Benefits Industry News

The human resources department traditionally spends a great deal of time developing written benefit information within the corporate communications structure. Most companies spent a great deal of resources on of general benefit information as well as summaries of health insurance or deductions are printed at the bottom of employee paychecks. Since the role of the HR department has evolved since the 1990s, when the department began to change its role in the workplace, employee benefit communication can be conducted in a number of different ways. The point of solid corporate communications strategies is to make sure that you are providing your employees with as much information as possible to be completely effective at their daily jobs.

If you’re running a smaller company, your HR department will most likely consist of one or two people, so it may be a little easier to have effective employee communications regarding things like changes in health care benefits or paycheck deductions. Corporate communication in the form of mass emails detailing these changes, or reminders to read the new information that will appear on the bottom of pay stubs will most likely suffice in these instances. It may also help to partner will smaller health insurance companies to meet the needs of your employees. In many cases, larger corporations that handle employee benefits will relay employee communication to your company in the same way they would a national corporation. This could cause your employees to miss certain important internal communications regarding the amount of coverage they can receive for their families. Therefore, working with independent health insurance companies, and finding out about employee benefits from organizations may be the way to go.

No matter how large or small your business may be, holding an employee meeting to learn more about things like 401k, IRAs, Social Security, and health insurance is always a good method of corporate communication. Employees that may have joined the company in their 40s or 50s will most likely be especially concerned about retirement benefits, and those with children will have questions about health insurance. Being able to utilize hard-copy materials as a form of effective employee benefit communications during a face to face meeting may ease any doubts and answer any questions they may have about their benefits and compensation.

The importance of effective corporate communication is a huge part of your company’s success. Be sure that you are being clear and open any time you engage in employee communication and try to have some available at all times during regular business hours to answer any additional questions concerns.

The current economic downturn has changed the world dramatically. It’s a new ball game for every organization. Now, more than any time in the past 60+ years, current feedback from employees and customers is essential for knowing where we are, where we need to be, and for planning our organizations’ futures. Conducting effective surveys provides information and insight for making informed decisions, driving positive change and significantly increasing profit and organizational sustainability.

If your organization conducts surveys, or if you are thinking of conducting a survey, this article will help you achieve excellent results and avoid pitfalls often encountered while conducting surveys.

To receive a PDF version of the complete survey report by e-mail, including employee survey best practices, key survey findings, survey data and verbatim comments, please send an e-mail to hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom requesting the “Employee Survey Best Practices Report.”

Survey Best Practices – Increasing Your Survey Expertise

As a survey company we are often asked questions about survey practices: What is the best way to conduct surveys? How can we get the highest possible response rate? Should we use a survey company, or should we try to use a self-use online survey service? The questions we receive are many and varied.

While Quantisoft has extensive survey experience and expertise, we decided to conduct a survey to identify employee survey best practices at organizations we do not conduct surveys for. The findings of the survey validated our own survey experience and produced interesting and useful information and insight about employee surveys.

This article includes the key Lessons Learned and Actions for You to Consider from Quantisoft’s Survey About Employee Survey Practices. Please contact Howard Deutsch at hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom to receive the full Employee Survey Best Practices Report, including the survey findings, data and verbatim comments.

Lessons Learned

1. Types of Employee Surveys – Participating organizations are using a wide range of employee surveys to gather information and insight for making better decisions and making informed changes. Types of surveys they conduct include employee satisfaction/engagement, employee benefits opinion, employee turnover, sales force opinion, IT customer satisfaction, business risk assessment and other surveys. Information about types of employee, customer and specialty surveys is presented at http://www.quantisoft.com/Industries/SurveyTypes.htm.

2. Survey Frequency – The most common frequency for conducting surveys is annually.

3. Satisfaction with Survey Companies vs. Self-use Survey Services – Organizations that primarily use survey companies are significantly more satisfied with their survey process than organizations primarily using self-service online survey services. The reasons survey companies are providing greater satisfaction and value than self-service survey services include the expertise and experience provided, receiving survey reports quickly without the need to take time to generate graphs and other reports in-house, objective analysis of survey results, more focus on implementing changes, greater support and involvement from management and other factors.

4. Effectiveness of Survey Practices – Organizations primarily using survey companies rate the effectiveness of key survey practice significantly higher than organizations using self-service online survey services. The survey practices with the largest gaps in effectiveness ratings are receiving support from managers, producing timely useful reports, communicating survey findings, developing implementation plans, analyzing survey results and achieving results from surveys.

5. Importance of Survey Practices - Survey respondents identified the “most” important survey practices as keeping responses anonymous, conducting follow-up surveys, time taken to complete survey and analysis of survey data.

6. Survey Response Period and Rate – Responding organizations strive to achieve a high survey response rate. A 2-week survey response period is most popular. A third week typically generates a higher response rate. 60% of responding organizations typically have a survey response rate of 60% or greater.

7. Primary Survey Approach - Online/Web surveys are the most often-used approach. Organizations are learning ways to end the use of paper surveys, even for employees that do not use computers to perform their job. 70% of responding organizations use Online/Web surveys as their primary approach, 20% use paper surveys as their primary approach and 10% use Online/Web surveys supplemented with paper surveys as their primary approach.

8. Reasons for Conducting Employee Surveys – The top reasons for conducting employee surveys include identifying performance improvement opportunities, assessing employee satisfaction and engagement levels and trends, part of ongoing measurement process and identifying causes of employee turnover.

9. Surveys Achieving Their Objectives – Some organizations are achieving very strong results from surveys while others are falling short. Key factors for achieving survey objectives include management support for conducting surveys and implementing changes, using a survey company and executing well on all of the survey practices. Surveys generate significant quantitative and qualitative results when designed and executed well, followed up by effective analysis and implementation of changes identified by surveys.

10. Using Normative Benchmarking Data – Survey respondents prefer to benchmark their survey results with survey results from other organizations. However, they are not comfortable using benchmarking data unless they can be sure the data enables “apples-to-apples” comparisons. Similarity of organizations being bench marked, similarity of survey questions/wording, common time frame for when survey data was collected and other factors are important for making valid benchmarking comparisons.

11. Survey Best Practices – Knowing and consistently following best practices is very important for successfully conducting surveys and achieving results. Organizations that fail to follow best practices for all survey practices fail to achieve the full potential results from surveys.

Actions for You to Consider – Conducting Better Surveys

1. Share the full Employee Survey Best Practices Report with people in your organization who are responsible for conducting surveys, and with managers that can benefit from conducting surveys. Send your request for the full report to hdeutsch@Quantisoftdotcom.

2. Compare your organization’s approach for conducting surveys with the best practices, lessons learned and other information and insight included in the full report available from Quantisoft. Identify and implement changes your organization can make to achieve greater results from surveys.

3. Consider conducting surveys to gather information and insight for increasing your organization’s competitiveness and bottom line in this difficult economic environment. Beyond the usual employee satisfaction/engagement surveys, other types of surveys can enable your organization to identify ways to increase sales, identify and manage risks more effectively, gather feedback for reducing costs and increasing quality and customer service levels, enhance your organization’s “going green” profile, get more value from employee benefits dollars spent and much more.

4. The world has changed dramatically during the past year. The information and insight gathered from surveys conducted just a few months ago may no longer be valid. Update previous surveys now to gather current information and adjust action plans to reflect the “new reality”.

5. Make sure to focus your organization’s surveys on gathering actionable information that will positively impact employees, customers, the environment and your bottom line.

Information and tips that will help you to achieve results from surveys are presented at http://www.quantisoft.com.

The term culture by and large denotes the ideas, customs, and art of a particular society. While referring to work culture or organization culture one would particularly mean the customs, patterns, arts and beliefs followed in various organizations. Edgar Schein, one of the most prominent theorists of organizational culture, gave the following definition: The culture of a group can now be defined as a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

Employee satisfaction on the other hand is a measure of how happy workers are with their job and working environment. Keeping morale high among workers can be of tremendous benefit to any company as quite rightly pointed out Jack Welch in his statement Employee satisfaction gets you productivity, quality, pride, and creativity.

In today’s world of globalization organizations stress immensely to follow a culture which encourages open channels of communication, a flat hierarchy, informal environment, teamwork, and respect to new ideas and thoughts.

The following aspects can broadly define the likely preferred work culture in today’s organizations which contribute to a satisfied workforce:

1.Work timings: Flexible work timings have gained immense popularity amongst today’s organizations. Organizations have started giving their employees the leverage of entering the office premises at anytime of their convenience and completing their designated tasks, though a minimum hours have to be spent in the workplace

2. Work from Home: Another concept which is gaining importance, more amongst female workers, is the concept of work from home. Organizations are largely investing in equipments with the aid of which employees will have the benefit to stay at home and at the same time stay connected to the office network

3.Business Attire: As opposed to formal business attire for day to day work, organizations have now remodeled their policy on daily dress code to the widely preferred business casuals which also includes denim on one day of work. A few organizations also have a policy of Friday dressing where only casuals can be worn by their employees

4. Flat Hierarchy: The preferred organization structure is a flat organization structure with few levels of hierarchy which enables fast decision making and easy accessibility to top management. People who stay closer to customers know better the market needs and can respond faster to rapidly changing customer requirements and such changes can be easily highlighted and brought to the notice of the top management in a flat hierarchy. Another emerging trend in today’s organization are meetings with supervisors supervisor which helps in smooth interaction within different levels of management which is very effective within a flat hierarchy

5.Decentralization: This is the process of dispersing decision-making governance to the employee at the lowest level of the hierarchy and giving them the right to exercise a few decisions all by themselves which acts as a great time saving and cost cutting mechanism

6.  Employee Empowerment: Organizations are largely investing in employee empowerment. The increasing use of Employee Self service Systems which allow employees to maintain their own personal data is the biggest example. This also helps to reduce unnecessary paper work and also aims at data accuracy

7. Innovation: As George S Patton says “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.” The increasing demand of today’s workforce is acknowledgment and implementation of their ideas and thus organizations have now started investing in employee innovation where young and fresh ideas are being recognized as best practices

8.Rewards & Recognition: With the increase in stress levels, with long working hours how does an organization aim to create contributing and motivated employees, how do organizations maintain the high employee morale and the quality of life are some of the key concerns of today’s organizations and one of the many answers to these question is an effective reward and recognition system. Apart from the performance appraisal system organizations today are investing a lot in reward and recognition programs where employees are rewarded as Star employees and key achievers, long Service awards are announced for employees who work with the organization for a long tenure, Employee referral programs motivates an employee to bring their friends to work with them

9. Employee Recreation: Employee recreation programs have been shown to reduce absenteeism, increase performance and productivity, reduce stress levels, and increase job satisfaction. The new term coined to define employee recreation is associate engagement. A few examples of employee recreational activities are office outings, invitation to employees family to come and visit employees workplace, annual sports event, team outings, decoration of employee workspace , organizing music clubs, dance clubs, drama clubs, arranging training for special areas of interest of the employees

10. Employee Benefits: Benefits are forms of value, other than payment, that are provided to the employee in return for their contribution to the organization. Employee benefits typically refers to retirement plans, health life insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, vacation, employee stock ownership plans, membership to clubs, special offers and discounts on premium products and outlets, sponsorship for education of employees children, attractive schemes from financial institutions on purchase of assets, subsidized food in canteen

To sum up culture is the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate behavior and in today’s world organizations are going through a constant change in order to maintain the best possible culture which sets an example and pave the way for enhanced employee satisfaction.