Comprehensive Employee Surveys Tell You "What You Need to Know" to Boost Your Organization's Performance and Competitiveness:

Conducting comprehensive employee surveys, including employee opinion surveys, employee engagement surveys and employee satisfaction surveys is a highly effective way to identify and diagnose problems and opportunities, and to gather information and insight for creating solutions that increase employee and business performance.

This article includes illustrative comments from a comprehensive employee survey conducted for a business-to-business company with several thousand employees across the U.S. This particular survey had over 70 questions.

Employee Survey Comments Tell You if Your Company's Corporate Culture is Healthy and Supportive of Employee Engagement and Performance:

Thousands of comments were received, pinpointing significant and sometimes alarming problems and opportunities and including suggestions for increasing employee and company performance, and customer satisfaction. The following sample comments illustrate problems with communications, ineffective and difficult managers, lack of empowerment, the effect of compensation on employee engagement/loyalty, technology and process problems, and other issues negatively impacting employee engagement and satisfaction, customer satisfaction and company performance. Some of the comments describe discrimination and abuse situations that can lead to costly law suits from employees and negative impact on company reputation.

Employee survey comments and suggestions provide the information, perceptions and insight your organization needs to compete, survive and thrive:

Illustrative Employee Survey Comments:

Read the following employee comments and suggestions and you will likely agree that conducting comprehensive employee surveys makes much more sense than limited question surveys.

No sane Board member, C-suite leader, senior manager, mid-level manager or supervisor wants to hear comments like the actual comments shown below. Failure to gather honest, comprehensive feedback from employees and to take prompt action demonstrates ineffective leadership and the likelihood that the organization will fail to compete effectively and perform at high levels.

The following representative survey questions are followed by illustrative verbatim comments. The survey included many additional questions that gathered comments equally revealing as these illustrative comments:

Departments Communicate Effectively with Each Other:

"Sometimes service, operations, billing, etc... don't communicate effectively with each other. I had to pull teeth last week just to get my customer an expected delivery date... we almost lost the deal because nobody seemed to KNOW anything... they just passed me along to another person, who would recommend talking to the previous person."

Feel Comfortable Going to Manager with Problems:

• "He uses intimidation and threats to communicate issues to us. I have ZERO trust that what I may discuss with him, will be taken seriously. Or that I will be labeled something like "Troublemaker" or "Whiner" because I am asking questions about some of his decisions and changes or just other questions in general"

Feel Good About Working for Manager:

• "He has only been at this branch for a year and I am counting the minutes till he hopefully leaves. The way he manages, he is only making everyone feel like they are walking on egg shells, and that is not a positive environment to be in. That is why I do my best to stay away from the office unless necessary."

Company Communicates Effectively:

• "I have a manager who never communicates anything."

Feel Good About Job Overall:

• "I have lost quite a few deals over the last 12 months due to our "Oracle" issues related to billing, and the length of time it takes us to fix problems within the system, whether we are trying to get a customer covered under maintenance, to trying to correct addresses of where equipment is located. I spend 70% of my time on administrative issues trying to keep customers, rather than selling."

Have Information Needed to Do Job:

• "Getting critical information (current equipment info, information regarding last sale, etc) often requires exhaustive file searching because up-to-date information is not in the database. This wastes what would have been valuable selling time."

Have Sufficient Authority for Job Responsibilities:

• "Employees have no authority and management has made that very clear. I am only empowered to make suggestions, and I have observed that those who make suggestions put their jobs at risk."

Am Inspired to Do Best Work Every Day:

• "I am motivated by making money and that is the only reason I am still here. Reducing the sales commission plan is a real de-motivator"

Manager Encourages Environment of Openness/Trust:

• "My manager creates an environment of hostility and un-trust. I cannot trust my manager to make the right or ethical decision at times. There is obvious favoritism which cannot be tolerated. There needs to be equitable standards for all of us."

Manager Listens to Concerns/Interested in My Ideas:

• "I love my job, but when it comes to my manager I wish I had another. She talks down to us and has said things to me that made me lose my respect towards her. I try not to talk with or even be near to her. She treats our department like we are six graders. Always talking down to us. does not let me communicate the way I want because she will always interrupt."

One Thing Company Could Do to Increase Engagement:

• "SOLVE OUR ORACLE PROBLEMS…especially billing errors and problems, we are losing too many customers and it is hurting our reputation in the marketplace. Sales is spending too much time tracking down and fixing Oracle related problems and not enough time selling"

Job Performance Is Evaluated Fairly on a Timely Basis:

• "Performance reviews and compensation don't reflect reality. Management doesn't understand that as a salesperson I am doing MANY jobs. They only rate me on selling & not the endless hours of FIXING PROBLEMS that hurt my sales. I spend more time fixing problems than selling. Someone should take responsibility for all the issues that have been presented with Oracle (billing and accounts receivable problems) and other problems hurting sales and customer satisfaction. This month a few sales I put through neither could be delivered or billed due to back order issues and Oracle problems. I also lost one of my biggest customers due to billing problems and very bad field service. Management is truly not understanding what is going on."

Would Take a Lot to Get Me to Leave:

• "Gutsy question! Good for you. I hope you listen to all of the answers on this. Discontinuing the 401K matching, along with other reductions in bonuses, coupled with increased quotas during an economic downturn definitely cause people to think about other opportunities."

Training Classes Effective:

• "Much more time was needed to learn Oracle. Training was crammed in one week, when this should have been a two week training class so that all aspect of the job could be covered. Oracle problems are causing our company a huge amount of problems, costs solving problems and lost business. Some of this could be resolved by better Oracle training!"

Management Values Employees:

• "There is no department morale, encouragement or acknowledgement for our hard work. A thank you is like pulling teeth."

Things You Like Least About Your Job:

• "Office atmosphere, too much conflict and tension because of our manager"