Employee Polls
Each organization is challenged from time to time to ask the own employees or to let ask for their opinion.
The reasons for this are of different nature, like:
- Judging leadership behaviour
- Measuring work contentment
- Getting to know degrees of motivation
- Examining the interplay of departments
- Gathering internal suggestions for improvement or naming
weaknesses,
- Testing prospective reactions to planned changes.
One of the management's most important tasks is to win the own staff for the organizational targets. Frequently, the optimal degree of involvement is not yet attained. Such unsatisfactory organizational processes may be traced back to defective communication flows between individual units of a company or on irritations between functions within a department.
Resulting from these deficient situations are:
- Conflicts between colleagues or / and departments
- Demotivation, the full accomplishment potential is not yet attained,
- Defective dialogue ability; hardly any target-oriented teamwork
- Own space of competence is not being used or not recognized
- Difficult tasks are rejected or even neglected,
- Worsening of working atmosphere.
In order to remedy analytically such operational bad states of affairs and to prevent them successfully, the instrument of the so-called employee polling is used.
The relevant information can be elicited in different ways:
- Questionnaire are handed out to employees with the request to reply within a given deadline.
- Employees are asked to answer the questions face to face within a certain time span.
In both cases, a detailed explanation of the underlying reason and goal of the poll should be given. Furthermore, it should be made clear that participation in this is absolutely voluntary.
The aggregation of the data as well as the interpretation of the information often happens analogously to the approach to numerous market research projects.
At the final presentation of results and recommendation for remedies, it is important that all parties be reached. In addition to a comprehensive research report, it is advisable to hand out an abridged version to all organization members.