Developing an employee survey in a winning company
Grundfos has carried out employee surveys since the mid-90s. The surveys have a high priority in the company, which in 2006 won the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) award as the best managed company in Europe. Based on a desire to take a more strategic approach to the surveys, Grundfos started collaborating with Ennova in 2005. The objective is clear: Grundfos wants to increase its focus on targeted improvements in the group and to ensure more coordination between the individual companies.
Mariann Linde, HR Development Consultant, has helped to define what she calls second-generation employee surveys. Now, just before the first big group-wide survey, she is looking forward to seeing the results.
“We started the tradition of carrying out surveys in the mid-90s, and we started with the Danish parent company, which is probably quite logical. Since then, Grundfos’s foreign companies have gradually been included, and today all the companies in the Grundfos group participate in the surveys.”
“Until 2006, the HR departments in the individual companies handled the entire survey, and many resources went into this task. Before Ennova became part of the equation, the surveys focused exclusively on employee satisfaction rather than the commitment and loyalty of the employees.”
Ennova is the first external partner with which Grundfos is conducting employee surveys. The collaboration started in the autumn of 2005 when a pilot survey was carried out among both salaried employees and hourly-paid workers to test how the system worked. To allow for the sometimes significant cultural differences in a group like Grundfos, all regional HR managers have been involved in the preparation process. They have participated in the approval of the individual questions and have also had the opportunity to put forward additional regional questions for the questionnaire, if required.
The global survey is being conducted in 2007, when all employees in the individual countries will be given the opportunity to express their opinion.
Anonymity
One of the challenges of conducting internal surveys is, of course, the question of anonymity. At Grundfos, this challenge was previously dealt with by the individual HR managers in the companies. The postal questionnaires had to be handed in directly to the HR department. It was always made very clear that the individual manager did not have access to the information contained in the questionnaire.
“But you were never absolutely sure who in the organisation had actually seen the answers. The collaboration with Ennova means considerable peace of mind in terms of anonymity, and it is being improved as not even I will have access to the individual answers in future; this is an extra security measure for the employees, who have, however, always had confidence in the system. However, it wasn’t simply the question of anonymity which made Grundfos outsource its employee surveys.”
Second-generation survey
“We felt ready to embark on the next generation of employee surveys. We have for a number of years measured where our employees were satisfied or dissatisfied, but now we would like to know why. Our own surveys could not provide the answers, and that is what Ennova will help us do. Obtaining more exact knowledge about our employees means that we can develop new strategic tools in the HR department, thus enabling us to target our efforts.”
When asked what Grundfos expects to achieve from this ‘generational change’, Mariann Linde says: “We expect to obtain specific action proposals which can be rolled out directly across the organisation. Our activities have always been based on our surveys, but I am slightly doubtful as to whether they have always been the right ones. In future, we will have specific knowledge about where to target our efforts in the different departments and companies. In the past, we have only asked about employee satisfaction and have therefore lacked knowledge about how satisfaction impacts loyalty and commitment.”
“From now on, loyalty maps will be prepared, and we will then be able to do something which we have not been able to do before. We will now also be able to find out what drives motivation.”
Action-oriented survey
As part of the agreement with Ennova, Grundfos will in future be working with the Action Plan tool.
“We have not previously registered actions locally, but have only ensured that actions were carried out in response to the employee survey. From now on, we can sit in the central HR department and monitor the actions taken in each company. This will provide us with a totally different overview as well as the opportunity to make comparisons and draw parallels. This will improve our overview considerably and will allow for better coordination. This is what I mean when I say that HR can work far more strategically when we know more about everything that’s happening.”
Part of Ennova’s reporting concerns management competences, which are divided into personal and professional competences. If a manager scores high on both parameters, he or she will be labelled a ‘star manager’, and such managers are attractive for most companies.
“For many years, management has been a top priority area for Grundfos in order to ensure that our managers have the right competences in terms of staff management. Ennova’s survey will, to a large extent, support our management development initiatives, because it can identify managers with special needs in the organisation. We are technically minded and can therefore benefit a lot from a tool that can identify managers in need of further development and make them even better. The point is that we can act in a more focused manner and find the driver for what we need to do globally. We have never been able to do this before.”
Grundfos facts
Grundfos manufactures pumps for the entire world. Grundfos is today one of the world’s leading pump manufacturers. Represented by 73 companies in 41 different countries and with 14,500 employees, Grundfos had a revenue of DKK 13.5 billion in 2005. www.grundfos.com
Using Ennova Action Plan, action plans are created in all departments and companies based on a standardised template. Each head of department will be provided with an overview of the results of his or her department and can, among other things, prioritise the individual items in the action plan as well as set up deadlines and milestones for the activities. The central HR department will obtain statistics showing the number of action plans created and which focus areas they concern.
