Listening to Our Employees
Our 2006 employee survey showed a cultural health metric of 80 percent, indicating a strong alignment of employees with Abbott's values and business operations.
In a corporate setting, culture is generally defined as the values that a company believes to be true or real, and how that organization behaves in response to those beliefs. Employees' actions are often viewed as an extension of the corporate values.
At Abbott, we manage our culture in the same manner that we direct all areas of our core business, through constant reassessment and alignment with our values to determine future strategic needs. In 2007, we continued to implement an annual global employee survey to evaluate cultural attitudes among our employees and establish a broad cultural benchmark across our company, measuring the gap between our corporate values and how our employees respond – known as a cultural health metric.
Some 90.43 percent of our employees feel that they understand how the work they do helps patients, according to the results of our bi-annual global employee Performance Culture Survey, designed to evaluate behaviors necessary to achieve business strategy and establish a benchmark on topics including employee motivation. Implemented in 2006, the survey saw the participation of 36,279 employees a 61 percent response rate and was translated into 27 languages. This survey provided invaluable insights into strengths and challenges across the company. In 2007, our business teams began using the survey results to help achieve core business objectives.
The survey results also revealed that employees want greater feedback on developing their careers. Consequently, many business teams put a number of resources in place sales career maps, management fundamentals training, team development, including having managers work more closely with employees to set career goals and evaluate their progress to help employees cultivate a satisfying and rewarding career at Abbott.
Many divisions of the company analyzed their data, conducted focus groups, and created action plans to address the areas of career development related to career opportunities, promotions and coordination and information sharing. The areas of greatest strength that employees identified were in the company's strategic direction, its work environment, and accountability of both managers and employees. In addition, it was strongly felt that our products meet the expectations of our customers and that we understand how our actions impact the lives of patients.
In order to continue to trend and track the cultural health of Abbott we will be conducting the next Performance Culture Survey this year.
