Case Study
NCHA use their staff surveys to demonstrate commitment to employee voice and empower their managers through action planning.
Evolving action planning processes
NCHA have run employee engagement surveys for a number of years, and now work with Agenda Consulting as their external survey partner. NCHA are continuously evolving their action planning process to make the most impact with their surveys and demonstrate their commitment to staff feedback.
Objectives
- Benchmark performance in key topics against other housing associations and social care providers
- Increase survey response rates to get a good picture of how staff are really feeling
- Demonstrate a commitment to listening to employees through transparency
- Empower managers through new action planning processes
Solution
Working with Agenda Consulting on their employee engagement surveys, NCHA are able to identify topics that need attention based on their employees’ feedback and put actions in place to improve in these areas.
Agenda’s survey technology enables NCHA to disaggregate their survey results by teams, providing the opportunity to identify where particular teams score lower on certain topics in comparison to the whole organisation, as well as teams which score higher.
Disaggregation of survey results enabled NCHA to run focus groups with lower performing teams, to understand more about what lay behind the results, to give further guidance on how to address priority topics. Top scoring teams also address results and develop action plans, so that they are constantly developing. Lower scoring teams can be influenced by what higher scoring teams are doing particularly well.
Provided with training and support, managers are given the autonomy to lead on their own team’s survey action plan, using their team’s individual survey results. In order to ensure that meaningful action is taken, analysis is conducted to see if there are changes being made and outputs are monitored.
Without our survey results, we wouldn’t know how people were really feeling. Rather than working on what we think we should be working on, we can focus on issues that need addressing based on clear evidence from employee feedback.
Our relationship with the Agenda team is really good, they help us understand and communicate the results with the rest of the team in a meaningful way.
Outcomes
- NCHA employees can trust that their feedback is anonymous and analysed externally and can be confident that action will be taken off the back of it. As a result, the response rates to NCHA’s staff surveys have increased over time.
- NCHA have created a ‘Colleague Voice’ which is a forum of employees from across the organisation, with the aim of achieving open communication across different departments. This group is the first to see and discuss the staff survey results, demonstrating the prioritisation of employee opinions.
- Managers can feel more involved in the survey process and empowered to implement meaningful changes, based on their team’s feedback.
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