Out-standing Employer

I'm very proud to be the CEO of a young company that recently obtained a certification called "Out-standing Employer" (Newspaper link , in French only : Employeur Remarquable). This certification is original because the auditors are all the team members (this is very different from most certification, like ISO9001:2000 where official auditors are not members of the team : this is an external audit process).

The certification is done from two point of view :

• Every team member fills a 141 questions survey that is completely anonymous (i.e. : managed by a third party that will not reveal the individual results : only averages and only for groups > 5 people). This is a key advantage compared to internal survey : truth can be spoken out !
  
• Managers fill the same 141 questions and are conducting an auto-evaluation of the sames practices.

During the same process, the importance of every criteria is assessed by the team members and managers.

This gave a very interesting managerial practices :

• What the team members define as important vs what the manager define as important
• The performance evaluated by the team members vs the performance perceived by the managers

Those results are then mapped on an Importance (X axis) vs Performance (Y axis) graphic as well as other representation (comparison team/manager, ratio performance/importance, etc.). Those graphs are very interesting as they allow team members and managers as well to :

• Visualize the strengths and weaknesses of the company managerial practices
• Rate, by importance, the managerial practice

The company (site in French only at this time) that created the certification is also providing an analysis of the complete data-set. They also generate an action plan :

• Strong points : What is very important for the team, perform well, but could perform better
• Weak points : What is performing OK/badly but is important for the team (65% and more importance)
• Analysis by age-group, department, physical location, etc. with corresponding strong and weak points (minimal sample size is 5 to have access to the statistics)
• Values of the company as measured by the survey : what interest the team members. This is a very precious results that you can use to recruit like-minded people that share the same value as the team.

The certification is awarded only to the teams that have 65% of the most important managerial practice that have a performance of 65% or better.

This certification reinforce my personal motto : " I prefer to work with motivated people than working to motivate people !". This is true, as far as I know, for partners, shareholders, investors, employee, customers.