Employee Inner Views
American workers are proud of their jobs.
Two out of three American workers have used company time or resources to look for another job.
American workers are loyal--to a point.
Two out of three would quit if they won the lottery.
American workers want more time.
American workers want more money.
Never have American workers been more poked and prodded about everything from how much they value company values (more than money) to the prevalence of on-site dry cleaners (15% of employers now accept workers’ dirty laundry).
Struggling to recruit and retain workers in this era of near-full employment, employers are eager for anything they can learn about what makes employees tick, and, more importantly, what makes them stick.
But whether the American worker is actually better understood isn’t at all clear.
“Is anyone reading all of these surveys? I don’t,” said Lewis Matlby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Princeton, N.J.
“I see hundreds of surveys each year related to the workplace, and I usually have one of two reactions, one of which is, ‘I already knew that.’ ”
The other, he said, is to dismiss a survey “because it’s put out by someone with a political ax to grind and it was thoroughly bogus to begin with.”
Surveys can backfire when employers fail to follow through, said Tom Terez, author of “22 Keys to Creating a Meaningful Workplace” (Adams Media, 2000) and the purveyor of a recent survey on workplace pride.
“We kill a lot of trees by doing the surveys and letting the results sit on the shelf or on the server,” Terez said. “Part of the problem is you have so much data, you almost drown in it.”
Surveys also are tricky when they reveal problems that are tough to fix, said Ronna Lichtenberg, author of “Work Would Be Great If It Weren’t for the People” (Hyperion, 1998).
“What if you do a survey and they say, ‘My boss is heinous’? That’s sort of tough to do anything about,” she said.
Bad bosses are a hot topic. Nearly 28,000 respondents to a recent Monster online job site poll said the boss had never said “well done.” Another found that a third of respondents would describe their boss as “a nightmare.”
Some surveys get things out of people that they wouldn’t tell their best friends, like the one that asked workers if they’d ever had an affair with a colleague (47% said yes). And when another online poll asked which cast member from TV’s “Survivor” people would least like to work with, 32% said truck driver Susan Hawk. She finally won something.
The most popular survey topic is the balance between work and everything else. A survey commissioned by FleetBoston Financial, for instance, found that 64% of workers would prefer more time over more money. (That’s not surprising, given that most of them said they spent more than eight hours on the job and many of them less than eight hours a night in bed.)
Just about everybody is putting a magnifying glass on the workplace. Online job sites now poll visitors about work issues ranging from their satisfaction with the average two weeks annual vacation to employer-mandated personality tests. Interest groups such as HalfthePlanet.com, a Web site devoted to people with disabilities, have discovered the employee survey as a way to spread their messages. Many research, training and human resource companies have opened or expanded their workforce-assessment franchises.
And if you think the Gallup Organization spends most of its time polling the public about presidential candidates, the death penalty and abortion, think again. Gallup surveys employees for 300 corporations and signs up a new client almost once a week.
“It’s the fastest-growing part of our business by far,” said Larry Emond, chief marketing officer. “This has become a huge issue. Everyone is trying to figure out how to attract and retain good people.”
That’s a big change from only a few years ago, when employers’ chief concern was figuring how to get more work out of people, said Rena DeSisto, a spokeswoman for Fleet.
“We’ve had an expanding economy and near-full unemployment that’s thrown many economists into a tizzy in terms of understanding the relationship between the economy and employment,” said DeSisto, whose company recently commissioned its first national worker-opinion survey.
After pioneering research in what would make a potato chip or toothpaste buyer come back for more, Indianapolis-based WalkerInformation has begun offering employee-loyalty surveys to corporate clients, who had become as concerned about keeping workers as they had customers.
“That’s why you’ve seen the proliferation of studies on employees. Employees have choices,” said Marc Drizin, WalkerInformation vice president for business alliances. “The companies realize they have to get a handle on [employee] happiness and morale.”
Many companies regularly subject workers to surveys, often containing more than 100 questions, taking their temperature on benefits, pay, trendy perks and general satisfaction.
“They’re long surveys, and they came back with all kinds of information that’s hard to make sense of,” Gallup’s Emond said. “They ask a lot of questions about things that seemed like good questions but were things nobody could change anyway or nobody was going to change.”
But some surveys have changed the way companies operate.
Work Hours Out of Date
When Eli Lilly & Co. conducted a census of its 14,500 U.S. employees, the pharmaceutical company learned that the hours workers had voted for decades earlier were very much out of date--and out of favor. The 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. workday had been implemented by popular demand in an era when dads wanted to get to work early so they could leave in time for dinner with the stay-at-home wife and kids.
In the 1990s, Lilly employees--many of them dads or moms--said somebody had to be home late enough to get the kids to school. The company met that survey finding and many others with an array of benefits and services, including flexible hours, optional compressed work weeks, on-site summer science camp and a corporate clinic.
Lilly, which last week was named one of the 10 best places to work for the fourth time by Working Mother magazine, also offers ready-made meals for employees to take home and on-site banking, dry cleaning and shoe-shine services.
“These are the little, niggling things that will eat up a whole Saturday,” said Joan Todd, who would rather spend her weekend with her kids, ages 11 and 6.
An Ernst & Young survey revealed that many of its 2,000-plus Southern California employees drove past company branches on the way to their regular office. The Big Five audit and accounting firm decided it was time for a change. With the ambitious goal of allowing employees to work within a half-hour’s commute from home in the nation’s most congested metropolis, the firm began leasing offices near clusters of workers’ residences and converting its locations into work hotels. By making a reservation as late as the night before, an Ernst & Young employee now can plug in a laptop or hold a meeting in any of a half-dozen offices located somewhere between a client and home.
As soon as the first “Workplace of the Future” office opened in El Segundo, more than 400 Ernst & Young employees stopped driving to downtown Los Angeles. And now, when meetings don’t require Kevin Kelly to fight traffic for an hour or more to the regional headquarters downtown, the Granada Hills man drives 25 minutes to an office in Warner Center. For the father of three, that’s important--especially during soccer season.
“I could put in a longer, more productive day in Woodland Hills, and be home in time for soccer practice,” said Kelly, regional director of human resources.
Mariette Uebelhack filled out an Ernst & Young employee survey about a year ago. But she’s not complaining. She too is availing herself of the company’s family-friendly policies, working at her Pasadena home a couple days a week since she had her first child and consulting a lactation expert at company expense.
“I would think real hard about leaving the firm and losing this benefit,” Uebelhack said.
Reflecting such trends, a recent Harris survey for Spherion Corp., a human resources management consulting firm, found that 53% of respondents felt that the balance between work and life had improved over the past five years.
Still, when Bridgegate, an Irvine-based search firm, recently asked 667 workers why they stay at a job, interest in flexible hours had waned (12% versus 14% in 1999). The No. 1 reason these respondents said they would stay in a job? An old-fashioned raise.
That’s not surprising; of course most workers, when asked, will say they want more money, better benefits and an office cappuccino maker, said Gallup’s Emond.
If the goal is to get workers to stay, however, those are the wrong questions, he said.
A Caring Boss Makes a Difference
What keeps employees at a job, according to major studies by WalkerInformation and Gallup, is a boss who seems to care.
But try telling that one to bosses.
“We showed these results to executives, and they said ‘Ah, come on. It’s got to be about getting paid a bunch of money,’ ” Emond said. “Having nice bosses is not nice. It’s not warm and fuzzy. It’s a huge predictor of business performance.”
Asking workers what they want--even if employers plan to give it to them--is not going to make them stay, said WalkerInformation’s Drizin.
“Satisfied employees will leave for 50 cents,” he said. “What you want are employees who are loyal.”
To determine what workplace conditions were most predictive of key business goals--employee retention, customer loyalty, productivity and profitability--Gallup interviewed 80,000 managers at 400 firms in 1994 and 1995, the largest study of its kind.
Gallup concluded that companies could trim worker polling to 12 questions, including “Do I know what is expected of me at work?” and “Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?”
If Gallup’s view prevails, employees could complete opinion questionnaires without having to put in overtime.
American workers might like that.
Lisa Girion covers the workplace for The Times. She can be reached at lisa.girion@latimes.com.
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Asking the Masses
There is a survey to support just about any position. Some find workers want more money. Others find workers want more time. A sampling of recent survey results:
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What Workers Don’t Like
* Red tape
44% of workers said less organizational bureaucracy is the one factor that would help them boost productivity. (https://www.meaningfulworkplace.com)
* Relocation
People are 17% less likely than a year ago to relocate for a job opportunity. (Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.)
* Bad bosses
21% of workers who recently changed jobs blamed poor management. (Society for Human Resources Management)
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What Workers Like
* Family
82% of men and 85% of women, ages 20 to 39, put family at the top of their workplace priorities. Men in their 20s are 7% more likely than women to give up pay for more time with families. (Radcliffe Public Policy Center)
* Money
65% of workers who recently changed jobs said they left for better compensation or benefits, according to a survey of human resource professionals. (SHRM)
* Internet
74% of people who use the Internet at work every day said it makes them more productive, and 28% of those who use it for personal reasons at work said it makes them happier and less stressed. (Xylo Report)Source: Los Angeles Times research
