IOP 480 Week 4 Culture and Climate Surveys Example

Measuring Service and Safety Climate Across Four Resorts: Designing and Reading an Employee Survey

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

IOP/480: Assessment Tools for Organizations

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The resort company, survey, staff and results are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Organizations increasingly survey employees to understand how they experience work. A well-designed survey measures specific aspects of the workplace that matter for outcomes and reports results where they can be acted upon. This paper designs and interprets a survey at Saguaro Springs Resorts.

The Request

Saguaro Springs' leaders want an annual employee survey. Guest satisfaction varies widely among the four Phoenix-area resorts, and workers' compensation claims for lifting and slipping injuries have risen in housekeeping and kitchens. Leadership now wants Jonah Whitaker to design a survey that will "measure our culture."

Climate Versus Culture

Schneider et al. (2013) reviewed research on organizational climate and culture. They described climate as employees' shared perceptions of the policies, practices and procedures an organization rewards, supports and expects, and culture as the deeper shared values, beliefs and assumptions, often expressed through stories and myths, that explain why things happen as they do. They noted that research had shifted toward focused climates, such as climate for service or for safety, which predict related outcomes better than general measures, and toward studying climate at the level of work units.

Following this guidance, Jonah proposes measuring two focused climates tied to the company's concerns, service climate and safety climate, plus engagement. Culture will be explored through interviews and focus groups, which better capture deeper assumptions.

Designing the Survey

The survey has forty items. Service climate items ask about practices, such as "In my department, we are recognized for going above and beyond for guests" and "My manager removes obstacles that keep us from serving guests well." Safety climate items ask, for example, "My supervisor acts on safety concerns we raise" and "Production pressure never comes before safety here." Engagement items ask about energy, pride and intention to stay. Items describe observable practices rather than general feelings.

The survey is offered in English and Spanish, translated and back-translated by bilingual staff and piloted with twenty employees to check meaning. It takes about twelve minutes on a phone or a kiosk in each employee break room.

Confidentiality and Response

No result is shown for a group smaller than seven people, which keeps any one person's answers hidden. An outside vendor collects responses, and managers never see individual answers. Leaders announce that results will be shared with every department and that each department will choose actions, which research on surveys suggests increases participation in future years.

Linking Unit Results to Outcomes

Harter et al. (2002) conducted a meta-analysis of nearly eight thousand business units in dozens of companies. Business units whose staff reported more satisfaction and engagement also tended to show more loyal customers, better profit and output, fewer quits and fewer accidents. The relationships were substantial enough to matter in practice, and the authors argued that engagement measured at the unit level is a useful indicator for managers.

For Saguaro Springs, this research supports reporting results by department at each resort and comparing them with guest comment scores, turnover and injury rates.

The company average for safety climate looked fine; one housekeeping department's score was the lowest in the company and its injury rate the highest.

Safety Climate and Injuries

Zohar (2000) studied production work groups in a manufacturing plant and measured group-level safety climate, workers' shared perceptions of their supervisors' commitment to safety. Groups differed meaningfully in climate, and group safety climate predicted the rate of minor injuries in the following months, even after accounting for risk levels. Workers' perceptions of supervisors' actions, such as whether they rewarded speed over safety, shaped the climate.

At one resort, the housekeeping department's safety climate score was the lowest in the company, with comments such as "If you report a sore back, you get fewer hours." The same department had the highest rate of lifting injuries. The pattern resembles Zohar's findings and points to supervisor practices.

Checking Whether to Aggregate

Before reporting unit scores, Jonah checks that employees within each department agree enough to treat their average as a shared climate. Most departments show adequate agreement, so their averages can fairly be treated as shared climates. In one kitchen, responses split sharply between day and night shifts, so results are reported separately for each shift.

From Results to Action

Each department receives its results in a short session led by a trained facilitator. In the low-safety-climate housekeeping department, staff and supervisors agree on three actions: no penalty for reporting pain, two-person lifting for heavy mattresses and a monthly safety huddle. Progress will be tracked through injury rates and a brief pulse survey after six months, and the department's supervisor will report results at a general managers' meeting.

Reading Open Comments

The survey ends with two open questions: what makes it easier and what makes it harder to do good work here. Nearly nine hundred employees wrote comments. Jonah's team codes them into themes, such as staffing, equipment, recognition and scheduling, and counts how often each appears by department. Comments add meaning to numbers: a low recognition score in the kitchen becomes clearer when dozens of cooks write that only front-of-house staff are thanked by name. Comments are edited to remove anything identifying before managers see them.

Avoiding Survey Fatigue

An annual survey loses value if employees see no change. Jonah recommends a short report back to all staff within six weeks, listing what each department will do, and a brief six-question pulse survey midyear on the specific actions, rather than repeating the full survey more often.

Limits

Unit climate and outcomes are correlated, but causality can run both ways: a department with fewer injuries may also feel safer. Tracking changes after actions provides stronger evidence.

Conclusion

By measuring focused service and safety climates rather than a vague culture, protecting confidentiality and reporting results by unit, Saguaro Springs' survey produces information managers can act on. Research on climate and culture, on unit-level engagement and outcomes and on safety climate and injuries supports the design and helps explain why one housekeeping department needs urgent attention.

References

Harter, J. K., Schmidt, F. L., & Hayes, T. L. (2002). Business-unit-level relationship between employee satisfaction, employee engagement, and business outcomes: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(2), 268-279. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.2.268

Schneider, B., Ehrhart, M. G., & Macey, W. H. (2013). Organizational climate and culture. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 361-388. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143809

Zohar, D. (2000). A group-level model of safety climate: Testing the effect of group climate on microaccidents in manufacturing jobs. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(4), 587-596. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.85.4.587