When Mitchell Johnson took over as President and CEO of Ozarks Electric Cooperative in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a few years ago, one of his first priorities was to encourage and empower employees to become more involved in managing the relationships with their member/owners.
Ozarks Electric has over 150 employees serving some 50,000 member/owners in a rapidly growing area of northwest Arkansas and northeast Oklahoma. Johnson knew it was critical to tap into the energy and expertise of the employees to make the co-op stronger and more competitive.
In April of 2000, Ozarks commissioned Inside Information to conduct the first in a series of employee surveys – determining attitudes, opinions and recommendations about ways to improve the workplace, employee productivity and satisfaction – as the first step in an overall employee involvement and Customer Relationship Management program.
That baseline survey indicated that most employees were well satisfied (3.4 average rating on a 5-point scale), but they also shared several suggestions of ways to improve internal processes and communications. Next, as Inside recommended in the survey results, Johnson and his management team took action to empower an employee committee to review the survey report and make recommendations for improvements back to management.
Then eighteen months later, in October of 2001, Ozarks Electric had Inside conduct a follow-up employee survey to identify trends from the previous survey. The change was impressive.
The survey showed a dramatic increase in employee satisfaction, feelings of “teamwork,” and a growing sense of confidence in fellow employees, supervisors and management. The previous 3.4 satisfaction rating had grown to 4.0 on the five-point scale – and nearly nine out of ten employees agreed that they are “willing to go beyond the normal effort to make this company more successful.”
“Our ultimate objective is to make and keep happy member/owners,” said Johnson. “But to get happy member/owners, you have to have happy employees first. We have really great employees, and we are thrilled to see them feeling more and more responsible for taking care of our member/owners. To begin that process, we had to find out what our employees were thinking, and how we could give them the tools they need to do the best job possible for our member/owners. That’s why employee surveys are so vitally important to your Customer Relationship Management efforts.”
