This article includes many illustrative comments from a comprehensive employee engagement survey/employee satisfaction survey/employee opinion survey Quantisoft conducted for a business-to-business company with several thousand employees across the U.S. This particular survey had over 70 questions.

Survey Comments Tell You if Your Company's Corporate Culture is Healthy and Supportive of Employee Engagement and Performance

Thousands of comments were received, pinpointing significant and sometimes alarming problems and opportunities and including suggestions for increasing employee and company performance, and customer satisfaction. We have selected sample comments that illustrate problems with communications, ineffective and difficult managers, lack of empowerment, the effect of compensation on employee engagement/loyalty, technology and process problems, and other issues negatively impacting employee engagement and satisfaction, customer satisfaction and company performance...more

Online Employee Surveys -- What's the Best Approach?

Employee surveys are a very effective and low-cost way to accurately gather a wide range of information and perceptions from employees. The information and perceptions gained from employee surveys can be used to identify a wide range of opportunities and problems, and provide insight, intelligence and solutions for significantly increasing employee engagement, satisfaction and performance, organizational effectiveness and business performance.

Important considerations in deciding your employee survey approach include:

Should your employee survey include a broad range of questions covering many topics, or should it include only one area of focus such as employee engagement?
What types of topics and questions should you ask and how should the questions be worded?

Quantisoft's experience strongly supports conducting comprehensive employee engagement surveys/employee satisfaction surveys/employee opinion surveys customized to meet the specific needs of organizations...more

What Employees are Experiencing, Thinking and Feeling -- Online Employee Survey Results Provide Answers

Employee satisfaction is a key driver of employee engagement, and employee engagement in turn is a key driver of customer satisfaction and loyalty, employee retention, productivity, sales, overall organizational performance and profit.

Employee satisfaction surveys and employee engagement surveys are the best way to accurately learn about what your employees are experiencing, thinking and feeling. These are the experiential and psychological factors that strongly influence employee behavior, and employee behavior can result in low or high levels of customer satisfaction, employee and customer retention, productivity, product and service quality, competitiveness, profit and growth...more

Enhancing Employer of Choice Reputation with Online Employee Engagement Surveys

One of the most effective ways for organizations to achieve and sustain a competitive edge is by building a high-performance workforce. This is easier said than done. The best performing employees can usually choose the company they work for. In order to attract, hire and retain top people, a company needs to be an "employer of choice", with an earned reputation for being a great place to work...more

Employee Surveys Increase People Performance: The Ultimate Competitive Advantage

After decades of reengineering and downsizing, most businesses are still inefficient. One of the most effective ways to increase business performance and profit is to increase the performance of employees, from the lowest levels of the organization to senior management, and little has been done in this area. Raising the level of performance of the weakest performers in each job category can have a dramatic impact on the profit of any company. While many companies are focusing on technology and strategic solutions to expand profit margins, opportunities to increase staff performance are frequently overlooked.

People are the most important asset of any organization. Fielding a winning team is critical to the ability of any company to compete effectively and to thrive, and top performing people are the foundation of winning teams. Closing the gap between the top and bottom performers (people performance gap©) can provide breakthrough increases in profit at most companies, even if their profit is already at all-time high levels...more

Boosting Employee Performance with Online Employee Surveys

As business competition escalates and pressure on profits increase, there is a need to continuously increase employee performance. In recent years many organizations have reduced staff levels. With fewer and fewer employees to do more of the work, employees are under pressure and feeling stressed, negatively impacting employee satisfaction and engagement and other important drivers of employee performance.

While many employees are doing more work than ever before, some are not. Not all employees perform well under continuous stress. Others are doing more work but the added stress is impacting work/personal life balance, work quality and customers...more

Using Online Sales Force Surveys to Energize Your Sales People and Increase Sales

Does your company want or need to increase your sales force performance? Not sure where to start? Or have you been spending money doing things that aren't generating results in terms of increased sales?

Sales Force Surveys -- The solution for increasing sales force performance and significantly increasing sales

Conducting a sales force survey/sales force opinion survey is a low cost and highly effective way to gather comprehensive anonymous feedback from your sales force about your company's sales environment and the barriers that are keeping them from selling more, much more...more

Sample Sales Force Survey Comments -- Identifying Barriers to Increased Sales

Conducting a sales force survey is a highly effective and low cost way to gather information and insight from your sales force about the strengths and weaknesses of your company's sales process and environment. Sales force surveys identify de-motivators and roadblocks that are impacting sales force performance.

Can your company benefit from a sales force survey? Here are a few of the questions sales force surveys can answer:

Is your company's sales force's performance being impacted by problems and sales barriers similar to those described below?
Does your company have a healthy sales culture?
Can your company's sales be significantly increased by identifying actions that can be taken to boost sales?
Is your company at risk of receiving law suits from your sales people because of unethical sales practices or abusive sales managers?...more

Unleashing Your Organization's Ingenuity -- Online Employee Surveys Can Help

Ingenuity is the ability of your organization and your employees to invent new products and services and new, better ways of doing all the things done across your organization every day. Ingenuity includes coming up with and implementing better processes, policies and business practices. Successful ingenuity/innovation includes two key components, coming up with new ideas and then implementing those ideas.

Ingenuity requires a corporate culture that encourages positive change, that removes barriers to innovation and change, and that puts in place an environment and resources that nurtures, accepts and rewards positive change. Ingenuity often requires collaboration and teamwork. Ingenuity also requires a corporate culture that allows and encourages employees with new ideas and approaches to challenge the status quo and established "business practices" without fear of retribution...more

Online Employee Surveys Identify and Discourage Employee Abuse and Discrimination

Employee abuse has many forms including verbal abuse, sexual harassment, discrimination based on age, ethnic background, gender or sexual preference, and physical abuse. Employees experiencing abuse from supervisors, managers and co-workers often are afraid to report abuse and discrimination for fear of retribution including possible loss of their job, position demotion or receiving lower pay increases.

Employee satisfaction surveys/employee engagement surveys/employee opinion surveys are a highly effective way to determine if employee abuse and discrimination are happening in an organization of any size. Boards, business owners, senior managers and human resources managers need to know if abuse and discrimination are happening and if they are, they need to take action to eliminate the abuse and/or discrimination...more

Increasing HR's Impact -- Employee Surveys Can Help

The most successful companies in any industry know that there is a strong connection between the "soft" aspects of business and the success of their company. Business leaders often say people are their organization's most important asset. Some leaders just say it while others both say it and act on it.

Human Resources' value to their executive team and their company lies in HR's credibility and ability to go beyond performing the day-to-day HR functions necessary to keep the business going and keeping the lights on.

In today's competitive environment, the degree to which HR is valued is directly related to its ability to add value to the bottom-line. What are the most important and powerful steps you can take now as an HR executive that will focus your energy and resources to the ultimate success of your organization?...more

Boosting Your Company's Competitiveness with Employee Surveys and HR Surveys

Both in good economic times and when times are highly challenging, companies need to compete aggressively to grow and thrive. Business leaders sometimes rely too heavily on their own knowledge to make important decisions, without getting valuable input from employees throughout their organization.

Your company's managers and other employees have extensive information and insight about your company's processes, products and services, customers and other key drivers of business performance, competitiveness and profit. Employees know the barriers to their own performance and what it will take to make your company significantly more competitive and profitable...more

Optimizing Payback from Online Employee Satisfaction Surveys and Employee Engagement Surveys

The best approach for achieving great participation in employee satisfaction surveys/employee engagement surveys is to keep all responses to your employee surveys anonymous. Employees are much more likely to participate in employee surveys and to provide honest answers to questions including ratings and comments/suggestions when they are confident that their answers will be anonymous.

There also are several other things you can do to increase participation in an employee satisfaction survey. Having a survey company conduct the survey will make employees more confident that their responses to the survey will be kept anonymous. Telling employees that you will share the key results with them and then doing so in a timely manner will also increase participation, especially if it is followed up by taking action to make changes based on your employee survey findings...more

Online Employee Satisfaction Surveys Determine If Poor Internal Communications Is Hurting Your Business

One of the areas that consistently receives low ratings in employee satisfaction surveys/employee engagement surveys is intra and inter-departmental communications. In addition to receiving relatively low ratings, employee survey/employee opinion survey questions receive significant comments that identify problems with internal business communications. Internal organizational communications are often insufficient and ineffective. Some managers often fail to communicate important information. Other managers are not open to receiving communications from their employees and from outside their departments.

In many organizations poor internal communications is significantly impacting productivity, employee morale and satisfaction, customer satisfaction, sales and profit. Employee satisfaction surveys/employee engagement surveys identify common communications problems and barriers across organizations as well as pinpointing opportunities for improving the effectiveness of communications in specific departments and work groups...more

Are Your Employees Comfortable Going to Their Manager with Problems -- Online Employee Surveys Assess Trust

The relationship between your organization's managers/supervisors and the employees reporting to them is critical to the success of your organization. A key component of the relationship between managers and employees is the level of comfort employees have with going to their manager or supervisor with problems. Effective managers are open to receiving problems from employees and they realize that it is better to know about and address problems rather than ignore them. Some less effective managers are not approachable and employees fear the reaction they will experience if they bring a problem to their manager.

Organizations with healthy corporate cultures/business climates encourage their managers to be good communicators and to be open to hearing problems without reacting negatively. Employee satisfaction surveys/employee engagement surveys are a fast and cost-effective approach for assessing the level of trust employees have in their managers as well as assessing a wide range of other issues that drive employee and organizational performance...more

Employee Engagement Surveys -- Elevating Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

Do you need to increase your company's competitiveness and profit? Where should you start? Should you focus on your employees first, or is it better to start by focusing on your customers first?

It is almost always better to start by focusing on your employees first. Highly satisfied and engaged employees are essential for achieving high levels of sustained customer satisfaction, retention loyalty. Start by listening to your employees and taking action on their ongoing feedback...more

How an Employee Survey Can Strengthen Your Business's Performance and Sustainability

Whether your company is a small or mid-size business, or a Fortune 500 company, you can significantly increase performance, profit, competitiveness and sustainability by closely listening to your employees. Conducting an online employee survey/online employee engagement survey is a highly effective and low cost way to gather information, suggestions and insight from employees, no matter what your field of business is.

Companies realize significant bottom-line benefits and a very strong payback when action is taken based on employee survey findings. Significant gains in employee engagement, satisfaction, performance and retention boost productivity, quality, customer service and customer satisfaction. Hidden problems, opportunities and solutions are identified. By focusing on the departments, stores, branches and locations receiving the lowest ratings in employee engagement surveys, companies can strengthen the least effective managers and the performance of the organizational units placing a strong drag on profit...more

Organizational Effectiveness

How to Use Employee Satisfaction Surveys to Drive Organizational and Business Performance

Satisfied employees are more engaged in their jobs. They work harder and smarter because they are happier with their personal situation within their organization.

Satisfied employees are more loyal and are less likely to leave your organization for a better job elsewhere. They tell friends and relatives about why they like their company (or other type of organization). Satisfied employees care more about their customers and their behavior and actions are more focused on quality and customer service excellence.

When most of your employees are highly satisfied, your organization becomes an employer of choice, making it much easier to attract and retain high performing employees. Employee satisfaction leads to higher productivity, lower costs, increased revenue and greater profit...more

Making Better Business Decisions

All important business decisions impact one or more of the following company constituencies:

Shareholders/owners
Employees
Customers
Suppliers
Community
Government (local, state, federal, foreign)...more

Does Your Company Need Viagra?

The economy is in its worst shape in over 60 years. At this difficult time, does your company have the energy and drive it needs to compete successfully? When the economy starts to improve, will your company have what it takes to thrive?...more

The Impact of Difficult Managers

When responding to employee satisfaction surveys and employee engagement surveys, employees sometimes describe their managers as "difficult to work for". Employee comments typically refer to these hard-to-work-for managers as "difficult managers / supervisors", "the boss from Hell" or "bully". Survey results that identify difficult managers should be looked at as an indication that there may be a problem with the effectiveness of the manager, especially when two or more employees in the same organizational unit describe their manager as difficult to work for...more

Conduct an Employee Survey to Energize Profit and Competitiveness

The recession has driven profit at most large, mid-sized and small companies well below peak levels. Companies that have had success in boosting profit have done so by making significant reductions in staff levels. Few companies have been able to generate significantly more sales. Productivity is up on a national level and many employees are working harder, producing more output in the hours they are working.

Many companies have reduced average work hours of the employees they have not laid off, and some companies have reduced compensation and benefits...more

Pinpointing Problems & Opportunities and Measuring & Managing Change

Surveys are the most effective way to collect customer and employee "Opinion and Perception" information and to slice, dice and view the information.

Surveys measure the pulse of your organization and enable you to connect the dots. Surveys provide the information you need to measure and manage change. When conducted periodically, you can see trends and determine if actions taken are working...more

Strengthening Your Organization's Leadership

Leadership is one of the most important drivers of organizational and business performance. Leaders at the top of organizations have enormous leverage in determining the business, strategies and direction of organizations. Top level leaders put in place the management team at all levels of the organization, raise needed capital and are responsible for making things happen. Leaders at lower levels of organizations are also critical for an organization's success. They are responsible for making many day-to-day decisions and for executing the strategies laid out by senior leaders.

Putting in place effective leaders at all levels of an organization often makes the difference between achieving great bottom line performance and mediocre business performance, or even failure...more

Customers/Customer Surveys

Does Your Company Need Viagra?

Customer Satisfaction Surveys -- Boosting Sales and Profit

The more you know about how your customers feel about your company, your products and services, your marketing, your sales and service delivery, and every other aspect of your company's offerings, the more you will know about the changes you need to make to compete successfully going forward.

Customer satisfaction surveys are a very cost-effective way to identify what businesses need to do to execute changes and achieve breakthrough increases in customer satisfaction, customer engagement and loyalty, generating increases in sales and profit...more

Quality and Customer Service -- the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

One of the best ways for companies in any industry to compete effectively, to increase customer satisfaction and earn customer loyalty is to provide outstanding quality products and services that are supported with exceptional customer service. In the everyday fog of running a company, it is easy to lose sight of the need to provide quality and customer service excellence on a consistent basis...more

IT Performance/IT Customer Surveys/IT User Surveys

Increasing IT Customer Satisfaction and IT Performance in a Difficult Economy with Tight Budgets

This article describes how IT customer satisfaction surveys, when conducted effectively and action is taken based on survey results, provide a powerful solution for increasing IT customer satisfaction and IT performance in a tight budget environment...more

The Visible and Hidden Costs of Ineffective IT Support and Customer Service - $$$$$

This article is about the visible and hidden costs of ineffective IT Support and IT Customer Service, including how IT managers can assess customer satisfaction, and the impact of ineffective customer support. The article also presents some of the negative comments received in an IT Customer Satisfaction Survey, demonstrating the impact of ineffective IT customer support on IT customers.

How effective is your organization's IT customer support, how is it impacting your employees and customers and how do you know?...more

How to Increase IT Help Desk Customer Satisfaction and IT Help Desk Performance

If your company or organization has an in-house or outsourced IT Help Desk, chances are that some of your Help Desk customers are dissatisfied with the service they are receiving. Some of the many possible causes of dissatisfaction with IT Help Desks include:

Long wait times when calling the Help Desk or after submitting a service request by e-mail or using a Help Desk Web portal or ticket system
Long CSRs that do not understand their customers' problems
Rude CSRs
Closing IT incident tickets before the problem is resolved...more

IT Customer Satisfaction Surveys -- Identifying the Important IT Challenges Facing Your Company

Is IT (Information Technology) helping to make your organization highly competitive and efficient, or is IT your company's Achilles heel? Unfortunately, at many companies if you ask IT's customers this question, the answer is "IT is our Achilles heel" or "we aren't sure". Most organizations spend a significant amount of money on IT without getting the results customers, employees and the company needs.

Running a highly effective IT organization isn't easy. Tight budgets, fast changing IT requirements, demanding IT customers, competitive business pressure, IT staffing issues and a highly complex hardware, software and network environment are some of the reasons for IT falling short at many companies...more

IT's Impact on Business Performance -- IT Customer Surveys/IT User Surveys Provide Answers

Quantisoft conducts IT customer satisfaction surveys across many industries for organizations ranging in size from 50 employees to Fortune 500 companies. While the IT customer survey findings are unique for every company, we are seeing many similar themes, problems and opportunities in every IT survey/IT user survey.

We're not sure that c-suite executives fully understand the impact IT has on their employees, customers and bottom-line performance.

A chef can't do his/her job without knives, and sharp knives work much better than dull ones. Likewise, many employees rely heavily on technology to perform their job. Without the right technology, they can't do their job. Using technology that is underpowered with significant shortfalls makes huge numbers of employees inefficient and frustrated...more

IT Customer Surveys Identify Problems and Solutions

Quantisoft's IT customer satisfaction surveys are highly effective in identifying known and hidden problems with IT service, hardware, software, network performance, application support and other key drivers of IT customer and company performance. Every IT survey/IT user survey we conduct is customized to meet the unique needs of our customers. Equally important, IT customer surveys/IT user surveys identify solutions for resolving problems encountered with both in-house and outsourced IT services.

Our IT surveys drill down to identify strengths, weaknesses, problems and opportunities by department, location, number of service requests during the past year and other relevant demographic parameters. Because we include comment fields after every question with a rating scale, our IT user surveys identify strengths and weaknesses based on ratings as well as providing information and insight for understanding the reasons why ratings are high or low...more

Risk Assessment Surveys/Risk Mitigation

Business Risk Surveys -- Identifying, Assessing and Quantifying Business Risks

Every organization faces its own set of risks, some of which are known but not necessarily quantified or understood, and others that are hidden. Risk surveys are a highly cost-effective way to identify and quantify risks by gathering information, perceptions and insight from managers across an organization.

Quantisoft's risk management surveys force managers at all levels of the organization to think about a wide range of possible risks. Our risk survey approach includes identifying risks by business unit and location and for the organization overall...more

Identifying Safety Litigation and Regulatory Compliance Risks

A potentially costly and embarrassing risk that many organizations face is employee and customer safety risk. Some of the many types and causes of safety risks employees and customers face include:

Risks from using equipment/products that may be unsafe
Lacking training in how to properly use equipment/products
Inattention to safety practices while using equipment/products
Inadequate safety rules/precautions in the workplace
Accidents due to insufficient testing to identify risk-safety products/situations
Unauthorized or uncertified people using equipment/products...more

Can Your Organization Benefit from a Risk Survey?

If your organization is committed to achieving sustainable growth, conducting a comprehensive business risk survey can help you achieve your objective. Most companies and other types of organizations face many types of known and hidden risks. Some of the risks may be known to some people in the organization, but not to others including people generally responsible for identifying and managing risk.

Conducting a risk survey enables your company to measure risk likelihood and potential risk impact, and to gather comments explaining the risks and suggestions for mitigating the risks. Risk surveys are usually sent to senior and middle management across the organization. Some organizations also have their Board members and lower level managers participate in the risk survey...more

How an Online Risk Survey Can Strengthen and Even Save Your Business

Conducting a comprehensive online risk survey is a low cost and highly effective way to identify and assess business risks. In our highly competitive and fast changing world, business executives and Board members should consider conducting an online risk mitigation survey annually. What you learn can save your company significant money, avoid a hit to your business' reputation and strengthen your sustainability. It may also save your business from bankruptcy or failure due to a catastrophic incident.

Many businesses have few or no resources focusing on identifying and assessing the risks facing them. Of those businesses that do have a risk assessment program or at least some emphasis on risk management, a significant number focus on a small number of the obvious risks including the typical insurable risks...more

Enterprise Measurement and Change

Optimizing Balanced Scorecard Results

Balanced scorecard is a measurement system that enables organizations to clarify and translate their vision and strategy into action. Balanced scorecard measurements provide feedback around both internal business processes and external outcomes in order to continuously improve strategic performance and results. When fully implemented throughout an organization, the balanced scorecard transforms strategic planning into the organization's business intelligence center...more

Using Surveys to Assess Key Drivers of Business Performance

Every business is unique, even if it has competitors doing the exact same things. Every organization has a unique combination of business drivers including their leadership, corporate culture, IT environment, employees, vision for the future and other drivers of their business.

Employee satisfaction surveys, employee engagement surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, IT customer satisfaction surveys, risk surveys and other types of surveys are a quick and cost effective way to assess any organization's business drivers. Quantisoft's surveys identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and problems. Depending on the type of survey, comments and suggestions received from employees, customers and other groups provide a wealth of information and insight for increasing employee and business performance and making better, more informed decisions...more

Survey Tips and Best Practices

Survey Tips -- Getting Better Results from Employee Surveys and Customer Surveys

Employee surveys and customer surveys enable businesses to gather important information, perceptions and insight from employees, customers and other groups (e.g. suppliers, shareholders, members, etc.) and then make better, more informed decisions. Surveys are the most effective way to quickly gather anonymous or identified feedback and suggestions from large numbers of people...more

Employee Survey Best Practices -- 11 Lessons Learned

This article summarizes actionable lessons learned from a comprehensive survey examining employee survey practices. The survey was conducted by Quantisoft. It contains lessons learned and actions you can take from 21 organizations ranging from Intel and American Express to Asbury Automotive, Connecticare, Norwalk Hospital, Hubbell Incorporated, New York Life, Citigroup, Atlanticare and Tusculum College...more

Employee Survey Best Practices -- Suggestions from 21 Companies

This article presents verbatim suggestions and comments gathered in a comprehensive survey about employee survey best practices conducted by Quantisoft. The full survey report includes best practices, key survey findings, lessons learned and actions you can take from 21 organizations ranging from Intel and American Express to Asbury Automotive, Norwalk Hospital, Citigroup, Atlanticare, Connecticare, Hubbell Incorporated, New York Life and Tusculum College...more

The Benefits of Online Surveys

Conducting surveys is a highly effective way to efficiently gather information, suggestions and insight from employees, customers and other groups. Over the past several years many companies have transitioned from conducting paper and phone surveys to conducting all or most of their employee surveys and customer surveys as online surveys.

Benefits and reasons for conducting an online survey include:

Most employees and customers of businesses use computers with Internet access at work and or at home, making it easy for them to participate in online surveys.
Online surveys are significantly more cost-effective than paper and phone surveys...more

Municipal Surveys/Community Surveys

Municipal Opinion Surveys -- Enhancing Community Government Performance and Voter Satisfaction

This article presents the best way for your city or town to learn from residents about their satisfaction with services and important issues: conducting municipal opinion surveys/municipal satisfaction surveys (community opinion surveys/community satisfaction surveys).

Many cities and towns are run well, some aren't. All cities and towns can be governed more effectively, regardless of how well they may already be governed. A large part of governing cities and towns effectively is to listen to residents and to be responsive to them, taking action where appropriate...more

Community Satisfaction Surveys -- Evaluating City and Community Services and Government Performance

Towns and cities are under severe budget constraints. While the actual demand for municipal services is increasing, town and city councils, mayors, city managers and other municipal government leaders are under pressure to spend less and cut services. This article describes how conducting a community satisfaction survey can assess the performance of a wide range of municipal services and leaders, and provide information and insight for increasing performance and resident satisfaction, often without the need to increase spending.

How effective are your community's fire, police, EMS, public works and other support services? Are the schools doing a good job? How do residents feel about proposed bond programs to support public works, school and other purposes? How satisfied are residents about living in your city or town? How do you know?...more

Green Going Surveys and Tips

Going Green -- How to Make Your Business Greener

By "going green" and becoming environmentally responsible, many companies have significantly reduced costs and increased sales. In the future, as predictions about the availability of energy, water and other natural resources are validated, going green may also enable companies to keep customers and investors happy, maintain market share, become more efficient, avoid legal liability for environmental damage and stay in business...more

35 Ways You Can Save Money on Energy

Conservation is a great way for individuals and the country overall to reduce energy consumption and save money. You will also be helping to fight global warming and clean up the environment.

Here are 35 things you can do...more