Accountemps, with offices in the U.S. and Canada, is the world's largest temporary help service, providing thousands of business firms with skilled accounting, bookkeeping and data processing help for temporary assignments. Its clients are CPA firms, corporations, nonprofit organizations and government agencies. Accountemps is part of the New York-based Robert Half Organization which specializes in financial personnel.

Wide-ranging surveys by Accountemps helps sharpen that company's temporary personnel performances. Those surveys also provide valuable information for Accountemps in their efforts to continually provide quality service and highly productive temporary employees.

Since the surveys were implemented eight years ago, top management of industrial companies have been interviewed on a wide variety of employee issues, says Robert Half, chairman of Robert Half Inc., the parent company of Accountemps in New York. These include: smoking in the workplace, employee use of time, how long it takes employees to get started working in the morning, Friday and Monday absenteeism, how to check references and hiring and firing practices.

Short, "helpful hints" booklets are developed based on the information collected and sent by direct mail nationally to Accountemps offices and to companies which use their services. This information is also used in print ads.

The data is gathered through telephone interviews with vice presidents and personnel management of Fortune 1,000 companies that have been randomly selected. Many of the surveys have been conducted by an outside marketing research supplier and the rest done internally by Robert Half, Inc.

One survey Accountemps recently sponsored involved employee productivity. Vice presidents and personnel directors of 100 of America's 1,000 largest corporations were asked to rate the productivity of different groups of workers. These top executives rated ...