Coleman Management Consultants (CMC) conducts opinion surveys or climate surveys to assess employee group attitude. The surveys provide information on the level of employee trust, confidence and satisfaction with their jobs, their company, their benefit programs, their work location, their management, their work teams and their opportunity for advancement. The information is collected, tallied and the findings are reported demographically. In this way we are able to identify issues which may be unique to given groups, but which could have an adverse effect on the entire organization’s productivity. A climate survey is a snapshot of employee attitudes at a given point in time. It provides information on where to place emphasis and attention when embarking on a diversity initiative and forms the baseline from which an organization can measure its progress.
CMC provides client assistance in developing the questionnaire. CMC offers an “inventory” of questions which has proven helpful in similar studies over the years. From this inventory, with CMC assistance, the client selects those questions which will be useful, then adds additional questions unique to their environment. Once the questionnaire, usually 60-80 closed questions and two to four open questions, is approved, CMC has it printed in a sufficient quantity to satisfy the survey goals. The surveys, along with postage paid envelopes addressed to CMC, are delivered to the client, who handles the distribution to its employees.
Employees must have confidence that their answers are completely confidential or the study will not be successful. To accomplish this, a cover letter from an appropriate executive usually accompanies the questionnaire explaining the reason for the survey, the importance of receiving complete, honest employee feedback, and that the organization will never see the completed questionnaires, only summary data. Even with this type of encouragement, it has been CMC’s experience that approximately 40% of the questionnaires will not be completed.
It is not necessary to survey the entire employee population to secure very high levels of confidence that the findings are correct and reflect the attitudes/opinions of the employee group at large. CMC can provide statistics on the number of completed questionnaires required to provide acceptable accuracy and confidence levels once the total employee size to be polled is known.
Once CMC has received the completed questionnaires, the answers to each question are key entered, key verified and entered into the computer. The computer produces one page of information per question. Each page has twenty columns of information. In this way, the responses to each individual question are represented demographically, side by side. Thus, if males agreed that promotional opportunities were equitable, but females disagree, this information would be on the same page along with the perceptions of African-Americans, Hispanics. older workers, managers, non-man
Climate surveys contain a great deal of data. CMC will provide an analysis of the findings, draw conclusions and make recommendations for required actions. Deliverables are the computer output, a written report and a presentation to both the survey sponsors and to management.
