UK’s biggest staff survey will help improve Civil Service

The Civil Service People Survey was rolled out across a total of 96 departments, agencies and NDPBs (non departmental public bodies) in October.

The survey replaced existing employee opinion surveys and forms part of the wider Employee Engagement Programme; an initiative to embed staff engagement across the Civil Service.

Results from the survey will help Civil Service leaders decide where best to focus their actions to improve staff engagement.

The benefits of the Civil Service People Survey include:

• a reduction in the overall cost of employee surveys in the Civil Service by using a single survey
• a set of comparative results for all organisations. This will improve understanding by the inclusion of appropriate benchmarks
• a focus on what drives civil servants to achieve their full potential and maintain a high level of health and wellbeing

Sir Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, believes the People Survey will help provide a greater understanding of civil servants’ experience of work, leading to improved public services.

He said: “The Civil Service faces unprecedented challenges tackling complex policy issues every day. In order to meet these challenges we must harness the talents of all our staff to the full.

'Our Employee Engagement Programme enables us to do this by understanding and improving civil servants' experience of work, helping to ensure that they have access to the opportunities they need to achieve success in their roles.

'This, in turn, supports our drive to deliver improved public services and better outcomes for citizens,' Gus added.

The results of the People Survey will be available from February 2010.

Delivery of results

The gap between the fieldwork and the release of results will be longer in 2009 than will be commonplace in future years. Delivering a common survey across 96 organisations that vary greatly in size and complexity presents a big logistical challenge in the first operational year.

Challenges include:

• 25% of civil servants were invited to fill in paper surveys as they do not have regular internet access, and each paper response needs to be keyed in manually
• Each open comment response must be proof read and themed and its anonymity maintained
• Questionnaires will need to be translated from as many as 24 different languages back into English
• Responses need to be collated into around 10,000 individual unit levels. All of these need to be checked, validated and quality assured
• The Employee Engagement model needs to be tested and verified

As a consequence of all these factors, adequate time must be provided so that results are accurate and fit for purpose.

Once business units throughout the Civil Service receive their results, managers will be looking to use them to implement real change that can enhance employee engagement and improve public services.