2017 Staff Survey: progress and next steps

Monday, 04 September 2017

A big thank you to all who took part in our staff survey focus groups over the summer. Over 180 members of staff across the University attended the sessions and shared their suggestions for improvement. 

A second round of focus groups will be held over the autumn, and will explore topics including values and behaviours, performance and reward and recognition. Full details and booking information will be shared around the start of term.

Report on staff feedback

As for where we are now, the staff survey team is currently collating all feedback and recommendations generated in the focus groups. This will form the basis of a report which will be presented to the University Executive Board (UEB) on 18 September – colleagues who attended the focus groups will be able to review the report before it goes to UEB. The report will later be made available via the 2017 Staff Survey web pages.

Diversity and Inclusion report

Survey responses on protected characteristics (such as gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and disability) have been collated into a new Diversity and Inclusion report, available to read on the 2017 Staff Survey web pages (university log-in required). 

There were notable differences in response from specific groups in several areas of the survey – for example, younger staff seem less aware of the Employee Assistance Programme. Negative responses were also significantly higher from those who were unwilling to declare any of their protected characteristics – this makes these responses difficult to address as the contributing factors behind these views may vary widely.

The results reinforce our priorities in terms of improving the experience of disabled staff and enabling the voices of transgender staff to be heard more widely. Actions in these areas are already underway via our LGBT+ action planning group, Athena SWAN implementation team and our work towards becoming a member of the Disability Confident Scheme. 

Actions and next steps

We are busily working behind the scenes to identify the next steps to take. The nature of our work means that it will take some time before we can share our plan of action, but in the meantime, please be assured that we are actively working towards our objectives of setting a University-wide plan for improvement. 

Following feedback from the summer focus groups, the 2017 Staff Survey web pages have also been updated to include details of the survey working group and its terms of reference, with further updates to follow over the coming weeks.   

New employee engagement KPI

Over the summer, UEB also agreed the targets for the employee engagement Key Performance Indicator (KPI). We will be using the Employer of Choice score from our survey results – this is a score out of 4 across 32 survey questions measuring employee engagement. 

Our current score is 3.32 and our target for 2019 is 3.36, which represents an increase of 1% across all 32 questions. 

Again, thank you to all who have shared their feedback so far – we look forward to sharing progress over the coming weeks and months.