September 2006 | Current Webpolls
Preferred Parking
In our first poll for September, a surprising 40 percent of respondents answered that their employer provides preferred parking. This is an intriguing statistic among our audience made up primarily of small business and nonprofit leaders and employees. Many organizations on the smaller side may not have much parking to offer at all. Complicated with this fact is that sometimes preferred parking for senior management and/or the "employee of the month" serves as a tangible reminder that one staff member may be perceived to be more valued than another.
If you're among the 40 percent of employers that offer preferred parking and you're in a management or leadership role, you may want to consider eliminating such signage and/or verbiage in your employee communications – at least on a trial basis. Some bosses find that their employees respect the fact that the boss can't park any closer to the workplace than they can.
Related: Read GreenBiz.com's travel suggestions for smaller organizations.
Soliciting Employee Opinions
Our second poll for September asked visitors to select the ways in which their employers solicit their opinions. The majority (52 percent) responded that their employer uses a suggestion box, special committee, staff meeting or a combination of these methods. A smaller pool of respondents (31 percent) said that their employer uses other means to solicit opinions. The lowest number of respondents (17 percent) said that their company has no measures or programs in place for this purpose.
The latter statistic is a bit alarming. That means nearly one in five employers have no systems in place to process and assess what their workers have to say. At these workplaces, it's likely that an informal conversation with the boss, a detailed e-mail to a supervisor or a staff meeting would yield some enlightening employee opinions. Still, in today's management world where process guides for such measures are widely available – and in which more and more research finds that people are your best asset (which explains, in part, the high cost of turnover) – small organizations owe it to themselves to start paying attention in a systematic way to what their employees are saying.
Related: Our Tool Kits on Employee Forums and Quarterly Employee Meetings are part of a 48-kit set that can help you create a winning workplace.
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