A noted CEO tells readers there is only one way to know how morale is at your
company: ask the people who work there.
Critical Numbers
There's only one way to know how good morale really is in your company: ask the
people who work there
I always find it interesting that so many managers believe you can't measure
morale. We encourage people to quantify, analyze, and improve every other
aspect of the business--from customer service to productivity to return on
equity--but employee satisfaction is supposedly an intangible, something you
can't put a number on or give a score for.
That notion is not only wrong but dangerous. What gets measured gets done. If
you don't measure morale, you wind up taking it for granted. You don't focus on
it. So you miss the opportunity to fix problems easily and inexpensively.
Instead they just sit there and fester, hidden from your view.
The challenge, of course, is to figure out how to measure morale. We'd been
tracking it for years at Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. (SRC), using polls,
suggestion programs, and the like, but we'd never been able to come up with a
system that allowed us to measure it in the same way that we measure, say,
inventory accuracy.
Then, about a year ago, one of our subsidiaries was invited by Inc. and the
Gallup Organization to take part in a survey for Inc.'s 1996 State of Small
Business special issue. Participants were asked 34 questions that probed how
they felt about their jobs, their working conditions, and their employers. (For
example, "At work, do you have the opportunity every day to do what you do
best?")
The results were interesting enough that we decided to do a survey of our own,
using 14 of the questions in the Inc./Gallup poll, modified slightly to
eliminate ambiguities. We then distributed the new questionnaires to all the
other subsidiaries and asked people to fill them out anonymously--at work--and
turn them in.
The responses floored many of our managers. Our Heavy-Duty Division, for
example, came in with abysmally low scores on three issues. People were asked
to agree or disagree with the following statements:
At work, your opinions count.
Those of you who want to be a leader in this company have the opportunity to
become one.
In the past six months someone has talked to you about your personal
development.
In our survey of Heavy-Duty, 43% of the people disagreed with the first
statement, 48% with the second, and 62% with the third.
Now, you have to understand that for years Heavy-Duty has been the crown jewel
of SRC. The plant it operates from is the one we started with, back in 1983.
Many of the people who work in that plant have been with the company since the
early days. Some of them have substantial equity stakes.
And Heavy-Duty was successful. It was not only our largest subsidiary but also
our most profitable and our safest, at one point running up more than 1.75
million consecutive hours without a lost-time accident. To all appearances,
morale was great, and employee involvement was high. We'd been holding
shop-floor meetings in the plant to review the numbers every week for more than
12 years. Most of the managers, moreover, had come up through the ranks.
So how could it be that a substantial minority believed that their opinions
didn't count? How could so many think they had no chance to become leaders?
The managers of Heavy-Duty decided to find out. They set up an
employee-satisfaction committee and asked for volunteers. Eighteen people were
selected, including a crankshaft grinder, a guy from cylinder heads, a buyer,
an engineer, an accountant, you name it. Every department and all three shifts
were represented. The committee's mission: to improve the division's scores on
those three questions the next time the company did the survey.
It didn't take long to start finding out why the scores were low. One committee
member said that, as a matter of fact, he didn't think his opinions counted.
"Why not?" the others asked.
This guy works in the dynamometer room, testing products before they get
shipped. Every time he received a fuel-injection pump, he said, he had to
change the setting because the specifications in the pump room were different
from those in the dyno room. He'd been complaining about the discrepancy for
two years, and nothing had happened. Apparently, his opinion didn't count.
The problem was fixed the next day.
His situation was typical. It soon became clear that we didn't have two or
three big problems in Heavy-Duty. Rather, we had loads of little problems, most
of which could be solved quickly and inexpensively just by bringing them to the
surface and focusing on them.
You might wonder how we'd missed them. The truth is, those types of problems
are easy to miss, especially if you're doing well. Why? Because to be an
effective manager, you have to follow certain routines. You have to make sure
you have good systems in place, and then you have to stick with them, day in
and day out. The danger is that after a while you'll stop thinking about them.
You'll forget to check them. You won't ask whether they're still serving their
original purpose.
It's a trap that even the best managers fall into, and believe me, the managers
at Heavy-Duty are first-class. The only way to avoid it is to conduct audits
from time to time. You have to develop the discipline of going back
periodically to take the pulse of the organization, to find out how people are
feeling, to check how you're doing.
We intend to use the survey as our audit. We'll do one every six months
throughout the company. The point is not to judge our managers but rather to
set benchmarks we can continually improve upon. We'll use our scores to track
our progress, just as we keep score in every other aspect of our business.
Only time will tell how successful we'll be, but at least people have the tools
they need. "Boy, it's nice to have something to measure," said the general
manager of one subsidiary. "Before, I was just going on gut feeling. Now I have
a baseline to work with. I can do something with that."
I'm sure he will.
Jack Stack is the CEO of Springfield Remanufacturing Corp., in Springfield,
Mo., and is the author, with Bo Burlingham, of The Great Game of Business.