Fieldfisher develop action plans and firmwide initiatives as a result of engagement survey

Staff surveys are more important than ever, but only if the purpose of the survey is understood and the questions asked seek to inquire not just to validate. The questions in an engagement survey need to be searching and actionable – not award winning. The information it provides needs to be used with good intention and employees need to know and believe that good intention.

Employees need to trust that the survey’s purpose is to create opportunity for people to get involved, to make changes to the things that they care about the most.

After putting our annual survey on hiatus for a couple of years, largely because we had started to question the value ourselves – we took the opportunity to look for a partner to provide a platform that would allow us to survey in the way we wanted, not in a way that was prescribed. We wanted to maximise the ability to integrate our results at all levels of the firm and we wanted detailed demographics, so we could get to the heart of issues, not just take a broad view with the limited scope that might provide.

We eventually chose to partner with WorkBuzz, who from the very start demonstrated brilliantly the power of true engagement. They have exceptional knowledge on what drives engagement and the advantage that gives an organisation. We were also impressed with the importance they placed on confidentiality, which for us would be critical to the success of any survey.

WorkBuzz were able to advise us on how to build the question bank and to gently challenge us when we needed it, in doing so, they helped us produce a set of question that were honest, straightforward and open to the possibility we might need to change some stuff. Partners and employees have been very complimentary on how easy the survey was to complete and how candid the questions were.

We were keen to use a variety of demographics to help us create more detailed action plans, and this has been hugely important throughout the cascade process, by providing a unique set of results for each area. Probably most important for us though, was the detailed dashboards we were able to utilise once the survey had closed. Each department head and country leader has been given their own dashboard, so that they can build local action plans and communicate results quickly to each team.

“We have begun work on the action plans and have a number of firmwide initiatives underway as a result of the survey. As we move into the new year we are going to start to use pulse survey’s to work with different groups of people on more specific issues and we hope that confidence will continue to grow in how we use these surveys and the action we take as a result.”

Shelagh Corrigan
Head of Organisational Development