Case Study – Diverse government agency

Situation

A large and complex public sector organisation awarded their annual staff survey project to a new provider – Full Circle Feedback. The client felt that the staff survey had become tired and they were especially concerned with the low response rates to issued surveys. The HR team had also found the staff survey project to be extremely burdensome and stressful to implement.

Challenges

The project presented a range of challenges including:

• High levels of cynicism about the organisation taking any action based on the staff survey results
• Lower response rates every year
• Under resourced HR team anxious about the staff survey project continuing to be a burden
• High levels of customising in extremely tight timeframes
• Incorporation of historical results from manual format into electronic reports for comparison

Solution

Full Circle Feedback worked closely with the client organisation to develop a detailed implementation plan. The survey was reviewed in consultation with the client via focus groups. The survey was improved to become far more relevant and streamlined. The challenge of increasing the response rates was a tough one with the very stringent timing for project completion. Firstly a communications campaign was designed and broadcasted at a team level by team leaders. Key messages were about letting staff have their say and a very firm commitment in advance from the CEO about the process that would be undertaken to action the results. The Full Circle software allowed for every rater to receive a personal request to complete the survey. The Full Circle Bureau took over the implementation of the project including setting up the project, sending out and following up surveys and generating the reports. The HR team received daily status reports re the project. There was a very comprehensive corporate report plus nearly 100 sub reports.

Outcome

A remarkable increase to a 78% response rate for surveys completion was achieved. The HR team was both relieved and very pleased at how easily the project was implemented. It was so well received by the organisation that the staff survey team received an award for excellence. Full Circle continued to work with the client in further probing the results, actioning them and continually informing staff that action had been taken. A subsequent evaluation project revealed that staff had noticed that the survey had made a positive impact.