Gullane Golf Club, a prestigious golf club near Edinburgh, was keen to improve its employee experience, lower employee turnover and increase its attractiveness as an employer so that it could continue to offer a high-quality service to its members and visitors, and subsequently make the Club even more successful. They had asked us for our support with the development of a new online employee engagement survey, to run the survey, to analyse the findings and to communicate the results to the Leadership Team and the employees.
The Client’s Needs
The client had carried out a survey the previous year, however, the format was a paper survey issued to each employees’ home addresses and had received a limited response rate of 50%. As the results were paper based analysis required a great deal of effort to determine the results.
For 2023, the client was keen to improve the process, firstly by increasing participation and creating a communication plan for the employee survey. Secondly, comprehensively analysing the findings from the survey results and make comparisons with the previous year’s survey to capture the employee experience at the Club. Finally, to have action plans to address any learning from the results.
Our Solution
Working with the senior management team which included the Head of Finance, the Club Captain, and the Club Secretary, we used the previous survey questions as a starting point to allow us to compare the results from the previous year with the new findings. This is key to establishing if the employee satisfaction scores have improved or employees continue to be dissatisfied with a particular area.
Online Survey
We developed an online employee engagement survey. The benefits of the online survey were:
- Anonymity was guaranteed and therefore employees felt confident that they could be honest without any consequences and this increased completion of the survey.
- Ease of completion because it was accessible from a personal mobile phone or laptop.
- Time to complete to suit the employees, either at work or in their own time.
- Real time completion rates could be monitored.
An additional benefit for having the survey online was that it enabled us to provide updates quickly and easily on completion rates to the senior management team.
Asking the Right Questions
After consultation with the senior management team, we agreed a set of 30 questions within 9 categories with a five-point scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree. We also introduced 5 new employee engagement questions related to the Engagement Index which are important indicators of Pride, Recommendation, Present Commitment, Future Commitment and Motivation.
We also included a further 4 new questions to allow segmentation of the answers by:
- team,
- length of service,
- employment, and
- management status.
This enabled us to effectively analyse the themes and areas for improvement and highlight differences between teams and therefore allow targeted actions for the Club as an employer.
We also developed a communication plan to support the roll-out of the survey which included:
- A teaser email for the new survey
- A poster for the Club – ‘The Survey is Coming’.
- Launch date (the date to send the link to the survey and the supporting email to all employees)
- Email reminders with corresponding dates to prompt employees to complete the survey and the closing date.
- Closing of the survey
Results
The survey achieved a much higher completion rate, with 76% of their employees completing the survey. We analysed the results, breaking it down into low and high scoring responses and illustrating any movement up or down or consistent from the previous survey.
We created a detailed presentation for the senior management team with the score for each question and included a comparison with the previous year, e.g. improved, no change, or had decreased, along with recommendations on areas to nurture and develop, thematic analysis from the free text, and potential areas to focus on.
We finally provided a structured communication plan for effective dissemination of the key messages from the survey, action plans such as workshops, and pulse surveys, and finally a suggestion to schedule the 2024 survey to continue building employee engagement.
The senior management team shared the information we had provided with their managers and employees to build on our recommendations and suggested action plans.
Our ultimate goal which was to enable the Club to identify actions that they could take as an employer to improve the employee experience and ultimately benefit their members and visitors was achieved to the satisfaction of our client.