You Never Know, Unless You Ask

One of our top business goals for several years has been to increase our Employee Owners’ job satisfaction.  Why?  Well who doesn’t like the idea of being happier?  The other reason?  Southwest Airlines has been known to provide some of the best service in the Air Travel Industry, and like them, we’ve learned that happy employees create happy clients.

Based on the kinds of things we’ve said and heard around Harrell Design + Build for years, we have had a hunch that people here are pretty happy.  While it was validating to be among the “Inc. Magazine/Winning Workplaces Top 50 Places to Work” winners, we’ve know that there had to be a way to actually measure and improve that happiness and satisfaction.

We just completed our fourth annual Employee Owner Survey and our Employee Ownership Committee is tabulating and analyzing the results to share with our team at our Full Staff Meeting in April.  Our survey was carefully designed to get a snapshot across multiple areas including customer service, communication, teamwork, trust, employee benefits and more.  This anonymous survey provides a means of not only quantifying our performance in these areas but also makes it possible for employee owners to share comments that help us understand how we’re doing in greater detail.

We’re fortunate to have a project manager on staff who loves statistics and she can slice and dice the data in a multitude of ways.  This creates some interesting perspective, but I think the most useful report she creates is one that ranks scores from highest to lowest for all four years, along with an aggregate score for each year.

Its rewarding to see that overall we have improved each year since we started measuring, but fascinating to see how some areas have gone up or down from one year to the next.  Obviously, seeing the results is only part of the goal.  Highlighting the areas that need the most improvement and creating a strategy to address them is where we make the biggest impact.

Our company mission statement is:

•  To provide the finest full-service Design+Build residential remodeling in our area.  We strive to be our clients’ “contractor for life” and,
• To foster a safe, stable, challenging and growth-oriented environment for our Employee Owners.

Our survey and the changes we make as a result of it help us to achieve this mission in a very proactive way.  And I think it’s a very worthy company goal.