NCEO Survey Resources

Highlights

• Build your own employee survey or use pre-selected survey packages
• Ready-to-use, fully tested survey items on thirteen employee ownership topics
• Extensive benchmarking data from 9,000 employee owners at 50 companies
• Detailed data charts show results, analysis and benchmarking data for each item
• Quick, customizable and affordable

Introduction

Your company is investing time and resources in creating an ESOP or equity compensation plan, and you need a way to determine whether that investment is paying off. Do employees "get it" or are they confused? How many are motivated to work harder, and how many feel cynical? Does the stock plan make them more likely to remain employed at the company? Does it make them more entrepreneurial?

The NCEO offers extensively configurable employee surveys with benchmarked data and extensive analysis to help you answer these questions. Our surveys measure attitudes, perceptions, and levels of understanding, so you'll know how many employees trust the plan, understand their role in creating value, and have the tools, skills, and information to act like owners. With this data, you can assess company strengths and weaknesses, measure progress over time, set concrete goals, and focus your energy where you'll get the greatest payoff.

The potential return on your investment in ownership, according to decades of research, is substantial: unique characteristics of ESOPs and equity compensation plans give many companies a competitive advantage; the NCEO surveys are specifically designed for companies with ESOPs and other employee stock plans, including stock options, stock purchase plans, and restricted stock.

Originally developed by Ownership Associates (a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts) and leading academic researchers, the NCEO's employee surveys have been carefully developed and fully tested. The comparison data is drawn from over 35 companies that vary significantly in terms of size, sector, age of plan, and plan design features.

The reports are fabulous, both in terms of their utility and their graphical layout. Terrific work!
--Drew Lebby, board member, Wexco Incorporated

The NCEO allowed us to build our own survey using their excellent resources and database combined with our company-specific survey items. The process was easy, preparation and reporting of results were done in a timely manner, and the survey was reasonably priced. We plan to use the NCEO survey in the future and highly recommend it!
--Janet Super, HR Administrator, MMC Corp

Cost

The cost for an NCEO employee survey is far less than comparable survey providers, and depends primarily on the number of survey items and the number of people eligible to complete the survey. For example, the ESOP Effectiveness Survey, which includes 24 pre-selected survey items, costs $1500 for a company with a work force of 100 people. A shorter questionnaire with 14 items would cost $1000 for a 60-employee company and $4,100 for a 500-person company. (Higher prices apply to non-NCEO members.)

Mini-Questionnaire: NCEO members can purchase access to an eight-item mini-questionnaire on ESOPs for their work force. This package does not include the flexibility or in-depth analysis of the full survey; it does include near-immediate access to the online questionnaire, hosting, and reporting. Learn more.

All companies, and especially those with 1,000 or more employees, are encouraged to contact the NCEO to discuss survey configuration, applications, and pricing. The price of the survey includes all customization, administration, analysis, and reporting (see "What You Get" below).

What You Get

Unless you choose otherwise, the standard survey configuration includes:

• Benchmarking data: The survey has now been used by over 7,000 employee owners at over 35 companies. The results data from these companies is integrated into the feedback you will receive, allowing you to put your results into context and better identify your company's strengths and opportunities. The results chart for each survey item includes the statistical significance and the practical importance of the difference between the company's results and the database norms.
• Detailed analysis: The feedback charts provide in-depth information for each survey item, including average, comparisons with the benchmarking data, breakdowns by employee subgroups, standard deviation (a measure of the level of consensus), percentiles, and rates of non-response. (See "Sample Results" for a typical data chart.)
• Web-based administration: The NCEO will provide access to a confidential online survey.
• Demographic items: Carefully chosen questions about employee characteristics allow comparisons among employee subgroups at your company. The NCEO will help companies select an appropriate number of demographic items in order to balance employees' sense of confidentiality with depth of analysis.
• Customization: Standard survey items are automatically customized to reflect the terminology you use at your company (i.e., "senior management team" versus "executive committee" versus "leadership group").
• Easy-to-use overview: A summary table lets you see at a glance the topics and items on which your results are especially strong or weak.
• Reporting: The NCEO will prepare the survey report in print-ready electronic format (PDF).
• Support: All survey administrations include 60 minutes of telephone consulting to help companies understand and use the survey data.
• English-language only.

You can adjust the basics of the survey package in several ways:

• A paper-and-pencil survey (instead of Web-based),
• Additional forms of results feedback (i.e., in-depth analysis, in person report of survey results),
• Open-ended items (i.e., "written questions"),
• Custom-written items, and
• Languages other than English.

Survey Content

The NCEO's employee surveys draw from a variety of sources, including academic research, public opinion research, and, primarily, our own proprietary survey items. Companies are welcome to select the survey questions most useful to them, and the NCEO project director for surveys will help companies choose the mix of items to maximize their benefit from the survey.

Survey items are available on the following topics:

• ESOP Understanding
• Equity Compensation Understanding (stock options, restricted stock, etc.)
• Entrepreneurship
• Information and Learning
• Trust in Leadership
• Organizational Fairness
• Work Atmosphere
• Decision Making
• Organizational Effectiveness
• Accountability
• Work and Pay
• Aspects of Ownership
• Employer-Employee Relations

Companies also have the option of starting with a pre-selected survey package. Each survey package includes items from several of the topic areas above in combinations that have proven to be effective.

The ESOP Effectiveness Survey, a 24-item package, covers the most important issues for ESOP companies, from ESOP understanding and psychological ownership to satisfaction, behavioral outcomes, and participation.

The Equity Compensation Effectiveness Survey includes 26 items and addresses employee understanding of stock options, stock purchase plans, or restricted stock.

The Ownership Culture Survey is the original 65-item survey developed by Ownership Associates. It includes comprehensive measures of all key aspects of employee attitudes toward ownership.

Next Steps

The easiest way to determine if the NCEO's employee survey is a good fit for your company is to talk with the NCEO's project director for the survey. Contact Loren Rodgers at 510-208-1307 or lrodgers@nceo.org. He will answer your questions about survey design, administration options, timeline, the results report, the comparison data, and pricing.

You can also learn more about the NCEO's employee surveys online.

Mini-Questionnaire: NCEO members can purchase access to an eight-item mini-questionnaire on ESOPs for their work force. This package does not include the flexibility or in-depth analysis of the full survey; it does include near-immediate access to the online questionnaire, hosting, and reporting. Learn more.

• Read Getting Started, our introduction to the survey process.
• Obtain a list of available survey items.
• Browse a selection of free articles and other resources that draw on the survey data.

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