Each year employee engagement company TinyPulse conduct a survey into various workplace matters.  The survey sees people from over 300 companies provide weekly thoughts on what things are like in their organisations.  These responses, all 40,000 of them, are then collated into the annual Engagement Survey.

The survey reveals a number of important trends.

1. 58% of employees don’t know their companies values or mission – which paints a pretty dire picture of both their involvement in the strategic process and of course the subsequent communication of it.
2. Happiness comes from colleagues, not managers – this was an interesting one, as it’s often said that employees leave their manager rather than their employer, so the finding that colleagues are more important to happiness than ones manager is interesting.
3. Collaboration matters – the survey reported that collaborative traits were the most valued amongst colleagues.  Despite this though, few organisations seem to be promoting these behaviours.
4. Tapping the crowd – for instance, just 18% of respondents revealed that they were regularly asked for suggestions on how things could be done better.
5. The feedback gap – likewise, just 36% had any kind of peer-to-peer appraisal system in place, thus depriving organisations of another form of excellent feedback.
6. Transparency matters – to fill out the picture, it emerged that management transparency was the single biggest influence on employee happiness.

So when looked at collectively, employees are clearly telling their organisations that they want to collaborate more effectively, not just across the organisation but up and down the hierarchy too.  They want to have a say in how decisions are made and the strategy the company takes.  And they want to work in an environment where feedback is abundant.

It all kinda reinforces the point that social business doesn’t result from the installation of an enterprise social network.  It’s much bigger than that and requires organisations to fundamentally change the rules of how they operate in order to encourage the kind of social and collaborative behaviours employees crave.

Hopefully 2014 will see more organisations set off down that path.