Time for Employee Surveys to Go Open Source

Readers of BusinessWeek magazine know that Jack and Suzy Welch write an interesting management column on the last page. The January 28, 2008 column contrasts the value of good employee surveys with the polls of this political system. They cite four key questions for employee polls or surveys:
1. Are employees buying into the company mission?
2. Do managers walk the talk about company values?
3. Is the company performing as claimed in public statements?
4. Are the HR systems rewarding excellence and culling under-
performance?
My hypothesis is that social media use in and outside the business promotes the values that contribute to performance. These include trust and knowledge sharing, for examples.
The Welch's probably would less happy with the organizational climate variables in my study but I would claim that the proven ones are as well linked to firm performance as the Welchs'.
One of the big challenges for researchers like me with employee surveys is that they are most often done by contractors claiming proprietary questions and techniques. I'll bet that the proprietary questions are build on the open literature. Academic studies are necessarily open and subject to challenge. I could potentially piggyback on employee surveys and get de-identified data but it could not pass review.
In Hawaii for example, SHRM is running a state-funded employee survey in 40 firms but not even the companies get their de-identified, i.e. anonymous, raw data. In a perfect world I could have an optional few questions on social media use after the 'required' part.
So I continue to look for businesses that would like an employee survey with most questions built on the published literature. I should ask the Welch's too!