The Employee Satisfaction Survey The Tanglewood employee relations department administered a survey every year to assess the attitudes of employees towards several aspects of their employment. Although the purpose of the survey is to collect baseline information on employee attitudes, Marilyn Gonzalez believes that these survey responses will be an ideal method to track the reasons why some managers are more likely to turnover. The annual employee survey is conducted in June. Boxes of blank surveys are sent to regional managers, who then use central routing to send surveys to each store. The survey was initiated to give employees an opportunity to express their feelings about key topics that Tanglewood thinks will benefit employees. Given the overall organizational culture, it should be clear that employee satisfaction is an important issue. Emerson and Wood send bulk e-mails to all store managers to encourage them to get a 100% response rate from their employees. However, it is common for less than 50% of the employees to complete surveys. An example of the survey is contained in Appendix E. The survey asks questions that can be broken down into four major topics, as follows: Supervisor satisfaction The supervisor satisfaction questions encourage employees to describe their relationship with their immediate supervisor and the extent to which they are satisfied with the direction they receive on a day to day basis. Tanglewood spends a great deal of money training supervisors on the "Tanglewood way" so they are especially concerned that these principles are carried out in practice. Work satisfaction Work satisfaction relates primarily to the degree to which employees believe that their tasks are interesting, fulfilling, and contribute to a meaningful life. The participatory system at Tanglewood puts a great deal of responsibility on employees to make their work enjoyable, but the corporate offices still want to make certain that every effort is made to ensure that employees have the freedom to do work they enjoy. Pay satisfaction Tanglewood realizes that because they place a great deal of responsibility in employees' hands, they need to ensure that employees feel they are been adequately paid for this additional effort. At the same time, because Tanglewood spends a great deal of time and energy creating an enjoyable workplace, they believe that they should not make pay too much a focus of their human resources activities. The company typically is a market leader in compensation relative to discount retailers like Target or WalMart, but pays slightly less than stores like Kohls, J.C. Penny, or Sears.

Benefits satisfaction The benefits package offered by Tanglewood consists of basic medical coverage for most employees, a 401K program, and maternity leave benefits. Additional benefits for higher level employees include 50% tuition reimbursement for undergraduate education and. Within the corporate human resources function, Marilyn Gonzalez has been increasingly critical of the lack of innovative benefits offerings. Emerson and Wood recently proposed that there be an overhaul of the organization's benefits because they do not create much of an impression on employees.

Correlations for individual surveys Daryl Perrone has also developed a correlation matrix that describes the relationship between surveys and performance indicators. This is similar to the information described in the validation chapter. Perrone thinks the same methods can be used to assess turnover as can be used to assess selection methods, since turnover is "selection in reverse." These data are available only for 153 managerial employees across the entire chain over time. To ensure that the data are valid, only one year of information is used, so that the same managers are not being counted multiple times. The final row presents correlations between the performance indicators and turnover as well. Remember that turnover is a negative outcome. A negative relationship between satisfaction and turnover means that those with a positive attitude toward the job are less likely to turnover. This also means it generally is preferable to see negative correlations between performance indicators and satisfaction, because it means that those with higher levels of performance are less likely to leave the organization

Table 3.2 Correlations between survey data and performance indicators Citizenship Absence Performance Turnover Work satisfaction Correlation 0.15 -0.17 0.28 -0.13 p-value 0.06 0.2 <0.01 0.11

Supervisor satisfaction Correlation 0.22 0.09 0.16 -0.19 p-value <0.01 0.27 0.05 0.02

Pay satisfaction Correlation 0.03 0.01 0.04 0.09 p-value 0.71 0.90 0.62 0.27

Benefits satisfaction Correlation 0.09 -0.07 0.12 -.24 p-value 0.27 0.39 0.14 <0.01

Turnover Correlation -0.19 0.32 0.34 n/a p-value 0.02 <0.01 <0.01 N=153

Evaluate the job satisfaction survey. Do you believe that this survey is comprehensive? what additional information can Tanglewood add to this survey to better understand turnover.