SDN Childcare Services
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Improving survey participation and action planning.
We have been supporting SDN Children’s Services, a medium-size early learning and childcare organisation in NSW, in their employee engagement journey since 2015. Although staff engagement and satisfaction levels remained moderately high for the first two engagement surveys, this organisation was keen to further improve survey participation and staff experience, which appeared to be stagnating.
Instead of conducting the high level results discussion and workshop that we have in the past, we partnered with People & Culture last year to facilitate a deep-dive action planning workshop which aimed at gathering more concrete ideas for action from approximately 50 middle managers. This workshop primarily focused on three priority areas including rewards and recognition, cross-unit cooperation and communication and career opportunities. We split these managers into small group discussions where they explored the group’s understanding of these practices, specific barriers, available supports and innovative solutions to these issues. Insights from these discussions were summarised by Human Resources to inform follow-up actions. In the preparation for the latest engagement survey, we specifically suggested ways to improve the participation rate such as reducing survey length, promoting staff perception of external handling of survey, and closely monitoring and tracking the response rate against historical trends.
What was the outcome? They achieved their highest participation rate since 2015, which meant that managers and staff could have more confidence in the reliability of the results. Also, there were significant improvements in 16 out of 29 practices, particularly in priority areas including cross-unit cooperation, which is essential for the organisation’s work across multiple professional disciplines, and career opportunities, which has informed the development of a career pathway and succession planning strategy. The improved outcomes have led to improved trust and underpins ongoing development of an employee value proposition based on working in partnership with staff to create a better experience for them.
