One of today’s biggest challenges is finding and retaining employees. How can an organization do that cost-effectively? One answer is to improve their organizational health – to be a place where people are personally engaged, where they can grow, where they feel appreciated. There is a direct positive correlation between organizational health and employee attraction and retention, and a strong positive correlation between organizational health and profitability/performance. To improve your organization’s health, you need to define it and measure it.

Perhaps the best way to measure your organization’s health is to use a confidential survey. Here’s an example of survey results comparing departments

When you’re looking at organizational health surveys, we suggest that you choose survey that:

1. Is actually valid – that has been tested for:
   1. Reliability,
   2. Validity, including face, content, and criterion validity, and
   3. Acceptable statistical fit.
2. Allows you to define the demographics that fit your organization (e.g., departments, length of service time buckets, ethnicity, locations, shift, etc.).
3. Allows you to add your own questions.
4. Allows you to drill into the resulting data and reports until such inquiries would compromise confidentiality. For example, if you wanted to see how female Millennials in Department X scored, the survey should show those results only if there are at least six responses that fit all those attributes. If there are fewer than six, it should not show the responses. You might have 32 females in your organization, 11 of which work in Department X. But only 4 of those are Millennials. So you could see results for all females, and all females in Department X, and all female Millennials across the organization. But not female Millennials in Department X.
5. Shows you the results across multiple iterations of the survey, so you can easily see trends. Once you take the survey, you’ll want to take some actions to improve your organization’s health. So we suggest that you take the survey again in 4-6 months to see if your actions are having the desired effect.

One survey that meets all these criteria is Vantage Point™, which was developed more than ten years ago by more than 25 Oregon Organization Development Network professionals. The three major dimensions of the survey are:

• Adaptability
• Engagement, and
• Cohesion.

If you’d like a copy of the White Paper which outlines the origins and validity testing of Vantage Point, I’ll be glad to send you a copy.

Gary Langenwalter