2010
Company culture matters
Two-thirds of employees believe that company culture is very important to the success of their organizations, according to a recent Work Watch survey by Randstad of over 1,000 employed adults.
Over one-third of employees believe culture has its greatest impact on employee morale, followed by 22 percent who said its greatest effect is on employee productivity.
The five most critical components of culture?
- Employee attitudes (selected by 69% of respondents)
- Effective management (64%)
- Strong trust relationships (57%)
- Customer focus (55%)
- High accountability standards (50%)
Organizations that are serious about improving results – including employee productivity – also need to be serious about measuring culture (especially in light of the fact that three-fifths of respondents said their company culture had been negatively affected by recent economic events).
Traditional employee engagement surveys are insufficient for this purpose, as too often they don’t include important elements of culture such as accountability, customer focus, and trust. A more comprehensive human capital survey is needed to more broadly capture the elements that make up culture.
2010
What makes a “best boss”?
Lots of interesting surveys about “bosses” recently. (See, for example, this post and link from last month.) In honor of “National Boss Day” on October 16, Adecco surveyed 1,000 employees (and bosses) in the United States on what employees want in their bosses and what styles their bosses generally use.
They found that many employees are seeking “visionary” bosses, while it’s more common to actually have bosses with a “commanding” style.
The survey found a number of changes relative to 3 years ago, with bosses more focued on work, closer to their teams, working more hours – and also more stressed. (Higher stress was reported by people who manage larger numbers of employees, and by “white collar” bosses versus “blue collar” ones.)
And finally? Seventy percent of employees don’t aspire to have the job of their boss.
2010
Biggest challenges with the boss
A recent CareerBuilder.com poll asked almost 4,500 full-time employees about their relationships with their boss. While the headlines focused on how many people said their boss was like Michael Scott from “The Office” (and other TV show bosses), the poll also included some more interesting nuggets about specific positive and negative qualities of respondents’ bosses.
For example, on the negative side, 61 percent of employees believe that their boss does a poor job in the area of their career development – grooming them to move up in the organization.
On the other hand, the vast majority of respondents felt their supervisors were good at offering flexible work arrangements (72 percent of respondents responded positively), taking time to listen (69 percent), and providing the resources necessary to work effectively (68 percent).
One of McBassi’s credos is that there is trememdous wisdom in the workforce, just waiting to be tapped. This poll provides just a glimpse of the sorts of deeper insights companies themselves could harness from their employees.
But to do so, they need to devote the resources necessary to deploy – and then analyze and act upon – the results of a thoughtful, actionable, employee survey.