Communication Satisfaction Questionaire

Efficient and successful communication is often cited as the single most important contributing factor leading to organizational success. Because even in our high-tech and globalized world organizational communication still always occur between people, assessing communication efficiency is really a measurement of how the people in the organization experience communication in the work environment. For this reason, the central focus of SLI's communication audits are to assess the level of employee communication satisfaction (individual employees' overall affective evaluation of interaction patterns on all levels) in your organization.

Simply put, people experience communication satisfaction when the communication goals and expectations in the organization are fulfilled. Communication satisfaction has a task-related dimension (e.g. the amount of available information and clarity of what is expected) and a relational dimension (e.g. communication relations with coworkers and superiors). Both these dimensions are therefore assessed in our communication audits.

SLI uses an online version of the thoroughly validated and widely used Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ) to collect quantitative data about your employees' communication satisfaction (with all or selected employees participating by answering a list of questions in their own time). The following communication factors are measured:

• Communication Climate: This measures an employee’s identification with the company as well as his or her attitudes toward communication in the workplace. It includes items such as the extent to which communication in the company motivates and stimulates employees to meet organizational goals and the extent to which internal communication makes them identify with the company. It also indicates whether or not employees have a positive attitude about communicating in the company.
• Supervisory Communication: Here the two-way communication between superior/manager and subordinate is assessed. Items include the extent to which superiors are open to new ideas, the attention superiors give to their subordinates, and the guidance superiors provide in resolving job-related issues.
• Organizational Integration: This factor focus on the degree to which employees receive information about their immediate work environment.  Items include satisfaction with information about departmental policies and goals, job requirements, and staff news.
• Media Quality: Satisfaction with the various communication channels used in the company is assessed here. At EITS, this includes electronic media such as phone calls, email, and text messages (sms’s); as well as more traditional channels such as meetings, memo’s, and face-to-face interaction.
• Horizontal Communication: This factor, also referred to as co-worker or informal communication, assesses satisfaction with the flow of information between co-workers. This includes the accuracy of information and the activeness of the company’s grapevine.
• Corporate Information: This factor deals with the most extensive kind of information about the company as a whole.  It includes items on information about change, information about the company’s financial position, and information about the overall policies and goals of the company. 
• Personal Feedback: Here employees’ satisfaction with information about his or her job performance and the clarity of the criteria with which he or she is being evaluated, is assessed. Items include recognition of individual efforts, superior’s understanding of problems faced by subordinates, and the fairness of evaluation criteria is assessed.
• Subordinate Communication: Sometimes referred to as supervisory communication, this factor includes both ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ communication with subordinates as the primary communication target. It assesses the receptiveness of employees to downward communication and their willingness and capability to send good information upward.

Because of the close correlation between communication satisfaction and employee job satisfaction, questionnaire concludes with two items to assess job satisfaction, and another two in which personal productivity at work is assessed.

Finally, while this communication satisfaction assessment is available on its own (with results presented in a brief report), it is strongly recommended that it be used as part of a full communication audit that would include on-site interviews with leaders and other role players in the communication process.
 

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