News

Are exhibitions good for your business’s health?

by Joanne Lawrence, ICMA InternationalJanuary 2011

ICMA International specialises in business to business customer and employee opinion surveys. Our clients come from many different industries and so, to keep ourselves up to date it’s not unusual for us to drop into different exhibitions and catch up with people and events.

As the recession started to bite we began wondering about attendance at exhibitions. Do the traditional reasons for exhibiting still apply? Can companies continue to justify the money spent not just on the stands themselves but on giveaways, man hours, travel? What are their reasons for attending? Where does it all fit in to their marketing plans?
To learn more we set up a series of telephone interviews with businesses we knew had exhibited recently. Read full story (download pdf)

ICMA publishes essential guide to running an employee survey

Measuring Employee Satisfaction
Translated from ‘Personeelsteveredenheid meten’ by Ingrid Goovaerts, revised and updated by Joanne Lawrence, Barry Whittaker and Heidi Lampi
Publisher: Management Books 2000 Ltd (2008)
ISBN-13: 978-1852525729

This is a practical tool for any manager wanting to assess the level of employee satisfaction within their organisation. The book explains step-by-step, a proven method of researching and analysing employee satisfaction within organisations. It is packed with examples of questions and inquiry techniques to establish a true picture of the current position, and shows how to analyse the data collected, including an explanation of the basic statistical principles involved. The authors provide sample grids to analyse and represent the spread of attitudes within an organisation, and explain how the research can be both interpreted and put to constructive use. There are plenty of books describing the importance of employee satisfaction and wellbeing, and describing ways of improving it - but very few showing how it can actually be measured. This book fills an important gap in the market and will be of vital interest to all personnel managers and HR practitioners