Manager hears for himself what his workers really think by going undercover, writes STEFAN STERN

EMPLOYEE ATTITUDE surveys, brown bag lunches, focus groups, informal chats: managers try quite hard to find out what their staff are thinking. But the results are mixed at best. What are your staff thinking? Admit it – you don’t really know.

Is there any way of finding out? Electronic surveillance would be a bad idea. Cloaks of invisibility work for Harry Potter, but are not available to the rest of us. One chief executive has done the next best thing. He went undercover in his own business for two weeks, disguised as an office worker, completing shifts on 10 different sites.

He has heard for himself what his people really think. It has been a revelatory experience.

Stephen Martin is the 43-year-old chief executive of the Clugston Group, a medium-sized civil engineering and logistics company based in the north of England. But for two weeks earlier this year, as far as his colleagues were concerned he was “Martin Walker”, an ordinary co-worker trying to earn a living like everybody else.

Ordinary, that is, except for the film crew that was following him around. The cover story was that this documentary team wanted to record how a clerical worker would cope with the demands of a physical labouring job.

In truth they were making a programme, called Undercover Boss, which will air on Channel 4 in two weeks' time and then in a US version later this year.

How did Mr Martin avoid being found out? He is still a relatively new chief executive, having started in December 2006. He grew a beard and turned up to work in protective clothing rather than a suit. His down-to-earth, style does not mark him out immediately as “boss class”.

“This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear unfiltered what my employees were really thinking,” said Mr Martin. “They said things to me that they would never have told their managers.”

What lessons has he learned? “Our key messages were just not getting through to people,” Mr Martin says. “People working a shift on a large site do not have time to read newsletters or log on to websites. You have to communicate with people on their terms, and it is different for every location. One size does not fit all.”

For example, Mr Martin found that an apparently sensible idea – encouraging his workers to take a tea-break where they were working rather than coming back to a canteen – was taken to mean that the break had been cut.

What is more, having worked these physically demanding shifts, the boss now has a more informed view of the job. His conclusion: “We were asking the impossible of some of them.”

This TV-inspired experiment has highlighted a classic management problem. Leaders may know exactly what they want to see happening. They send out messages down the management line. Employees ought to understand. But between the top table and the shop-floor something goes wrong. Leadership teams can be ignorant of how badly their wishes have been distorted, and how much unhappiness there is among those on the receiving end. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009