There's a direct correlation between the attitude of employees at Hyatt Hotels and guests who stay there. When the employees are happy, so too are its customers, says Harold Morgan, director of employee relations for Chicago-based Hyatt Hotels Corp.

For that reason, the national hotel chain conducts yearly employee attitude surveys. Its intention is to ask their 40,000 employees their thoughts on such things as management, working conditions and the hotel in general.

"We have pioneered service in the hotel business and a lot of people have xeroxed our concepts," says Harold Morgan, director of employee relations at the Hyatt headquarters. "One of those concepts is to treat your employees as best as you can and that means asking them what they think."

Morgan says the competitive climate of the hotel industry necessitates the use of employee surveys. "Hotels can't survive too long without them."

Survey process

Administering anonymous surveys has been a tradition for about 14 years at the hotel. More and more companies are doing likewise as management specialists stress the importance of listening to employees. That's the result of the increasing number of companies which are experiencing organizational changes because of mergers and restructuring.

Traditionally, the Hyatt headquarters has written the questionnaire, fielded it and tabulated the results. As the company grew, that responsibility was handed to a Chicago-based survey research firm.

All 85 hotels are shipped the survey booklet to give all company employees the opportunity to complete it. It takes employees anywhere from a half-hour to an hour to do and covers 15 categories including questions on management and supervisors, working conditions, compensation, company training programs and what the employees think of the hotel in general.

Feedback process

After the surveys have been tabulated, they are fed back to the corporate headquarters and individual hotels in a three-booklet format.

Booklet one contains a grouping of all the questions in general from every hotel. These questions have been combined in a graph of positive results. This portion of the data also reveals the past performance of the company and the company as a whole. It also contains a breakdown of every single question by hotel.

Booklet two contains a demographic breakdown of all the questions. This helps in localizing what part of the company, for example, senior personnel or males vs. females, is experiencing a particular problem.

Booklet three contains all written comments.

Action plan

Once the hotels have had a chance to review the books, they submit to headquarters an action plan, says Morgan.

"These are a list of steps they plan to take to solve the problems, to keep the good things they have going and to look for new opportunities to assist employees."

The survey pinpoints a wide range of problems the company has had to address.

"Sometimes there is a communications problem between two departments like food and beverage and room service," says Morgan. "Sometimes it's a manager-employee relations problem or the image of the hotel in a particular community."

Mini-surveys

The company does not do any formal follow-up to find out if problems are being taken care of. It does, however, specifically address that problem in the next survey and asks if management has done anything to resolve the problem.

Morgan says "mini-surveys" are also conducted once or twice a year. This survey contains 30 core questions taken from the main questionnaire but unlike that one, the mini-survey is administered optionally by the hotel. It serves in helping management keep in tune with what's happening at the hotel.

"It's a quick and easy way to ascertain what's going on," says Morgan.

Organizational change

In 1985, Hewlett-Packard Co. surveyed its entire work force of 82,000 employees in the U.S. and Europe for the first time since 1979. The company experienced a major organizational change in 1984 and wanted to know if the slowing business environment had had an impact on the corporate culture.

Before the survey was written, a random sample of employee interviews were conducted. According to Robert Levy, corporate personnel marketing and education manager at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, Calif., the purpose of the interviews were to find out if the climate was "right" to administer the survey.

"We wanted to investigate the attitudinal trend issues, for example, what's bothering people, what they're happy with, what they value," says Levy. "We did this to find out if the time was right to administer a survey. If there was an upheaval in the organization, we may be measuring the upheaval and not people's true attitudes."

The interviews were then used to determine the flavor of the questionnaire which was designed by a Chicago survey research firm and Hewlett-Packard.

Levy says 20 categories were addressed in the questionnaire. These focused on management supervision, corporate communications, benefits, working conditions, work relationships and the employees' attitude to-ward the survey itself. Additional questions were asked of individual groups within the company such as manufacturing, marketing and re-search and development.

Once the results had been tabulated and reviewed, they raised more questions than answers, says Levy. That's when groups of employees called analysis groups were organized to further look at the survey data. These groups are a particular section of the company, for example, engineers, who, compared with their coworkers in other Hewlett-Packard companies nationally, have received a lower rating on a portion of the questionnaire for their firm. The purpose of these meetings is for these employees to give issue statements - comments about problems or issues they see as needing to be addressed.

Follow-up

The follow-up process is ongoing, says Levy, and is made up of a variety of communications efforts. These efforts are in the form of internal personal audits, director reviews and corporate publications. Furthermore, the company is in the process of developing a core questionnaire that would be distributed randomly and more frequently than every five years than the main questionnaire is scheduled to be distributed.

To survey an entire work force as extensive as Hewlett-Packard's is an expensive endeavor but worth the investment.

Says Levy, "We do it because we're employee-driven and because it provides one way for our employees to speak to management and for management to speak to employees. It helps reinforce the whole communications process."