Stanley Works Dramatically Increases Employee Participation Using Zoomerang Employee Survey Services

The Stanley Works vastly improved the employee participation rate of its employee satisfaction survey and dramatically reduced the cost of implementing the survey by working with the Zoomerang Employee Survey Services team. Zoomerang deployed the survey directly to nearly 6,000 salaried Stanley Works employees across the globe giving employees the benefit of completely anonymous responses.

Stanley Works the $3.6 billion tool, hardware and automatic door manufacturer is committed to building and sustaining a high level of employee satisfaction and therefore measures its employee satisfaction through a wide variety of programs. With about 6,000 salaried employees in 134 countries, Stanley Works has evaluated employee satisfaction every 18 months since 1999.

Zoomerang Services Replaced Expensive Outside Firm
Previously, Stanley Works paid a firm approximately $70,000 to design and implement a paper-based survey to its salaried personnel. Employee participation for the first survey was 42%, according to Tim Perra, Stanley Works Manager of Communications and Community Relations.

The next year, we wanted to keep the survey the same so it could be a baseline but the original company wanted another $70,000 to implement and compile the results again, which we werent interested in paying, Perra says. We had been using Zoomerang surveys for smaller projects, so we decided to investigate using an online alternative.

Using Zoomerang Employee Survey Services to Ensure Anonymity for Employees
Ensuring the anonymity of the employees was an important issue. In general, employees are much more apt to provide honest, even potentially negative, feedback when they are assured that their identity will not be revealed to management. This honest feedback is paramount to helping determine the appropriate action steps to take to improve employee satisfaction. Perra did not want to deploy the survey from his own account as he wanted the survey to come from a third party to ensure his employees would feel comfortable responding.

The Zoomerang Employee Survey Services team stepped in to assist, providing a survey deployment service that is popular among its HR customers. In this case, Stanley Works created the survey and the eight translations required to reach their employees around the globe and uploaded them to a Zoomerang zPro survey account. The Zoomerang Employee Survey Services team then transferred the survey and the data to a private account (unreachable by Stanley Works staff) to email the survey. The initial email invited employees to take the survey using a Zoomerang email address and, in turn, employees could reach Zoomerang customer support by phone or email with questions, if needed. Stanley Works staff could not view who had accessed the survey but were sent screen shots daily to track employee participation rate. The survey contained limited demographic information so the responses couldnt be tracked back to individual employees.

Were actually not interested in tying responses back to individuals because were looking at broader issues within the company, but the assurance was important, Perra says. And with Zoomerang, it was really very simple. The Zoomerang team was always there, always able to resolve anything right on the phone. From the Zoomerang side, everything was done right.

Employee Participation Jumps, Costs Drop
Employee participation jumped to 75% and the cost of doing the global survey dropped by 92%. We saw a huge jump in employee participation, Perra says, which I attribute to the fact that its an online survey. Its so much easier for employees to do it at their desk. And the reminders that were sent by Zoomerang made a difference as well. What was amazing, though, was the cost benefit. We had a 92% decrease in the cost of the survey, so that was huge.

Perra also contends that he was able to focus on the business-critical issues of survey wording, analyzing the results and reporting to management.

The beauty of it is that I can handle all the creation of the surveys and the distribution list, focus on the communications, and then I can have Zoomerang deploy the survey and collect the results, Perra says. Its easy and its anonymous.

Survey Results Driving HR Plans at Stanley Works
The results of Stanleys most recent survey show improvement in all 13 categories of employee satisfaction and are driving additional changes at Stanley Works. There are more than 150 documents on the company intranet related to the survey, indicating how widely the data is being disseminated and used. Perra created a presentation to the companys Board of Directors that plots results against the baseline to determine potential trends. Results are presented to the corporate executive council and then pushed out to the entire company.

We then highlight the issues with low scores and work with the HR department to make them accountable for creating action plans to address them, Perra says. We print out all the open-ended comments so the executives can view how the employees are responding anonymously, in their own words. Senior management takes the employee survey very seriously. And the results go into the next survey.

Stanley Welcomes New Employees in France and Italy with Satisfaction Survey
The success with the company-wide employee satisfaction survey prompted Perra to use it as an assimilation tool as well. We acquired the biggest tool company in Europe, Facom, with factories all over Europe -- and we wanted to know how those employees felt so we administered a baseline survey. With just two simple emails to the Zoomerang Employee Survey Services team, the survey was deployed -- on the second day after acquisition. Turnaround time with Zoomerang is amazing.

European managers requested that the survey also be deployed to those employees who werent online those on the factory floor so more than 1,000 paper-based surveys were sent in French and Italian. Nearly 650 responses were sent back to Zoomerang, and Zoomerang translated the French and Italian surveys and then transcribed the responses into the electronic survey, including the open-ended questions.