

Your response to the data then confirms that message, and invites them into the change process, bringing it home even clearer.

Carefully-chosen, high-success-probable change projects, give employees the taste of success and the momentum to go after the tougher problems, with confidence and creativity.

Some Typical Outcomes

Employees feel genuinely listened to. Gripe levels decline.

The grapevine loses some of its power to generate or reinforce "we-they" mindsets.

Management starts learning about problems and issues earlier in the game, while there is still time to deal with them, rather than after it's too late.

Change initiatives are easier to get off the ground, and momentum builds more rapidly. People who engage in active or passive stonewalling "get the message," as they begin to get negative feedback from their co-workers.

Management-employee relations improve and dissatisfaction levels (a leading factor in turnover), decline.

Note: The Attitude Survey instrument can also be used as an excellent source of supplementary data in our Leadership Climate Study process.

 

You may hear complaints from the same people and dismiss it.  But, how far does that sentiment go in the organization? What is the root cause
of it, how is it effecting organizational performance, and how
is it hitting your bottom line?

An Attitude Survey can help root out problems that are stunting growth and find solutions to significantly increase organizational performance.

_____________________

A Case Study

What aren't your people telling you?

A manufacturer with a 90% market share and a very stable bottom line sensed complacency, change resistance, and other troubling symptoms, suggesting the organization was ill-prepared to respond to changes developing in its markets.

Farr Associates was engaged to facilitate an Attitude Survey process using 130 assessment items drawn from our database and customized with items specifically targeting suspected problem areas.

The results: discovery of significant perceived leadership gaps that hobbled the workforce's capacity to change, and its willingness to even try. Selected leadership development efforts and organizational change projects engaging the entire workforce, have these gaps rapidly closing and a new will and outlook carrying the company towards a brighter future.

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