- Economic psychologist Dr. Othmar Hill
- Specimen of an employee questionnaire
Experienced Corporate Culture
After the crisis means before the crisis! At any rate, the continuance in position or the departure of top performers in an enterprise determines the degree of job satisfaction. Hence responsible management is always interested in the well-being of staff. However, analyses of corporate culture are recommendable so as not to implement personnel or organizational development measures on a large scale and thus cost-intensively without a precise analysis. Like radar, these analyses give indications of in which departments and on which management level there is a need to act.
Do all the employees pull together and are they motivated? Which areas are particularly affected by frustration and anger? What do the employees think of the company, apart from management etc.?
Management has no chance of ever obtaining an objective picture of the situation because it always receives filtered and prepared information. In direct surveys of production or administration, for instance, truths are also concealed for fear of losing jobs.
Only an analysis of corporate culture by means of employee attitude surveys provides management with a clear picture of staff loyalty, the attractiveness of employer and place of work as well as the salary level.
If you do not want to entrust a polling firm with this task, because it does not have the resources for a later implementation, then an economic psychological consulting approach is recommendable. Industrial, business and organizational psychologists have learnt how to design targeted questionnaires. To this end, management usually provides the relevant issues such as health, danger of burnout, loyalty, leadership quality and management competence, intercultural capacity as well as the questions as to strength of communication and willingness to co-operate in almost all cases.
For these core areas, as short and well structured a questionnaire as possible is designed with about 50 to 70 questions. It is then tested on five to ten persons, translated into the languages of the company locations, if necessary, and placed online. The questionnaire is also issued in hard copy to a large section of the employees.
The statistical assessment, finalization of the report and presentations to management and staff then give clear evidence for causes and improvement programmes.
An example should illustrate this. A large glass company with two factories in Austria and Hungary would like to know how things stand with job satisfaction and communicational culture. The result: in both factories, the employees are highly motivated and can cope well with the performance requirements. On the other hand, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among the workers concerning management behaviour. In Hungary, there are also shortcomings in the co-operation between the departments. In the Austrian factory, the corporate health system is regarded as worthy of improvement.
HILL then provides an objective report, also containing proposals for a package of measures, and accompanies implementation with facilitators in the steering group and with professional team and individual coaches in order to improve co-operation capacity and management behaviour. The firm itself develops a programme for the health system (including fitness offers and dietary alternatives via the company kitchens).
The costs for the analysis of corporate culture focusing on an employee attitude survey are at least compensated for by the very targeted and concentrated actions. The employees experience the analysis stage as motivating in itself and even more so the rapidly implementable and thus positively appreciable action programmes.
The Person
Dr. Othmar Hill, founder and President of HILL International, has been a business psychologist and human resources strategist for more than thirty years. He is a pioneer in the development of structured potential analyses and a specialist in intercultural management, competence management and strategic planning. In addition, he was the founder of the Institute for Humanistic Management.
