Does your company “take the pulse” of employee satisfaction once a year, or perhaps twice? Does it do so at regular, scheduled times?
Do all the managers scramble in the six weeks ahead of the survey to provide “morale” or “motivation”? (And do half of them spell it “moral”?)
Does it work?
The same goes for employee feedback about their managers. Is it solicited only around performance reviews?
Does that change behavior for the long term?
What if no one* in the company knew when these surveys or feedback forms were going to be sent out?
If you’re a manager and that thought has you even the slightest bit uneasy, then you need to examine what you’re doing and try to fix it. Right now, it’s hard for employees to vote with their feet, but times will get better — and the very best, the ones you most need to retain, can always find new positions. And even if they’re not leaving because there’s nowhere else to go, morale and motivation affect performance, which in turn affects your own review — to say nothing of the lives of everyone involved, from your team to the other teams that interact with yours to the customers who might purchase your output.
There is no “time” for morale and motivation except the present time, every time. It’s not about events, or presentations, or gifts, or pithy and overworked sayings. It’s about how you relate to them, the level to which you extend trust, the extent to which you help when needed and avoid over- and micromanagement. It’s about having their backs, about recognizing that your job is to eliminate the roadblocks that make it hard for them to do their jobs.
Succeed here, and you won’t have to worry about “surprise inspections.”
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*When I say no one, I mean no one, including HR. It’s not hard to have these surveys and mails prepared to go out at any time. Let’s say a company wants to “take the temperature” twice a year. It’s trivial to design a program — I could write it in Excel in under five minutes — that you’d run once every two weeks, with a random factor that will come up “Yes” only, on average, twice a year. You send the surveys and such within minutes of the program coming up “Yes,” so everyone, including your own manager, has no advance warning. Of course, you’d suspend running it for eight weeks or so after it comes up “Yes” and you send the survey. (And the programmers out there recognize that you’d have to account for those eight weeks — and the two weeks at the end of the year when you can’t send anything useful — in calculating the odds for the random-number generator.)
