ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES AND VOICE AUDIT

Diane M. Gayeski

Instructions:  Check each of the initiatives or approaches from the list below that your organization currently is pursuing.

•	Continuous improvement/total quality management
•	Cost-containment/downsizing
•	Diversity awareness/diversity appreciation
•	Employee empowerment
•	Globalization
•	High-performance workplace/performance-based compensation
•	Just-in-time manufacturing
•	Learning organization/continual learning
•	Participatory decision making
•	Relationship marketing/customer orientation
•	Self-managed teams/teamwork
•	Work-life balance/family-friendly workplace

On the list that follows, check the items that characterize your organization’s typical communication and training practices.

•	Communication interventions such as training and newsletters are evaluated (if at all) by “smile sheets” measuring how much the audience liked them
•	Communication/training/marketing staff are rewarded for the amount of materials or programs they produce, rather than on their return on investment
•	Company materials do not include or acknowledge input of employees or customers.
•	Employees are typically sent to training courses or conferences either because of and organization-wide or department-wide mandate or as a “reward” for good performance.
•	Employees are typically sent to training courses or conferences by managers, rather than making the decision to attend themselves.
•	Most learning activities consist of courses led by a professional instructor.
•	Most meetings with management consist of announcements and/or formal presentations
•	People are often expected to attend training courses and meetings before or after work or on weekends.
•	People are not rewarded for doing what they’ve been taught in training.
•	People often throw out memos and newsletters or delete email and vice mail messages before even reading/listening to them.
•	Policies and procedures documentation is often not kept up-to-date.
•	There is no established way to solicit and organize good ideas from customers and employees.
•	Training and documentation generally presents one “best” way to approach a task, based on the input of one or two subject-matter experts.
•	Training and employee communication programs are based on requests from managers who thing that the person has a training or communication problem.
•	We don’t really know how much the company spends on communication and training each year (including the time employees are away from their “real” work).

Pages 165-166	The 2002 Annual: Volume 1, Training/©2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.