It's important to have a diverse workforce. But when it comes to employee satisfaction, diversity alone won't suffice. For example, a survey conducted by the Howard University Center for Accounting Education (CAE) discovered that, at least in the accounting industry, African-Americans don't feel...read more

Managers who only give positive feedback can do just as much harm as overly critical or laissez-faire ones. Waiting until annual performance appraisal time to give negative feedback – if ever given at all – won't suffice. Letting someone know where he's falling short of the mark doesn't mean...read more

Most people get called in for their dreaded employee appraisals once a year. Those who get them twice a year can actually consider themselves lucky. Feedback is important and if the only time any is forthcoming is during a formal personnel evaluation, then you could be in trouble. In her article,...read more

It's probably safe to say that employees hate job performance appraisals because their bosses hate them. Giving someone bad news is painful; receiving it is even worse. But there doesn't seem to be a better way for bosses to help employees learn and grow and better serve the companies where they...read more

What is it about annual job performance appraisals that makes employees and managers alike dread them more than a visit to the dentist? According to a post on the New York Times' Well blog, one reason annual performance appraisals are dreaded, especially by employees, is because they're too...read more

Sometimes in survey research we need to ask questions that may be a little tougher for the respondent to answer. Typically these can be questions that require recalling something that happened in the past. Other times we need our clients to compute a little bit of math to arrive at an answer they...read more

One of the earliest recorded efforts at job performance evaluation review occurred in the U.S. Army. In 1813, General Lewis Cass was asked to provide a formal evaluation of his men. Although General Cass's comments provide a humorous example, they also identify the problem that occurs when there are...read more

Have you ever created frequency distributions from particular survey questions, only to realize that some response options were chosen only a few times, and others weren’t chosen at all?  This can occur for many types of questions with ordinal or interval scales, and is especially common when likert...read more

I just created a survey to gauge Cvent employee interest in playing in a local softball league this fall. It got me thinking after yesterday's post where I suggested using online surveys to collect employee feedback for product enhancements. Perhaps it's not obvious how human resource departments or...read more