What great measuring can do for your organization

By Kelly Kass

Getting employees to complete a survey isn’t always an easy task but the folks at Aon UK are demonstrating just how valuable employee feedback can be, especially when the research leads to positive changes in a company.

I had the chance to chat with Aon’s UK Communications Director, Charles Willy, who filled me in on the secrets to running a successful survey – a measurement process he and his team first organized four years ago.

“We started measuring performance for several reasons. Aon had been through some years of fundamental change and we wanted to establish how engaged our people were in the business in helping the company perform better financially. We also wanted to see how engaged they were with the goals and strategies of the organization and figure out what their actions needed to be to help support the business strategy. We sought to learn how the company was ticking while getting a feel for the pulse of the organization,” Willy remembers.

While Aon offered a myriad of communications channels, there wasn’t a tangible way to speak to the business units and discuss what employees thought of the company.

“Our main driver was understanding where employees stood and what we needed to do to improve,” Willy recalls.

So Willy and his team developed a questionnaire focusing on relevant issues for all levels of employees and key stakeholders.    

“We developed questions that would enable us to address concerns such as trust in leadership, levels of understanding of company strategy as well as working conditions at Aon,” Willy explains.

For a month, he recalls, the survey was tested extensively around the organization through the use of focus groups. “We took our time to get the questionnaire right since it would be the basis for measurement moving forward at Aon.”

Fueling responses

With the questions set, it was now time to send out the survey. Needless to say, getting employees to respond was a bit of a challenge, due in part to “general organizational upheaval,” Willy remembers.

Aon had just announced forthcoming redundancies and major restructuring inside the company. That, coupled with the fact of employees being “permanently busy,” Willy admits, “meant there was never a right time to carry out a questionnaire to employees. In the end you just have to go for it and factor in any extraordinary circumstances into the results.”

As a result, he and his team worked extra hard at receiving a strong response rate. Active support from top leadership, getting line managers behind it, donating money to three different charities for each completed questionnaire, all played their part in increasing the response rate.

While Willy counted on the opportunity for employees to feel like they made a difference, managers also played a part in garnering responses. During the monthly departmental meetings, 15 minutes were allotted for employees to complete their questionnaires. These and other tactics helped get the response rate up to around 70 per cent.

Being transparent through good and bad

Willy admits that not all employee responses were positive in the surveys. Far from it! Answers to the 2005 survey revealed that staff were low on trust when it came to leadership, with motivation on the job being sorely affected.

A key part of any survey is getting leadership on your side and ensuring they act on the results. That entails a certain amount of influencing skills but also a clear selling of the benefits to them. At Aon, once results were counted, individual packs with all the analysis they needed were distributed to each manager in each of the company’s 16 business divisions to support them to communicate their business unit results. They could also see each other’s individual results and peer pressure at Board level counts for a lot in getting action carried out.

Continuing Aon’s open and honest approach, Willy and his team published the survey’s results on the intranet. “Once we got the results out there, we then entered the next stage – taking actions to improve in certain areas.”
 
Many of those actions were implemented last year, including an employee survey steering committee made up of different representatives from the company and chaired by Aon’s HR Director. The group meets on a regular basis and then reports its findings to the executive committee so they can chart what progress is being made in the organization.

Building trust


“One of the key findings was that engagement leads to greater trust inside the company. Since we received low trust readings in the area of leadership, we thought it would be effective for Peter to start a blog.

At the time of the first survey in 2005, he had only been in the organization for 6 months. Therefore we wanted to build his brand and establish honest engagement with employees,” Willy explains.

Seeing an impressive 400,000 hits, Peter’s Blog receives ten times as many page views as all the other blogs in the global organization.

Perhaps it’s due to the fact that “no subject is taboo” on the blog, but insults about colleagues or the company are not published.

“The blog is meant to facilitate a dialogue between Peter and Aon employees where he can address issues that are important to them. We’ve had roaring success with it because it’s searingly honest and helps employees feel more engaged since leaders are brave enough to try to understand how people are feeling about the state of the company,” Willy points out.

He continues, “Leaders need to be prepared for trenchant, open criticism particularly when times are hard and difficult choices have to be made by company leaders on issues such as pay freezes and other cost cutting measures. At a time when many leadership teams are being criticized for becoming “invisible” this blog is a channel to keep them ‘out there’, not physically but electronically.”

Willy stresses that the blog is not used for corporate messaging but rather to compile comments and test for reactions about the goings-on in the company. It is also used for employees to debate with each other around issues and to pose questions to management; for examples, questions about fuel allowances for cars are then passed on to the Finance team who then post a reply. Questions are answered on as timely a basis as possible.
 
Hands-on involvement

Another valuable resource for Aon employees has been the creation of the Aon Forum (and a supporting blog) designed to help them understand more clearly what Aon’s business strategy is.

The Forum, which Harmer sponsors, is made up of 36 employee representatives elected by their peers. The group is headed by Aon’s HR Director and looks to advise senior management on how to best communicate company strategy while engaging employees. The Forum offers consultation on all major change occurring in the company.

“One of the suggestions we received from the Forum was that we needed better face-to-face communication. Therefore we revamped our comms approach so that face-to-face became our primary channel, along with email,” Willy explains.

Other survey outcomes

One pertinent survey question asked how regularly people were communicating in the company. Willy and his team received a variety of different answers which has now led to the implementation of mandatory one-to-one monthly meetings between employees and managers.

In addition, Aon has launched a useful communication toolkit as part of a UK Knowledge Exchange designed to facilitate internal communication between colleagues, as well as leaders.

As a result of the improved communication, Willy says, the atmosphere has become much more healthy around the company.

The upward-moving numbers illustrate the success of the survey and the action that followed.

According to Willy, from May 2005 to May 2008, Aon employees belief in Aon as a good business has increased +23%; client service has gone up 18%; trust in leadership has increased by +16%, while pride in Aon has seen a 19% increase. Communicating at the “right level” has also gone up 20%.

“Admittedly, these were from a low starting point but the trend has been in the right direction,” says Willy.

Why measure

Thanks to those numbers and his experiences at Aon, Willy has become a firm champion in the area of measurement and has spoken on the topic publicly.

While he acknowledges that measurement is often difficult for communicators to get excited about, it is critical to execute it in order to bring about change.

“I believe passionately that if communicators want to a make a difference to an organization, we need robust data. Company boards make decisions based on hard data, not conjecture.
 
From a communicator’s point of view, it puts you in the driving seat for affecting change if you can say to a CEO, ‘this is how key stakeholders feel, this is how people view performance in the organization, this is how they feel about these particular issues.’

If communicators can link up through HR or run a survey themselves, it makes our jobs that much easier. People will listen more to the real hard facts and help change the culture of a company. No-one claims this is easy but measurement is a terrifically effective change tool.”