The Unique Newmeasures Survey Philosophy

1. Our company was founded to be an alternative to the traditional employee survey. We came into business with the express intention of innovating the employee survey process by shortening the content, which was too long, too time consuming, and too complicated to make sense of the reports. More importantly, employee surveys were rarely being used to actually drive organizational improvement. Our goal was to innovate a tool that would help organizations change, and change quickly, in response to greater demands of customers and the marketplace.

2. A second uniqueness of the Newmeasures survey is the role/function of our question, “I feel valued as an employee of this organization.” This question is our proxy for a job satisfaction question.  We chose the wording of Q6 because it encompasses more aspects of the work experience than a question on the order of, “I am satisfied with my job.”

Feeling Valued is a powerful predictor of employee engagement. It correlates highly with nearly all other questions on the survey and functions as an outcome measure along with our question on organizational effectiveness.  And, Feeling Valued correlates more highly than typical engagement questions like, “I would recommend this facility as a good place to work to a friend or family member.”

There is a subtle but important difference between how organizations interact with employees to gain “employee engagement” and how organizations interact with “valued employees.” In the first, there is the implied sense of “how can we get employees to become more engaged?”  In this sense organizations do something to the employees in exchanged for their loyalty.  If, however, our goal is to value employees, then our intention is to examine the systems, policies, and procedures of the organization that get in the way of the employee feeling valued. In the valued employee model, we do something for employees by removing the obstacles that get in the way of their doing their best at work.  The term “valued employee” focuses on how the organization views and treats its employees.  When you value something, it is a high priority and a central element in your decision-making.  We decided that a valued employee model is one in which management asks itself, “If we really valued our employees what would we change? What would we do differently? What policy assumptions would be altered or eliminated?”

Feeling valued is the result of an employee experiencing an organization keeping its promises and acting with integrity. The likely outcome of the experience of feeling valued is a desire to go the extra mile, to remain with the company (retention) and to express appreciation and loyalty.

3. The third uniqueness of our survey tool and our company is the inclusion, early on, of organizations’ values. Placing company values in our core 16-item survey proved to be an absolutely critical addition that dramatically changed our concept of employee satisfaction. Values superseded every other question on our survey in terms of the impact on employees’ engagement.  The effect of values was so great that Larry Murphy, PhD, was heard to say that if an organization worked on nothing but integrating its values into the workplace, they would drive employee engagement to higher and higher levels. Over time, as more and more surveys are added to the Newmeasures database (and nearly 80% of all customers include their values on their surveys), the statistical link between values and employee engagement/satisfaction and organizational effectiveness grows only stronger.  Consequently, Newmeasures may be the only company in the United States with a large enough database to prove conclusively the importance of values in corporate success.

4. A fourth uniqueness of Newmeasures is our commitment to the environment. Long before being “green” was the current buzzword Newmeasures was dedicated to reducing our carbon footprint. We encourage email and electronic media over reams of paper, our surveys are delivered via email and we keep our reports short and targeted. If pricing and/or the environment are an issue, we are positioned to be your vendor of choice – contact us to learn more.

For more information, please email us at info@newmeasures.com or click here to fill out our short contact form.