“Have your say” on the City & Guilds Group
19 April 2010
By Edward Wheeler, Account Manager, ORC International
The City & Guilds Group, the UK’s leading vocational awarding organisation, awards over 1.8 million certificates every year and employs over 1,000 people across the globe. Its corporate values promote excellence, engagement, integrity, innovation and fulfilment, and the organisation aims to offer a workplace that reflects these.
The Group encourages staff to provide regular, open and honest feedback on the organisation, underpinned by its annual employee engagement survey – supported by ORC International since 2003. The Group is committed to taking action, which ensures employees have faith in the survey process leading to impressive results. The survey regularly receives a response rate that exceeds ORC International’s UK cross-sector norm: 86% in 2009, compared to the overall average of 62%.
In order to continue striving for excellence, the 2009 survey set out to not only improve year-on-year results, but also to challenge the Group to achieve a "best in class" benchmark. This bespoke norm was compiled from the results of the top 15 performing organisations for each comparable question from ORC International’s perspectives database. At a time when most organisations were seeking to maintain engagement levels due to the recession, the Group actively set out to improve itself and how it manages its people by introducing this high performance target.
Amplifying the employee voice
2009 also saw the establishment of a Group Employee Forum to represent employees’ views and amplify the organisation’s employee voice. To ensure they were fully engaged and could play a key part in action, ORC International presented the results to the Forum, in addition to the Senior Management team. This ensures action remains high on the agenda and helps buy-in to any future changes and improvement initiatives.
The 2009 results showed excellent progress but highlighted some areas requiring further investigation. To gain additional insight, ORC International facilitated a series of focus groups which helped shape the specific areas requiring action.
City & Guilds has broadly divided the actions into two levels and individual department report owners were tasked to agree five priority survey areas on which to focus, and establish appropriate measures or targets for 2010 to determine progress made. These targets have also been incorporated within Senior Managers’ objectives.
