Employee engagement survey – a world class result

Here, at SUEZ recycling and recovery UK we are excited and full of anticipation as we await the results of our latest employee engagement survey. The survey is called U Say and we run it every two years with our partner Best Companies, a company specialising in workplace and employee engagement.

This is our fourth such survey and in preparation for it, we focused on creating a network of locally based and trained ‘promoters’ whose role was to encourage employees to complete the survey, as well as prior and during the survey window, ensuring the implementation of a comprehensive communication plan to reach all levels of employee.

One new feature this year that seemed to be very effective, was a twice weekly company-wide announcement showing the levels of completed surveys per area of the business. It seemed no one wanted to be near the bottom of that league table!

As in the last survey, this latest one was an electronic one, whereby an employee could complete the survey via a work based computer terminal, a number of tablets that were in circulation or from their own personal computer at home. There was no paper questionnaires to be seen, a real move forward from our very first survey that was based on post boxes and the HR team personally collecting completed surveys and bringing them all to a central point for Best Companies to come with a large van to collect.

The window for survey completion this year was four weeks and through the above steps I am very proud to announce that we achieved an absolutely fantastic return rate of 84 per cent. We had been pleased with our previous two survey return rates of 65 per cent, both well above the average for companies our size, so reaching 84 per cent was amazing in an organisation that covers 300 sites across the whole country. Best Companies said that they considered this a world class result. To have had such a large number of employees (just under 4,000) feeling confident enough to take part in the survey and trust in what we will do with the result, gives me confidence that as an organisation, we are heading in the right direction.

Another fantastic result was that for every completed survey, our CEO, David Palmer-Jones, made a donation to our corporate charity, Macmillan Cancer Support. We raised £26,868!