Employee Survey Results 2020

Dear Goodwill Team Member,  

The end of the year tends to be a reflective time for everyone, as we consider the events of 2020, and try to make sense of them. It is also a time for looking forward into a new year with excitement and hope for what 2021 will bring. At Goodwill, our annual Employee Engagement Survey is a terrific opportunity to engage in reflection like this—to look back at how we have been doing, and at the same time, to look forward to improvements we can make together.

This past October we sent out our annual Employee Engagement Survey, and we are grateful to all the employees who participated: an amazing 74% of you took the survey. The results have provided us with a great deal of invaluable feedback and information. The entire Goodwill Management Team has spent time reviewing, processing, and discussing what we learned over the past six weeks. 

The survey offered all Goodwill Northern Michigan employees an opportunity to rate our efforts in various areas, including team effectiveness, job satisfaction, and management. The survey also offered opportunities to provide open-ended comments. We asked the same questions we have asked in the past so that we can track our progress over time, and also because the questions we asked are tried and true industry standards, backed by years of research into their effectiveness in improving employee satisfaction. 

I am pleased to share that overall, our 2020 survey responses were incredibly positive, even though the survey was taken during a pandemic! Compared to last year’s scores, we saw positive movement in almost all of the scores this year. You can view the full results here.

The items you rated highest were:  

• Understanding Expectations. Your responses indicate you know what is expected of you at work. Overall average 4.59 out of 5, up from 4.39 out of 5 last year. This was also the highest-scoring item last year.

• Supporting Each Other. You stated that you feel your manager or someone at work cares about you as a person. Overall average 4.43/5, up from 4.27/5 last year. This was also the second highest scoring item last year.

• Staying Focused. You shared that you feel your manager keeps the team focused on priorities. Overall average 4.38/5, up from 4.04/5 last year.

• Connection to the Goodwill Mission. You feel the mission of Goodwill Northern Michigan makes your job important. Overall average 4.36/5, up from 4.02/5 last year.

The items you rated lowest were:  

• Friendships at Work. Responses indicate that many of our team members do not feel they have a best friend at work. Overall average 3.18/5, up from 3.09/5 last year. The was also the lowest-scoring item last year.

• Career Development Opportunities. You shared that your manager is not assigning you new opportunities to help you develop in your career. Overall average 3.72/5, up from 3.67/5 last year.

• Career Development Discussions. You shared that your manager has not had a meaningful discussion about your career development in the past six months. Overall average 3.73/5, down from 3.77/5 last year.

These results tell us that we need to do more, and we have a plan that we hope will help. For the past 18 months at Goodwill Northern Michigan, we have been transitioning away from doing workforce development programs for people outside of our organization. Instead, we are focusing on developing our own workforce by helping our employees reach their career goals.

To do this, we have asked every manager to do informal check-ins with their employees every three months. The goal of these check-ins is to find out how things are going, how we can work together to improve things, and what we can do to support your hopes and personal employment goals going forward. We hope that when we have fully implemented regular check-ins, we will see big improvements in Career Development scores on the survey.

The regular check-ins are all about you and your professional growth. We are doing them instead of the once-a-year annual reviews that many companies use. Annual reviews tend to make people nervous. They always look backwards, instead of looking forward to a better future. We have found that they are not helpful to our team members or to our organization.

We are doing regular check-ins instead because they offer you one-on-one time with your manager more often. This time is for you to discuss and plan opportunities for your professional development. Perhaps you might want to learn a new skill at Goodwill or move into another department. Maybe you want to go back to school to pursue a career goal like becoming a nurse. Or maybe you want to continue doing what you are doing, but feel you can do a better job if some of your job conditions were to change. The check-ins are a chance for you to talk with your manager about these things, so that we can figure out ways to help. 

In addition to holding managers accountable for doing these check-ins with each team member on a regular basis, we will continue to develop the capacity of our managers with regular training opportunities designed to help them be better managers. Our managers are the main catalysts of the growth and development of our team members. When our managers are positive, strong, and helpful, everyone does better, and our organization thrives.

Listening to your feedback is an important part of our culture, and these survey results offer us the opportunity to improve in areas that are important to our employees. When our employees are satisfied and engaged in their work, our organization will do better work, and be a better place to work. Engaged employees are more productive, stay with the organization for longer periods of time, and provide a better experience for our customers and clients. All of these factors that contribute to our organization’s long-term growth and success. Your satisfaction and well-being are important in every way.

Thank you again for helping us by taking the survey. We are grateful for the opportunity to work with you on building a better place to work. We will do another survey in 2021 and hope we can get even more team members to participate. We welcome any comments or concerns you might have. Please feel free to share any questions or concerns with your manager, me, or any of the Senior Team members.

Sincerely,  

Allison Cavanaugh 
allisonc@goodwillnmi.org 
231-995-7708