Nutra Pharmaceuticals Needs to Determine

Nutra Pharmaceuticals needs to determine if cross-training in the packaging department would improve employee morale and reduce turnover. In order to determine if this is the case, the survey intends to ask employees directly about these particular issues. The survey is able to do this in a couple of ways. The first is that the survey asks the employees about their attitudes towards the company and their jobs, including questions about how those attitudes have changed as their tenure with the company has increased. The survey then also directly asks if the employee feels that cross-training would improve morale and performance. It is more effective to ask questions such as these directly rather than indirectly because there is no uncertainty about the response.

The survey questions are appropriate to the business problem. The business problem is that the employees appear to be suffering from low morale and a relatively high rate of turnover. It has been determined that one potential cause of this is the monotony of the job experience itself. Thus, the questions about cross-training and morale directly test a reasonable hypothesis that cross-training would increase morale. There is no direct link in the survey between cross-training and retention, however. The retention issue is addressed in more general terms, because it is felt that direct questions about an employee's short-term desire to remain with the company are unlikely to receive an honest response.

The survey relies on ordinal, non-numerical measurement. Because the measures are non-numerical and subjective the distance between the measures is unlikely to be relevant, which means that the responses are going to be ordinal in nature. The respondents are also asked some questions that have interval responses. These questions are less important to the survey overall as they measure the employee's tenure at Nutra Pharmaceuticals. The reason for ordinal measures is in order to measure the potential effectiveness of the particular strategies of cross-training in terms of how they might change job satisfaction and improve the likelihood of long-term retention. There is also a question about gender which obviously only has two possible responses, and these responses would be considered nominal in nature. Again, because this question is not integral to the findings of the survey the use of a nominal question is acceptable -- and for this question recommended.

There are few ethical implications when designing a survey such as this. The main one with which to be concerned is the privacy of the respondents. The respondents are being asked questions about general intent to remain with the company, for example, which means that protecting their privacy is essential not only to the effectiveness of the survey but also to the ethical integrity of the survey process. Employees indicating an intention to leave the company at some point should not be identified by any possible means as this could compromise their prospects at the company or the quality of their employment conditions. That the survey also asks about age profile, gender and tenure could allow managers to narrow down respondents to one individual or a handful of individuals, thus compromising the privacy. Therefore, managers familiar with the division and its employees should not be responsible for analyzing the survey results nor should they have access to these results in anything other than aggregate form.