If your employees are often heard grumbling under their breath or, worse yet, amongst themselves, you might want to consider surveying your employees to find out what they’re really thinking.

As reported by The Wall Street Journal Online, June 18, 2007, there’s a trend among human resource professionals to survey employees as part of an ongoing effort in ‘employee engagement.’ Engaged employees are more cheerful, more helpful, contribute more to the workplace, take initiative and speak well of the company in their off hours. With benefits like these, no wonder more companies are jumping on the engagement bandwagon.

These new surveys replace the old job satisfaction assessments, and place the emphasis on individual commitment, motivation, attitudes towards other employees, how well the employee understands his or her job responsibilities and whether they feel they receive enough of the right type of feedback.

Companies undertaking this workplace initiative range from Abbott Laboratories, American Express and Washington Mutual to Yum Brands, parent company of a mixed bag of popular fast food restaurants. Gallup Consulting, Towers Perrin and other HR/management consulting firms lead the pack in helping employers find ways to rev up employee engagement across multiple stores and brands.

One unexpected offshoot of these surveys is higher-rated customer satisfaction surveys. Apparently, happy employees create happy customers. Imagine that.

Tags: Customer Experience, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 9:23 am and is filed under Customer Experience, customer service, employee satisfaction, retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.