Case Study: gathering data for an employee survey in a FTSE100 company

Most progressive organisations, irrespective of sector, understand the benefits of seeking feedback from their stakeholders. This is especially true when it comes to your own employees, where retention is often a crucial priority, given the high costs of recruitment and training. Conventional wisdom holds that job satisfaction and staff motivation increase in direct proportion to the extent to which employees feel involved in the enterprise.

We were asked, via an intermediary, to prepare an online questionnaire aimed at determing attitudes to various aspects of the client company’s activities, culture and ethos. What was needed was a straightforward mechanism to enable a small team (about 75-strong) to log in to a closed-user survey, using the internet. Because the survey was entirely online, team members could complete it whenever they felt like it, at their own pace, and it was therefore not seen as something that had to be undertaken in the workplace, with co-workers or managers breathing down their necks! Despite there being a fair number of questions, it was kept simple because we merely asked “Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?” and then listed each statement accompanied by a simple point scale.

By keeping it simple, the takeup was higher than might have been expected from a more cumbersome process, while, arguably, since employees could complete it at their leisure, it seems likely that answers were more spontaneous than might have been expected in a busy office. Once the exercise was declared closed, it was a very simple matter to download the data into a spreadsheet for analysis and presentation to the client’s management. Since submitted questionnaires were identified by a staff number, by linking this to the employee file, it was possible to analyse responses by department, grade and whether an employee was office- or field-based, greatly improving the quality of the analysis.
 

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