Employee engagement survey: Improved transparency yields engagement boost
Read how AFTRS turned their situation around to achieve an impressive shift in workplace culture
The Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) offers a range of postgraduate, undergraduate and short courses to students and practitioners in the screen and broadcast industry.
In 2016, AFTRS had identified concerns around staff engagement and were looking to boost job satisfaction and morale, as well as making AFTRS an inclusive employer and place people wanted to work. In particular, they wanted to foster a healthy and supportive workplace and were keen to understand the underlying issues.
Safety and participation at work
Louise Hope joined AFTRS as the Director, People & Culture in 2016, working alongside the then new CEO, Neil Peplow. Prior to Neil’s commencement, the organisation had conducted a staff wellbeing survey that showed some alarming results in terms of psychological safety in the workplace. Neil asked Louise to focus on turning the results around.
“It had uncovered an issue that we took really seriously – we wanted to foster a culture where people felt safe to speak up and the survey showed that wasn’t the case,” Louise said.
Louise engaged Voice Project to run the employee engagement survey to take a comprehensive look at how staff felt about a range of workplace practices.
“The engagement survey is so good because it measures everything in the organisation, not just how you feel in the moment about a particular aspect. It allows you to really hone in to see what needs to be addressed, giving you really clear feedback on which practices are letting the overall staff experience down and impacting on engagement.”
She said the survey feedback showed that overall trust in leadership was low. Staff felt there was lack of transparency and few opportunities to participate in decision-making.
“The general feeling was that that nobody consulted with anyone,” Louise said.
Despite receiving some confronting feedback, the AFTRS Executive Team, with support from their Council, decided to adopt a ‘radical transparency’ approach to sharing the survey results with staff in order to support trust-building and to model a more consultative approach.
“All of the results and feedback comments were made available on the intranet,” Louise said.
“I also organised divisional debrief meetings with staff but did not invite the divisional heads in that first year - in order to ensure staff had a space where they felt comfortable to share their feedback.”
She said follow-up focus groups helped to unpack several areas of workplace practices that staff wished to see improve.
“The focus groups were cathartic for people. And we were determined to address the issues raised.”
Leading a culture shift
The first area AFTRS set about improving across the organisation was satisfaction with leadership. Driving improvements in response to the engagement survey was built into each divisional director’s performance agreement.
To improve communication and transparency, the Staff Consultative Committee was re-imagined, with more staff representatives appointed and a broader mandate; the Diversity Taskforce was opened up to more staff; the WHS Committee structure and membership was re-vamped to include more representatives from across the School and the CEO engaged directly with all staff representatives once per quarter to allow strong two-way feedback mechanisms. Work was also undertaken to ensure better communication flow through Town Hall meetings held every two months and Divisional meetings each month that supported dissemination of information from the monthly Executive meeting. Minutes from monthly Executive meetings were made available and accessible on the intranet to support transparency.
A new performance review process was also established, alongside revised position descriptions, and this helped open up conversations between staff and their supervisors about responsibilities and expected work outcomes, as well as professional and career development. With support from the Chair of AFTRS Council, Russel Howcroft, the Executive team also placed a clear emphasis on the purpose and values of AFTRS – which became things that were talked about regularly.
Louise said a focused effort was also made to support mental health and wellbeing.
“We have a WHS committee, and we talk to them about all issues including mental health and wellbeing. Whenever there is a change initiative, we talk to them about impact on workload and health. The Staff Consultative Committee is also involved in those conversations.”
AFTRS followed up with another survey in 2018 to track their progress.
“I was incredibly realistic with the Executive Team that improvement would be gradual, that it would take some years to make the impact we wished to see. So, when I saw our results, I was a little bit surprised that we had achieved such a large increase,” Louise said.
Employee satisfaction with organisational progress had improved by 19%, employee engagement by 9% and intention to stay by 12%. There was also a 10% improvement in satisfaction with Executive leadership.
“The data really helped us to identify the most important areas to focus on and what would get us the greatest leap forward. By communicating about the results, and creating specific action plans for each division, people felt heard. And there was some surprisingly low-hanging fruit that was really easy for us to action – we just needed to listen.”
Empowering staff to work more flexibly
Redoubling their efforts, AFTRS continued with divisional focus groups and renewed divisional action plans.
The earlier work to improve psychological safety had shown that staff wanted to feel part of a trusted and valued community, so creating a more connected and flexible workforce became a focus in 2019.
“We really started to focus on creating a flexible atmosphere where people are trusted to decide how, when and where they do their best work,” Louise said.
“Many of our staff are in that ‘sandwich generation’ where they have caring responsibilities for both young children and aging parents and may be working a full-time role. We wanted them to feel supported to choose balance and choose a schedule that would help them to be and feel at their best.”
A huge amount of consultation and discussion with staff went into considering more flexibility and how to make this work within AFTRS. They also discussed the potential future benefits of being a more flexible workforce.
“We set up systems like VPN and provided laptops to staff and we started to test out how to foster inclusive meeting practices if some participants were in the office and some in a different location.”
Informed by these experiments, AFTRS introduced a range of policies and practices to support flexible working, which became a blessing when the pandemic hit a few months later.
Improving despite disruption
The year 2020 brought change on multiple fronts for AFTRS.
“Our new CEO Dr Nell Greenwood commenced in her role about two weeks before COVID hit. She has an extraordinary vision for the School. Having been a part of the Executive team, she was well aware of the changes we needed to make quickly to be able to deliver on her vision and to support a clearer and more collaborative ways of working together. This meant that halfway through the year we were rolling out an organisational restructure – the consultation for which had to been done remotely. We had to make sure that people understood the vision and the rationale and that they still felt really connected and engaged,” Louise said.
With the new structure came new Executive team members, Dr Romaine Moreton, heading up the School’s first ever First Nations & Outreach division, Con Apostolopoulos, heading up the Partnerships & Development division, and David Balfour, heading up the Teaching & Learning division.
“Nell’s focus in recruitment was on ensuring the new Executives embodied a values-led and human-centred leadership approach, with open and transparent communication styles to ensure that we had the best possible environment to deliver on her exciting and ambitious vision for the School. Romaine has delivered a new First Nations Strategy that embeds First Nations values at the heart of the School, guiding our behaviour and interaction with one another. With a key focus on relationality, responsibility and reciprocity, this has no doubt helped to drive the results we are seeing.”
Nell has increased the frequency of staff Town Halls to every four weeks, with an ‘all-staff drop-in’ session booked in between each Town Hall meeting. No questions are out of bounds.
“This has really helped staff to stay connected and provided an opportunity for staff to hear and ask about what is happening across the School.”
Louise said that Nell and the new Executive Team really prioritised communication - and how the School would adapt in the face of COVID-19 became a hot topic at the all-staff drop-ins.
“While it wasn’t our first foray into online teaching, most of the AFTRS courses are hands-on, practical and deeply experiential with collaborative practice and equipment use a key part of the experience. Pivoting to online required a whole of school effort.”
Despite these challenges, the next survey results in 2021 showed continued improvements. Employee engagement rose again by 8% and there was a significant shift in satisfaction with leadership – a further increase of 29%.
In regards to improving staff retention – the results trend suggests a continuing positive shift over the years. For example, between 2017 and 2018 employee’s two-year-intention to stay with AFTRS increased by 14%, and in 2021 it increased by further 12%. And this is borne out by AFTRS’ steady turnover rates.
Staying the course
Louise believes that renewed faith in leadership is the key driver behind these results.
“Both managers and individual team members are more engaged and empowered now, there is transparency around decisions and decision-making, and there is a more collaborative and open approach across teams. People have more trust and feel they are using their skills in way that is respected and important.”
Louise says her top three tips for driving organisational change are:
Use your employee engagement survey as a diagnostic tool and don’t be overwhelmed when the results come in.
The data is great but it doesn’t mean much in isolation. Speak to staff to ensure you understand what the data is telling you, figure out how to prioritise actions to be taken and identify the issues that stop people from being at their best.
Surface the ‘no’ in the room. Seek out dissenting views and respond by considering the feedback and how the project can be made better for it: “We place an emphasis on understanding the ‘no’ in the room so that we can be prepared and have thought through all of the potential impacts a project might have. This helps people to feel heard and valued – and their contribution is often really key!”
Voice Project provides research-backed surveys that measure employee engagement, leadership capability and customer satisfaction. These state-of-the-art surveys help organisations get the best feedback to drive positive change. Voice Project works with organisations across the not-for profit, private and public sectors. Get in touch.