Context: I live in Australia, and am changing some minor details (numbers mainly) to protect myself.
I work in a large, multi-site business. Revenues have been dropping and staff are leaving in droves after increased workloads and two rounds of “restructures”. Morale is low and clients are picking up on it. Management conducted a whole of staff survey on employee experiences. Nearly 900 staff responded to almost 100 questions about all aspects of our job.
For my division there are around 50 staff across all sites. The 5 areas of the survey we scored the lowest were:
1. Frontline staff have enough resources to do their job
2. Excellence is rewarded
3. Management are open to exploring new product lines
4. Managers respond to feedback
5. There is open and honest two-way communication with management
Their initiatives?
- Quarterly pizza party paid for out of the pockets of the staff members of a “host” department.
- Monthly service excellence award
Who got the first service excellence award?
The management team. They awarded it to themselves for… wait for it…
Employing 5 new IT staff in a year! (We had 10
IT staff quit, but let’s ignore that part).
You could hear the laughter across the whole building once this was announced.