During the earlier stages of my career I was fortunate to have worked for a large corporation that had a management development program for up-and-coming managers. This program combined formal management courses with on the job training. The job training involved assignments to different divisions in the company. Two learning goals were mandated by these assignments:

1. Acquire knowledge in a new discipline 2. Learn about the different parts of the organization, experience their challenges and understand how they contribute to the success of the whole

My formal education was in environmental studies with a specialty in ecology. One of the key principles in ecology is that ecosystems are made up of interdependent elements. A change in one part of an ecosystem will result in changes in other parts of the same system. Without knowing it at the time, my classmates and I became “systems thinkers”. This ability to see systems has guided my decision making throughout my life in business and in my private affairs. Naturally, I thrived in this opportunity to be a part of a management training program where I was able to experience different parts of the organization and see first hand how each part related to the whole company.

When I concluded the training program I was appointed manager of marketing planning. My appointment coincided with a strategic decision made by the company to aggressively increase its share of the energy market. I had a staff of 35 and a budget of three million dollars for market research. I was learning on the job. I learned from my staff and I learned from the consultants we hired to conduct much of the market research. In addition I was sent on a two week intensive executive marketing program at the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University in New York, and a year later to the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia. This was an amazing time of learning, personal growth and achieving demanding goals.

After that my career continued to flourish. I moved through the senior ranks of several companies until I reached president. Nine years ago I established Entec Corporation a company that specializes in measuring employee engagement. Although I loved marketing, I returned to my first passion-creating working environments where employees can thrive and be fully engaged.

Over the last nine years I have worked with many organizations and I have also been privy to the HR practices of many others. To my surprise I discovered the lack of research discipline that HR departments applied when conducting employee surveys. I was prompted to write this article after reading a piece by Sudipta Dev, from Aptech. In his article, "Is Job Happiness a Myth?" he wrote about the importance of conducting an employee satisfaction survey as a way of gauging employee sentiment. He also mentioned how important it was to conduct focus groups afterwards to fully understand the survey results. I witnessed this process of conducting an employee survey, followed by focus groups in several companies over the years. This included a well known company with 35,000 employees. However, I thought these were isolated cases. When I read this article it was evident that this was common and considered a best practice. I could not believe what I was reading. Why spend money on an employee survey if it is going to be followed by focus groups? Isn’t this placing the cart before the horse?

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