Is anybody listening? Software helps Office Depot respond to employee survey results

HR Magazine, Nov, 2004 by Drew Robb

The surveys are tied into the creation of action plans for the coming year, says Anita Cayuso, a supervisor in sales accounting. She begins by printing out the analysis and the accompanying documentation, which contain suggestions for ways to improve upon the key survey findings. As a manager, she also uses a module in the Kenexa software to generate an action plan for her area. She then schedules a meeting with her staff to go over the main points in the survey results.

"You don't want to touch on every minute area because you could be in the meeting all day long," Cayuso says. "Everybody is interested in the results and wants to have their opinions heard on the surveys."

Afterward, she meets privately with each employee to address areas in which they have excelled, areas of concern and areas in which improvement is needed. Together they set goals and create a game plan for the employee, and Cayuso follows up on that plan throughout the year.

"The surveys give me a very good view of areas I need to address with my employees," she says. "As a supervisor, my responsibility is to take them out of their comfort level and to challenge them to do a little bit more."

She keeps these individual plans in a folder in her office; only the group plan is kept and tracked online.

Driving Positive Change

These surveys and their follow-up are having an effect, both for individual employees and the company as a whole.

"The survey gives us an opportunity to see where we are as a department," says Shewfelt. "It gives me an opportunity to provide some feedback in a way that can be grouped meaningfully, and it drives positive change."

For example, during the action planning that came out of the survey, Shewfelt and another senior analyst heard they were getting a bit stagnant in their jobs. So they switched duties, which gave them each a new area in which to develop personally and gave the department greater depth.

The survey also gives him a better sense of the entire company as a team, Shewfelt says. "I like the visibility into what the opinions are in the company and how my department is doing relative to the rest of the company," he says. "Just because I'm not a manager doesn't mean I don't want our department to compare favorably with the rest of the company."

On a companywide basis, automating the action plan has been more important than just automating the surveys, McNeely says. When the supervisors view the surveys, they just have to hit a link to go right into the action planning tool. These plans, which are updated quarterly, then cascade up and down throughout the organization. The company has compared survey results with business scores for different locations and found direct correlations between engagement levels, profitability, employee retention and customer service, he says.

Looking Beyond Shades of Gray

While Office Depot prefers the Likert scale method, other companies find value in data gleaned from open-ended questions. For example, the Plano, Texas-based information technology firm Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS) uses a mix of the Likert scale and open-ended questions in its employee surveys. Once each year, EDS conducts a web survey of all 130,000 employees, and three times a year it does a sample survey of 20,000 employees using proprietary survey software that draws organizational information from the company's HR management system from SAP of Walldorf, Germany.