Employee Survey
In fiscal year 2009, Medtronic conducted its biennial employee survey, Global Voices. Prompted by best-in-class comparisons, previous Global Voices results, and internal company goals, management raised the bar for performance, requiring favorable scores of 80 percent or above for a strategic index or dimension to be considered a strength. Previously, Medtronic used a threshold of 65 percent to make that distinction. All areas receiving scores lower than 80 percent were identified as areas for improvement.
Conducted in 11 languages, the fiscal year 2009 Global Voices survey had an 88 percent employee response rate worldwide, compared to 87 percent in fiscal year 2007 and 85 percent in fiscal year 2005.
Similar to past years, we assessed performance along 13 strategic dimensions. The results identified Mission and Values, Ethics, Corporate Citizenship and Overall Satisfaction as company strengths, with each receiving favorable ratings of 80 percent or more. Corporate Citizenship and Training achieved the greatest improvements over fiscal year 2007 scores.
Employee Development (61 percent favorable) received the lowest rating; the item with the largest decline since 2007 was also related to this dimension. We launched Medtronic University in November 2009 to increase our performance in this area.
In addition, we introduced six strategic indices to focus our follow-up efforts.
| Global Voices Strategic Indices Scores (FY09) | (% favorable) |
| Employee Engagement | 80% |
| Inclusion | 76% |
| Leadership Effectiveness | 74% |
| Manager Effectiveness | 80% |
| Organizational Leverage | 59% |
| Performance Excellence | 72% |
Among our strategic indices, Employee Engagement and Manager Effectiveness received the highest scores (80 percent favorable).
We also compared our scores to a best practice external norm comprised of cross-industry best-in-class benchmarks drawn from WorkTrends™, a normative database of employee opinions collected regularly by Kenexa Research Institute. We are also using that information to guide our survey follow-up efforts as well.
The best practice norms are based on six characteristics of high performance organizations:
- sharing customer satisfaction information with employees;
- conducting regular performance appraisals;
- cross-training employees;
- providing quality improvement training;
- conducting employee surveys; and
- having a written mission/values/values statement.
Global Voices in Action
Nine hundred business groups across Medtronic received Global Voices results reports. Managers receiving reports are responsible for reviewing their Global Voices data, sharing it with employees, and engaging employees to implement changes in areas needing improvement. To increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the process, we introduced an online system in fiscal year 2009 that helps managers prepare for and conduct survey feedback meetings with employees and record action planning efforts. More than 300 groups have at least one action plan identified as “in progress” or “completed” that is posted in this optional system. Of these, 125 address Organizational Leverage, our lowest scoring index.