Employee Opinion Survey
From: M. D. Anderson Department of Performance Improvement
Date: January 15, 2008
Courtney Holladay: Hi, I'm Courtney Holladay, and I will be talking to you about the employee opinion survey.
We have conducted two employee opinion surveys at M. D. Anderson with the goal to become the employer of choice. That is to increase employee satisfaction with their workplace. Our first employee opinion survey was conducted in October of 2002, and then we re-surveyed again in October of 2005. The plan going forward is to re-survey about every 18 months to two years.
Just to give you a little history, the response rate back in 2002 was 60% compared to 53% in 2005. On those surveys we out-performed our benchmarks, which were a random sample of employees, for academic and healthcare institutions. When we talk about the database in a couple minutes, I just wanted to let you know that your HR Generalist has been trained on how to use the database. They are available to help you when you are going through the database if you have any technical difficulties. When you're looking at the survey there are some guidelines that I would like to provide you with, in the interpretation. All the survey questions were asked on a 5-point scale. The scores are based on the percentage of people who chose a particular response, whether that was strongly agree or strongly disagee. We then collapsed those 5 response items into a 3-point scale: favorable, neutral, and unfavorable. When you're looking at the scores, there are some general guidelines to help you in interpreting whether things are favorable or opportunities for improvement. Favorable ratings are represented by scores over 70%. Those are generally perceived to be strengths in those areas. Opportunities for improvement are represented by items with less than 50% favorability, or items that received unfavorable ratings of greater than 15%. Neutral ratings are those rating between 50 and 70% favorability or where you had a neutral rating of greater than 25%.
I also want to make you aware of the institutional opportunities for improvement as you are looking and comparing your own departmental opportunities. The institution continued to have an opportunity around empowerment. We lie behind our other benchmarking institutions and employees still feel that they are unable to say what they think, that they can express their ideas and suggestions. In addition to empowerment we also had an opportunity around manager behaviors. The ratings from 2002 were actually better in terms of where we saw our manager's integrity and discovery. The third opportunity for improvement, in the institutional level, is around performance management. Employees do not feel as much as we would hope that top performers are receiving more pay and recognition or that their managers are dealing with poor performers or having the opportunity to provide upward feedback on their manager's performance. When you start looking at your departmental results there are some comparisons that you should be making. Those to your one up, those to 2002 (if you do have survey data for back then). And if you have a department with more than 50 people you can look at the demographics.
Are there differences between groups at the job level, or different gender, or ethnic groups? For departments with less than 10 respondents you will not be able to look at your individual data. In this situation you can look at your one-up data to see if they reflect your own issues, or discuss with the team to see if there are any issues that they think can be addressed.
There are also some questions that you should be looking at when you start to narrow down what particular item you would like to work on. Looking at those two to three items where you can improve, determining if there are any strengths that you can leverage against. What items you scored particularly well on. You want to make sure you can determine the cause, be able to take action, and also be able to follow up on whatever survey item you choose. You could also use initiatives that are currently underway and just piggy-back on the survey results and work on those with those initiatives. Once you decide what survey item you want to work on there are additional HR resources that you can tap into. If you want to work on retaining your employees, we have turn over data that's available. For hiring the right people, we have the behavior based interviewing course that is available out of HR. We also have an institutional competency model from which we can develop interview guides, and employ development plans.
If you need any help with the additional HR resources or the employee opinion survey database, please contact your HR generalist who will be happy to assist you. Thank you.