Quits at a 7-year high. Is it time for an Employee Survey?

Organizations seemed to survey their employees regularly during the 1990s and early 2000s. The war for talent was in full force and they felt it was important to keep their finger on the pulse of their workforce. Then the recession hit. And with it came difficult management decisions - cost-cutting, restructuring and layoffs.

Management in many organizations understandably shifted from a collaborative, participative style prior to the crisis, to a command-and-control style during it. And in many cases the employee survey disappeared with this shift.

Unfortunately, many organizations re-discovered that there is nothing more efficient than a dictatorship, so they have been hesitant or slow to move back to more collaborative cultures. But this statistic might change their minds: 2.8 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in March 2015.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this number has been rising since September 2014, but March marks the first month quits have reached that level since April 2008. 

This means the war for talent is heating up again. Employees feel they have more options than they've had in recent years and many are looking for a healthier, more pleasant work environment. So it may be time to initiate planned organizational changes to make sure your organization is a ship people want to board rather than one from which they can't wait to disembark.

A great way to gauge whether employees may be actively looking for new opportunities, passively open to new opportunities, or happy, engaged and entrenched is to dust off the old employee survey and simply ask them. 

Administering a survey can be easy using an instrument like SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang. However, if you suspect the trust gap between workers and management in your organization has grown from a crack to a gorge over the past few years, you might benefit from engaging an outside organization to conduct the survey for you. Employees are much more likely to provide honest feedback if they trust that their responses are truly confidential. The return-on-investment could be huge, especially if some of those 2.8 million employees who voluntarily quit their jobs were yours.

The hard part comes after you collect the results - demonstrating to your employee base that you are actually listening. This is the phase where you communicate the results along with action plans designed to address their concerns. 

Of course you're always going to have the vocal disgruntled minority who gripe about virtually everything. The challenge is recognizing when it's more than that - especially when it's feedback you don't really want to hear.  A reputable consulting firm can assist not only in the design and the administration of the survey, but in the interpretation of the results, the communication, and the implementation of strategies that evolve from the analysis.