Internal illusions

Surveys are usually customer or prospect oriented, but they don’t have to be. Your staff are your ‘daily belief’ – the responsibility of transferring your business culture to the end user is with them. They have contact with customers every day and collect all sorts of information that probably, through fear of reprimand or lack of time or encouragement, is never relayed back to you. So why not ask them, in the anonymous, unbiased context that surveys provide?

If people are losing jobs, work load has declined and cash flow is becoming a problem, there is no doubt that staff morale suffers too. If staff morale is suffering, so does performance and eventually customer service and sales. Abraham Maslow would argue, based on his famous ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, that motivational factors also change when economies are in decline – suddenly paying the bills becomes more important than achieving recognition for your work.

So how do you understand whether declining morale or changing motivational factors are affecting your employees, and in turn customers? Here’s my radical suggestion – ask them! Don’t wait for the figures to tell you there’s a problem. If it’s affecting your bottom line, the damage is already done!

Internal surveys, conducted anonymously through a third party, can reveal some very important information. What factors are concerning your staff? What feedback are they receiving from customers/clients? How do they view their current job security? Answers to all of these questions could reveal problems you didn’t know existed, or absolute gold mines of information, ideas and suggestions for improving service or production. Some of the most dynamic, market leading companies in the world have reached that position by simply listening to their people. Google allows 1 day a week for their engineers called ’20 percent time’; when they can work on anything they are passionate about. This process has created some of their most
successful products.

So if you’re wondering what’s going on inside the heads of people that make your organisation tick, let the power of an anonymous, third party controlled survey (or focus group) weave its magic. We have a great, affordable online survey system called Ballotbox that is completely flexible to your needs. All we need is your key topics/areas you wish to learn more about, and you can leave the rest to us. Your staff are then directed to an online survey that is completely protected from anyone’s prying eyes, and we’ll give you a full report of the results at the end. Once you have the survey tool in place, you can re-issue the survey every 6 or 12 months for next to nothing, tracking how the answers vary over time. If you’d like some more information of how we could help you, contact me.