Do Supervisory Boards invest enough in the Skills of their Members?

According to a survey conducted by Denison Consulting amongst Supervisory Board members of Swiss companies, the investment into the skills of the Board Member seems to be an area for improvement. The item „There is continuous investment in the skills of the Board“ scored amongst the 5 lowest items across the 34 questions in the survey. It received a mean score of 3.31 as a result of 24% of participant rating this item as unfavourable, 27% as neutral and only 49% as favourable (on a 5 point scale).

While Board members serving on companies with 5.001-10.000 employees didn’t see this as an issue at all (100% favourable score), all other segmentations by company size as per number of employees resulted in much lower scores.

With the exception of Board members serving on Boards in the Energy industry, Board Members from all other industries that participated in the survey rated this question among the 5 lowest ones across the survey – such as from the Consumer Goods, The Financial Services, the Information / IT and from the Health Care industry.

There were no differences in rating between Chairmen of the Board versus Board Members and Board members from publicly listed companies were slightly more positive (but also amongst lowest 5 ratings) than non-listed company Board members.

If you are interested in the full details of the study, please contact afiedler@denisoncultureeurope.com. We would like to thank all participants for their contribution.