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Johnson & Johnson has an uncommonly strong sense of identity and purpose shared among its employees, and the reason is found in an organizational document written in 1943 by Robert Wood Johnson titled "Our Credo". The Credo states that the Company's first responsibility is to the people who use its products and services; the second responsibility is to its employees; the third to the community and environment; and the fourth to the stockholders.
One way that this powerful cultural artifact remains a mainstay in managerial decision making is the continual "testing" of how well J&J's employees are living up to the spirit of the Credo. Specifically, all J&J employees are invited to participate in the biannual Credo Survey. Unlike typical HR surveys, the Credo Survey is designed to assess employees' perceptions of how well J&J lives up to the four responsibilities specified in the document. The Credo Survey's results are used to guide business strategies throughout Johnson & Johnson, despite the constraints of being a global business with an incredibly complex organizational structure.
In 2004 Genesee helped J&J introduce two new features of the Credo Survey. For the first time, J&J surveyed an entire business sector at once, across nine businesses using 39 languages. Secondly, Genesee customized an online action planning system that was linked to the survey reports. The combination of these two services gave senior managers an unprecedented view of the overall results and subsequent change efforts. As a result, this conglomerate of global companies was able to assess survey trends in conjunction with other known indices of performance, make recommendations as to the appropriate areas for change management, and then monitor the creation and status of all action plans to see where corporate support could be added to "grassroots" efforts.
Read the complete presentation from 2004 SIOP (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology) Conference.
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