Charles Sturt University
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Voice Project has been working with Charles Sturt University since 2003 to deliver their diagnostic comprehensive staff engagement survey every 2 to 3 years.
Their advocacy of the survey aided in steady growth of the tool in the sector, which then enabled robust benchmarking against other universities. The university has always treated the survey as an important “voice” mechanism for staff, protecting their anonymity carefully, reporting results transparently, and genuinely engaging with the feedback. This has led to a consistently high participation rate of over 70%, and culminated in a Change Challenge Award in 2019 for significant improvements as evidenced in the survey results. Voice Project has worked closely with Charles Sturt to ensure the survey was accepted as relevant and valid by a tough academic audience, and to enable and equip leaders to use the data effectively to drive change.
Support for survey design
For their early surveys, our consultant at Voice Project worked closely with a representative staff committee who reviewed the survey content and provided feedback for customising the survey based on contextual issues, diversity considerations, and requirements for internal reporting to key stakeholders in areas such as facilities, technology and equity. Because of this early investment, consulting on subsequent surveys has been fairly streamlined, applying learnings form previous surveys and making minor updates based on current issues such as new value statements and the impact of changes.
Because of this iterative approach, the survey had gradually grown over the years, and in our most recent review Voice Project recommended cutting the length of the survey to improve the experience of staff. Separate “service quality” surveys were now also conducted to provide feedback to facility and technology teams, making some content redundant. As a highly valued “voice” mechanism, some staff were concerned that this may have been a strategy on the part of management to avoid certain issues. Charles Sturt were able to clearly communicate that the revision was based on psychometric evaluation by Voice Project to minimise demands on staff and retain scope (i.e., at least one item from all previous survey categories was retained).
Support for feedback and action-planning
Voice Project worked with Charles Sturt to adapt and design custom report guidelines and action-planning toolkits for managers. Our consultant presented university results and facilitated discussion with the Executive Team as a group, and debriefed individual senior leaders on their Division or Faculty results, before jointly presenting to their teams of leaders and Heads of Schools. “HR Master Classes” were also conducted with the HR business partners to enable them to support leaders in feedback sessions and action-planning with staff. Presentations of the results were also given to the University Council, enabling an objective ‘third party’ perspective on performance.
To support momentum in action-planning, about 9 months after one of the surveys Charles Sturt asked Voice Project to run a workshop with Heads of Schools. Our consultant designed and facilitated the session, with:
Leaders looking back and sharing how their feedback sessions had gone, and what they had learned from staff in these sessions
Voice Project sharing trends in the sector to contextualise their issues, and success stories from other University clients who had achieved significant progress in similar areas
Leaders looking forward and sharing ideas for solutions and action-planning, and how they were monitoring, measuring and communicating progress with their teams.
