As the leader of a 15-person department you have received a research study about your workplace that shows employee job satisfaction is 71% good/very good but morale is 26% good/very good. The lowest workplace rating is for internal communication at 15% good/very good. Which ONE action should you take first to understand the problem? (5 points).

Morale can be significantly increased by improving internal communication systems such as sharing information in a clearer, more consistent, more useful, and timely manner and encouraging employee feedback.

Provide workplace communication training to all employees, including yourself.

The organization structure needs to be reviewed. It will be very difficult to change systems of communication if the organization's structure to too bureaucratic, involves to many decision-approvals, and is unclear as to who is in charge of what.

Employee accountability must be reviewed. Unless employee attitudes change about the workplace their communication behavior will never improve until there are strong penalties for failure to properly communicate.

The culture of the overall organization needs to be looked at to see if what is believed in is actually being done.

The quality of internal workplace communication is VERY strongly correlated to effective conflict management. This means the REAL problem in the workplace are too many employee conflicts.

Your own leadership competencies need to be explored through an evaluation tool and/or through a 360-assessment involving your employees.