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Major Brands – Internal Employee Communication

Case 2: A National Heavy Construction Equipment Company (An Internal Employee Communication Example)

Before Hiring Ethridge

A national heavy construction equipment company had been rapidly growing through acquisitions and was experiencing “growing pains” in the areas of service quality, employee communication, and employee satisfaction. As one means of improving the situation, the company had recently established a Business Service Center. The purpose of the Business Service Center was to provide high quality “internal customer” service between the centralized corporate office and the various branch offices around the country. The Business Service Center was to be the hub of communication between managers and employees in various field locations around the country and central departments like Human Resources, Payroll, Information Technology and various equipment specialty departments.

After Hiring Ethridge

The company contacted Ethridge & Associates, L.L.C. (Ethridge) to identify where customer service and communication problems were and how to correct them, plus to measure the level of service quality satisfaction with the company’s Business Service Center. Ethridge custom-designed and conducted an organizational communication study that consisted of three phases as follows.

  • Phase 1 was a focus group among all senior corporate officers of the company, including the President and Vice Presidents over major corporate divisions. The purpose of these groups was to clarify the expectations of the Business Service Center, expectations of employees, and management’s perceptions about what the communication issues were. The purpose of this phase was to identify the range of issues, perceptions and possible solutions in the minds of leadership.
  • Phase 2 was in-depth, qualitative telephone interviews with a small, random sample (cross-section) of employees across all geographic areas and departments to identify the range of issues, perceptions and possible solutions in the minds of employees.
  • Phase 3 was a quantitative telephone survey with a randomly selected, adequately large sample of management and employees throughout the entire national corporation to quantity how prevalent each issue and perception was, as well as to test concepts about which solutions would work best to correct the communication problems.

Phases 1 and 2 were analyzed using our Motivational Linguistics Analysis® to uncover the motivating factors that were driving management expectations, perceptions and employee satisfaction/dissatisfaction, as well as the correct corporate language (“buzz words”/jargon) to use in designing the Phase 3 questionnaire. In the Phase 3 analysis, the advanced, multivariate statistical analyses of CHAID, factor analysis and regression analysis were used to identify the relative importance of those factors (to see our multivariate analytical capabilities click here.)

Our analysis, found important discoveries (among others) about:

  • How the culture of the organization and employee satisfaction had been negatively impacted by inadequate communication with employee, as well as what specific messages and media to use to improve the situation
  • The need to update and communicate the Corporate Vision Statement, Mission Statement and Corporate Values to reflect changes in management’s paradigms as the company had grown
  • A lack of adequate awareness that the Business Service Center existed and what its purpose was, both among employees in the various branch offices and among employees in the Business Service Center
  • The need to train employees in the Business Services Center and various other corporate functional departments in Becoming Customer Focused and Communication Skills to equip them to be better prepared to serve the branches

As a result, this corporation was able to improve its training and employee communication leading to an improved customer-service oriented culture, higher employee satisfaction, and greater profitability due to lower employee turnover and higher quality service.