Customer interview with GastroSocial

We are delighted to have Mr. Philip Gretener - Head of Corporate Development / Quality Management & Data Protection at GastroSocial - answer our questions about his experiences with our employee surveys.

Why did you originally decide to conduct an employee survey?

• GastroSocial has conducted the employee survey internally in the past, with the issue of anonymity often coming up. By switching to an external implementation, this point should be specifically addressed. By taking an honest stock of employee satisfaction and motivation, we also want to recognize how the management tools are "working" in everyday life, identify potential for improvement and create the basis for an open dialogue.

When was that?

• The decision was made within the management team at the beginning of 2018.

How did you hear about ValueQuest GmbH back then?

• We became aware of ValueQuest during a thematic online search.

What were your experiences during the first survey? Were you able to improve the working atmosphere and improve employee satisfaction?

• The employee survey helped us to obtain truthful feedback from employees on various topics. Based on the feedback from employees, specific measures were defined and implemented at team, department and company level. With this approach, employee motivation was increased from 72 to 81 points (max. 100) by the second survey after 2 years.

How often have you been conducting employee surveys since then? And what do you think for this frequency?

• We have been conducting the survey every two years since 2018. We have opted for this frequency so that we have enough time to analyze and present the results and to work on the key topics we have defined. In quarterly updates, we inform employees about the measures taken on the defined key topics.

How did the process continue and what do you think made it successful? What were the most important learnings?

• It is essential for us to communicate the overall results transparently and promptly after implementation. In a further step, detailed results will be presented up to team level. It is also important for us to take a stand on the numerous open comments. The first measures/decisions should be announced shortly after the presentation of the results. We focus on a small number of measures/fields of action for the company as a whole and implement these in a targeted manner that is tangible for employees. Experience has shown that less is more: unless employees see a compelling need for action at team level, it remains voluntary to define measures at this level.

Which instruments and tools are helpful for you?

• The short reports and presentations already available for each team provide a very good overview of how employees are feeling. If you want more details, the detailed workbooks can help.

Where do you stand today?

• We received the "Excellent Employer" award for the second time in a row, placing us in the top 20% of all companies in the benchmark comparison. We are proud of this result and see it as confirmation that we have mastered the challenges of the last two years well. In the future, we want to continue to improve in a targeted manner and confirm our good results.

What arguments would you use to recommend an employee survey to other companies? recommend?

• A company often lacks the knowledge to formulate the right questions in order to create a meaningful evaluation from the results. ValueQuest convinced us right from the start with their scientifically proven method. The analytical approach and guaranteed anonymity give us a realistic and meaningful picture of the mood and opinions of our employees. The detailed reports identify potential for improvement in order to systematically increase employee motivation.

How would you describe the collaboration with ValueQuest?

• The collaboration was very professional at all times. It quickly became clear that ValueQuest has a lot of experience and is responsive to our specific needs. With the customized instruments, we can carry out the survey with little internal effort and invest our resources in the implementation of defined measures.

Thank you very much for the interesting and informative interview. We look forward to continuing to accompany you in this exciting process in the future.