GE Employee Opinion Survey

The GE Employee Opinion Survey (GEOS) is a biennial, census survey of our global salaried workforce. The broad scope of the survey questions encourages employees to provide input on strengths and opportunities in many aspects of the work environment. The survey is designed to enable analysis at the level of business, function, manager and geography. Employees and managers are encouraged to work together to develop action plans to address identified areas of opportunity.

The GEOS was administered most recently in September 2010. In the spirit of continuous improvement, a number of enhancements were made to this survey.

Survey Administration

• We moved the administration of the survey to September to better align the GEOS with GE’s operating rhythms. As a result, employee feedback was more prominent at the Company’s Global Leadership Meeting, in the annual review of talent and in managers’ goals and objectives.
• Questions were added to measure the extent to which employees believe that action will be taken at the team and business levels, based on the GEOS feedback.
• Extra questions on special topics including Environmental Health and Safety, Enterprise Risk Management, Brand Awareness, etc., were added to the survey for sample groups of employees (approximately 10,000 employees per special topic).

Communications

• With this year’s theme, “Your Voice, Your GE,” communications focused strongly on increasing employees’ understanding that responding to the survey is an important opportunity for them to speak openly and anonymously about what they think works well and what needs improvement.
• At the same time, communications to managers emphasized that their responsibility does not end with reviewing survey results. They are expected to use the results to take action and make improvements. With this goal in mind, communications directed to managers emphasized the theme of “Ask, Listen, Respond.”
• In addition to using traditional communications methods, we included a number of digital communications, including: video messages, flash animation, custom websites, storytelling, podcasts, data visualizations, webinars and newsletters.

Ownership

• To increase the number of managers who received a survey report, we reduced the number of respondents needed from 15 to 8. This action doubled the number of managers receiving a report to more than 10,000.
• We asked managers to take ownership of their results along with support and guidance from their human resources team. To help them, we created a self-service website with simple tools for accessing and analyzing results, communicating findings, and developing and executing improvement plans.

At a GE-wide level, the survey revealed the following strengths and opportunities: