The Citizens Advice / PQF annual People Survey has been running for a number of years now, and apart from the addition of the wellbeing questions, little has changed.
This stability has allowed year on year comparisons to be made, but I now think (for the reasons listed below) that it is time for a review.
If you agree for the need for a review of the annual People Survey, please can you indicate this by either making a comment to this thread… or filling in this short form: https://forms.gle/wtdXJHjc3e3XbGUT7
Thanks in advance
Hitesh
Below are just a few reasons for review:
· Skewed results: With relatively small teams, staff satisfaction survey scores are overly affected by “live issues” and cause massive fluctuations. (Suggestion: There could be statistical confidence testing put in place to discount the highest and lowest answers).
· Unrealistic expectations: Our scores are compared with those who also have their staff satisfaction in that Quarter but that doesn’t tell me anything. If you’re like me, we beat ourselves up when scores drop from 95% to 85%, but we forget that many HR people will say any staff satisfaction score above 70% is good. (Suggestion: We instead compare our scores with our [CAB] statistical neighbours, or maybe CIPD’s Good Work Index so we can compare ourselves with the UK economy)
· Value to national organisation: I don’t think CitA use these scores to influence their service-wide People Strategy… unlike with QAA or LSA etc, I don’t recall ever seeing any feedback from CitA about what trends they’re seeing from annual People Satisfacton survey scores and service-wide tips etc.
· HR legal minefield: Staff acting in bad faith can use the survey to (at best) air issues which should really be addressed formally using the grievance process or (at worst) to make slanderous comments that in theory could put others at risk. Sometimes they say things that reveal their identity without explicitly naming themselves… but often we cannot act. This leaves us exposed.
· Not a two way street: The survey design puts the onus back on management/trustees to fix things, when actually it needs a team effort. The survey should explicitly ask what could the organisation do to improve things and secondly what could they do to improve things.
Kind regards
Hitesh
Hitesh Patel
Chief Officer of Citizens Advice Halton
