Understanding how people feel about the organisation they work for is helpful. Knowing how the people within your organisation feel about your mission and their personal goals, roles and responsibilities, will set you on the road to identifying appropriate actions that can improve company performance and avert potential retention issues.
One of the traditional routes to gain these insights is to use an employee satisfaction survey. These are intended to identify what needs to be done to make employees feel more contented or to create a better work environment and company culture.
Does Satisfaction Tell You Anything About Engagement?
The challenge with satisfaction surveys is that satisfaction is not the same as engagement. People can be quite happy with their place of work without really being engaged. Yet, it is engagement that drives productivity and performance.
Another critical factor in organisational performance is the extent to which the commitment and enthusiasm of managers is shared by their teams. This is a key component of what we call the Organisational Climate. The disparity between the engagement levels of leaders and the relative engagement of their teams has been proven to be a strong indicator of performance.
Climate and Performance
The Performance Climate System tool identifies and evaluates differences in perception between leaders and teams. It measures this across six critical performance dimensions: goals, roles and process (transactional performance); and adaptability, connection and resilience (transformational performance). The insights provided highlight potential areas of conflict, disconnect, misalignment or miscommunication. The information gained from using the PCS enables leaders to know precisely where they need to focus more effort to improve performance.
Does PCS Work?
PCS has been used by organisations for over 15 years. In one example, by using PCS over a 3-year period, the customer services team of a global financial services business reduced staff turnover from 49% to less than 5% (Saving £1m), cut sickness and absenteeism from 12%, to 2% (saving £700k) and achieved a 12% improvement in customer satisfaction (74% to 83%). These gains were aligned with a 28% improvement in organisational climate.
If you want a tool that goes beyond assessing whether employees are satisfied to look at how engaged, committed and productive they are, contact the team at Performance Climate Systems.