What is Morale?

Early on in our consulting practice, at the end of an employee survey, managers representing different parts of the organization would be presented with the results, a process which often took a couple of hours and involved looking at massive amounts of data, question by question, group by group. At the end they would frequently ask an important question about their own area: “I saw the presentation, but can you tell me how my group did?” As easy as the task of answering this may sound, it is not: how do you “boil down” the results of 110 questions into one quick summary? They had seen the results on the screen, even summarized by major topics like “compensation and benefits”, “communications”, etc., but they often had no real sense of the overall picture. At the time, the tactic which was used was to say something like this: Well, your employees love their jobs but don’t feel so good about the company; they think many more decisions should be made at the local level and that they are being micro-managed by corporate. As you saw, your group was lower than the company average on a few questions, but also higher on others.