Mike -

I couldn't help weighing in on this topic. I have to agree with Bob - the survey should support a business outcome and not be (as too often is the case) and end in itself or a means of self-gratification for management.

I always caution clients that I have not yet encountered the organization that is in business to produce 'happy employees'. (Substitute 'valued' or 'empowered' or any other adjective that a survey may yield.) This does not mean that employee satisfaction or ‘happiness’ does not matter, but that it is one of many indicators and if not linked to business result can take on an unnecessary life of its own.

The most striking example I can share of this is the time (after weeks of arguing against a high Voice of the Employee score as a primary metric for leadership success) I uncovered 2 branches of a client organization that had among the highest VOE scores while experiencing massive employee fraud. The employees were happily stealing from the company and were glad to score the survey highly!

In the end, I believe two things are important to keep in perspective: 1. compound metrics matter - a survey should only provide a small part of the picture and 2. Any survey should be undertaken only in support of some clear business objective.

Hope this was helpful.

Careful what you ask for...give the employees a survey but then don't get ticked-off at the results. ASK THEM and they WILL TELL YOU if it is anonymous.

Do it for sure, but I don't advise doing this too frequently as you facilitate the development of a "B**CHING" culture. Maybe once every other year.

CAVEAT:
You MUST make SOME changes (and then 'market' those changes) as a result of the survey in order to sell future participation.

My $0.02.
check six,
Boom

I agree with the previous posts. I guess in a former company I drank a lot of "Gallup Koolaid". I believe that their engagement survey has many outstanding benefits. However, if you don't start out with a solid understanding of the difference between employee satisfaction and employee engagment, you're in trouble. You could have a satisfied but non-enngaged employee who sat as his terminal all day long and played video games -- would he contribute to the bottom line of the organization.

Same thing with customer satisfaction vs customer loyalty. Can you mess up a customer's order once and have a loyal customer? What the difference? What's the impact to the bottom line? Is a loyal customer more likely to be forgiving, to pay more, etc.?

If you read Gallup's research on the Q12, they found that over 60% of companies were WORSE OFF after doing employee surveys, because employees told them what was wrong, and they did nothing with the results. I'd suggest starting with a balanced scorecard approach, where you look into what are the important metrics to the success of your organization. If, for example, it was the basic set of learning and development, financial, customer and employee engagement, you could ask for Requests for Proposal to see how well each of your possible alternatives addressed your needs. Then, I'd suggest a meeting with your upper management team to make sure that people are actually willing to deal with the results they receive.

My experience with Gallup was solid - the survey results are good and the outcome is managed by the work teams themselves. Good outcomes with positive impacts on employees, customers, and shareholders.

Entropy, Mason H., and Bob Gately--some outstanding posts here. Let me add my 2 cents.

1. Let me clarify the point about "business objective." The business objective is NOT to find out what kind of survey. There should be a larger business goal (improve cycle time, reduce rework, improve retention, build customer loyalty) that has a number (by 5%) and a date (by the next FY) assigned to it. The idea behind any such survey is that it should be driven by the business goal. Period. Otherwise you'll get a lousy response rate and you'd end up chasing your tail, investing time and resources on an activity that ultimately provides little value to the business.

Think of it this way: it's like asking people what they think of their computers. Now who could argue with asking for people's input--getting their perspective should be valuable--right? Well, if we ask everyone in the organization about their computers, we'll get a wide range of responses. And a lot of them will be stuff like "the help desk doesn't" or "my screen is busted" or "we should have gotten Macs" or "why don't we have a standard browser on the system?". And so we invest time and effort on those responses and yet when we're done with it, is the organization better off? If there some goal or priority that we're now closer to? Probably not. The alternative is to just ignore the feedback which gets us to....

2. Do NOT administer a survey unless you're prepared to act quickly and visibly on the feedback. Yeah, everyone pays lipservice to that. But the reality is that if you ask 100 people in a range of organizations, they'll tell you that they fill our surveys and nothing happens. Even if something happens, it's usually so much longer down the road or not visible that to the employee it's "nothing happens." Which means you're worse off than NOT doing the survey because the survey has helped build cynicism and contempt for the organization ("they ask my opinion but then they do nothing--screw them!").

3. There are times when all of the alternatives you've mentioned (climate, engagement, attitude, etc.) can be a valuable contribution. However, in most cases, I think they're a waste of time. That's because we're measuring the wrong thing.

Let me put it this way, if I want to determine if you're a good writer, do I ask your opinion what writing? Or should I assess your writing?

Show me an organization that is growing, giving out bonuses, hiring people and I'll show you one that scores highly on any such survey you want to do. Show me an organization that is re-entrenching, laying off people, no bonuses this year because of the economy and I'll show you one that will almost always score poorly on such surveys. And yet neither is a correlation of the job people are doing but simply a reflection on the world around them (even the world outside of their organization).

The world is replete with examples of organizations where people were happy yet incompetent, or organizations where people knew they were doomed (literally--they knew they were going to be laid off or in some cases lose a war or die) and yet performed fantastically. So any survey should be driven by what it is you want to measure. If you want to measure performance, don't measure climate. If you want to measure turnover, don't measure attitude. If you want to measure quality of work, don't measure engagement.