Company profile questionnaire: One aspect of managing people in use at UNIGATE Available to Purchase

The company profile questionnaire is a quick and relatively simple way of taking the temperature of an organisation in certain defined respects; it is frequently used, for example, to form some assessment of the views of employees on how they are being managed. Another way of putting this is that the company profile questionnaire can give some idea of the perceptions of employees on the management style of the employer. In most companies management style is usually regarded as of concern solely to the managers; this being so, most management training programmes contain some reference to the choice between different styles. But even those companies who do introduce management style as a study for managers rarely introduce their shop‐floor workers to the topic and even more rarely bring them into a discussion of it. However, in view of the growing interest in worker participation and joint management decision‐making, it is becoming important that the concept of differing management styles should be introduced to all employees, not only to managers. Filling in a company profile questionnaire will, in many cases, be the first time that the workers in an organisation will have come across the concept of management style and its importance to relationships between people. That establishes why we believe that enquiring into the perceptions of employees of the management style of their company is important and likely to become more so. We have been wanting to include something in the journal on the use of company profiles for some time. And then we came across the actual questionnaire used recently by the Unigate Company, a group with a large number of employees spread over many scattered locations. The original purpose of Unigate was to provide a means whereby Group Head Office could form a view as to how the various parts of the Group were currently being managed in selected areas of management of concern to the Chief Executive. Unigate kindly gave us permission to reproduce their company profile questionnaire in full. Here it is.