The group's strategic project made employee satisfaction a priority. But assessment of social performance cannot be improvised. BPI set up an ambitious approach designed to "scan" the expectations of the company's European employees&

Context
Measuring the Social Performance of the Enterprise
This group that was initially French lived through a great industrial adventure for 20 years led by a charismatic director. It is today the world leader in all of its markets. In 1996, a Plan 2000 was launched that mobilised all of its entities with operational and financial performance objectives. A distinctive element was the fact the improvement of employee satisfaction was down as one of the principles of the project. There may have been standards to measure economic performance of the company by, but measures of social performance were not yet available - a huge project to get underway in a group that counted 60 000 employees.

Task
A Global, Managerial, and Ambitious Approach
Global: Before the year 2000, every employee of the company was consulted based on a single questionnaire.
Managerial: The objective was to encourage the management to listen to the employees. To prove this, no data was to be consolidated at corporate level
Ambitious: The field of investigation was wide (organisation, management, HRM, prospective).
Taking part for France, Ireland, Portugal and Austria, BPI was the European project partner.

A Mine of Information
For each entity, the preparation step was essential - building and training of a project team, adaptation of the questionnaire, preparation of a communication plan. A double field investigation was then carried out - a questionnaire was sent to employees' homes and one-to-one interviews were carried out. BPI handled processing of the quantitative and qualitative data - a mine of information on the employees' expectations and perceptions which was analysed according to the specific characteristics of each entity. The summary report was first presented to the management team - this was just the beginning of the process.

Explanations, Suggestions, Actions
In parallel to the general distribution of these results, the managing committee identified the prominent themes that were to be subject to in-depth reflection within the framework of discussion groups. These mobilised employees once more, this time with the goal of explicitation and suggestion. The approach ended with the preparation of a plan of action. Based on the expression of everyone's expectations, this implicated all of the actors involved.

Perspectives
A "Barometer"
The period from 1996-2000 initialised an arrangement that should become permanent. In this context, the participation of consultants follows the logical development of knowledge transfer to an dedicated internal team.