Frequently Asked Questions

UoR View and the Employee Engagement Survey 2025 process

1. What is employee engagement and why does it matter?

Employee engagement refers to the connection employees feel with their jobs and their organisation. If you are engaged at work, you enjoy your role, feel secure, developed, respected and recognised. You get a real sense of achievement from your job. You know where the organisation is headed and believe in in its cause.

Being engaged certainly benefits the individual, and of course it benefits the organisation too. An engaged employee:

• Is proud of their organisation
• Cares about the future of their organisation
• Is willing to go the extra mile at work
• Would like to be working for the organisation for the next few years
• Advocates the organisation to others.

All this means measurable improvements for the organisation: increased productivity, less absence, and lower employee turnover. Generally, the workplace becomes a better place to be.

Employee engagement has become an essential competitive issue globally, as organisations compete to attract and retain talented people in their workforce. Find out more at: What is Employee Engagement - Engage for Success 

2. Why are we doing this survey?

Employee engagement can only be measured by asking employees themselves to identify an organisation’s strengths and weaknesses as a workplace. A survey is one of the most important ways to improve your work lives and the organisation overall – it provides an objective, quantitative and qualitative measure of engagement. Once we get the results, we have the opportunity to celebrate what we are good at and identify issues to help make positive changes to the workplace.

3. Why has it been so long since the last full survey?

The University ran its last survey of all staff in 2020. There hasn’t been another since because the contract with our previous provider expired and work has been carried out to identify a suitable new one, to allow the University to better conduct a range of employee engagement surveys on a regular basis.

4. Who are People Insight and why are they involved?

People Insight are employee engagement specialists. We have asked them to conduct the survey and use their expertise to advise us on what to do as a result. They also have extensive experience in running employee surveys with other organisations across the UK and internationally. They are an experienced HE partner, working with over 75 UK HEIs on their staff listening activities.

5. Is the survey voluntary?

Yes. Participating in the survey allows you to express your opinions and help make a difference in your workplace. We really hope you will complete it.

6. How long will it take to complete the survey?

The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete. It is really easy: you select from the multiple-choice boxes to show to what extent you agree or disagree with a number of statements, and then have the opportunity to write free text comments on burning issues you want us to know about.

7. Is the survey confidential?

Absolutely. One of the benefits of an outside agency like People Insight administering the survey is that all your answers go to them, including whether or not you individually have completed it. At no point will anyone at the University, including senior leaders and managers, be privy to individual responses.

This means that you can be completely honest with your responses without them being tracked back to you personally. People Insight administers the Employee Engagement Survey according to strict confidentiality policies and takes this very seriously.

8. How can it be confidential when you ask me for my age and length of service, etc?

It is optional to complete the requests for personal information at the end. All personal responses to this survey will be kept completely confidential. People Insight will collect, report, and analyse the data. While we will be looking to produce reports based on the feedback from certain respondent groups – e.g. by different Schools or Departments – to help us better understand where we need to take action, we will only be able to receive reports for groups where there are 10 or more respondents.

If there are fewer than 10 respondents, that team's survey results will not be reported on in isolation, to protect individual identities. This doesn’t mean that any responses will be ignored - all responses will be included at least in reports at the overall level, so your voice will still be heard.

9. How is the survey data broken down?  

Typically, the data will be broken down by demographics such as School/Directorate, length of service and a range of others. This will target action planning where most needed. As stated above, analysis will only be provided for demographic breakdowns with 10 or more responses to ensure that individual responses remain anonymous.

If you have more than one position at the University, your responses will be included in the School/Directorate analysis where you have the highest FTE, or if your positions are broadly the same FTE, the longest length of service.

10. What about anonymity of the free text comments?

When you are writing the free text comments, you will get the following warning: Please take care when providing this feedback.

Please note that any comments that you make will be repeated verbatim in the feedback report from People Insight. Although they will not reveal the name of the person who provided the comments, you should consider whether you could be identified from your comments and, if so, whether you would wish to be. If you are concerned about this either before, or after writing your comments, please contact People Insight directly via support@peopleisnight.co.uk

11. What is the point - will what I say make a difference?

Sharing your thoughts about your work will help drive real change, and your thoughts are unique – we want to hear from everyone. The survey is one of the best ways we have to voice our opinions honestly and openly with the goal of improving our own work lives and the organisation overall.

12. Can I amend my answers once I have submitted the survey?

If you have submitted your answers and would like to amend them, please contact support@peopleinsight.co.uk and let us know. We can either reset the whole survey for you or reset the survey without deleting any data so you can make any amends from the start of the survey.

13. How will our survey be accessible to a screen reader?

People Insight’s online surveys have been developed following best practices in accessibility and web standard compliance. They follow WCAG 2.0 AA recommendations whenever possible during the development of the survey. The usability has been tested using most common readers such as Jaws, NVDA or MacOS Voiceover. However, due to the wide range of available screen readers and their frequent changes and updates, different interpretation of standards and different methods available for browsing a web page within said readers, People Insight are unable to guarantee error free operation in all available readers and their versions.

The layout has not been externally tested and certified through an independent third party, therefore People Insight are unable guarantee that our standard layout is 100% fulfilling all WCAG 2.0 AA requirements at the moment. Customers requiring a layout fulfilling a specific WCAG level, shall contact People Insight via support@peopleisnight.co.uk.

The People Insight mid-term roadmap contains further accessibility improvements to our survey layouts and additional accessible question types. This will further improve the standards compliance, e.g., support for more recent WCAG recommendations, and usability for screen reader users in our upcoming online surveys.

To summarise, People Insight keep the surveys as simple as possible sticking to best practice to accommodate most readers. If there is a couple of users who still are having difficulty with their technology on the surveys, please get in contact with People Insight and they can find alternative ways for them to answer the survey, whether this being an objective People Insight employee answering the survey with/for them.

14. GDPR/Privacy

The security of your information is important to us. All your data is private and confidential, and we take all reasonable steps to ensure that your information is handled securely and in accordance with our Privacy Policy https://peopleinsight.co.uk/privacy-policy/

All personal data held by the Company is held in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR and Data Subjects’ rights, as set out in our Data Protection Policy (attached). We will retain and use your information for only as long as necessary to provide you with our services, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our legal rights. Formal processes and procedures are in place to securely dispose of devices that may contain client Data.

Hopefully that provides you with the necessary reassurance that we certainly take data protection very seriously and so any data you provide us will be in safe hands and very much treated in accordance with GDPR.

15. Privacy/Confidentiality

The survey is confidential in that the responses come directly to People Insight, and whilst they technically are able to see who has completed it and see individual responses, People Insight do not release any raw data back to the University or divulge information on who completed the survey.  When People Insight do provide the results to the University, People Insight report this in aggregated format in order to help maintain anonymity.

The reporting threshold for the survey is ten, so although you may only be one person in a certain category/demographic the University will not be able to cut that data by that demographic unless it has 10 people or more in. Your results will therefore then be included in the overall survey results and won’t be able to broken down further by demographic i.e. gender. 

Unless you directly or indirectly identify yourself within the comment sections your results will be anonymous to the University.

We do encourage you to answer the survey as honestly and openly as possible to be able to make the most effective improvement actions, with the awareness that you are comfortable in the idea that all answers are aggregated.

16. When will we hear about actions taken as a result of the survey?

The University will receive a report of survey data in March 2025, at which point we will conduct our own review and begin to develop action plans. We will share the key findings of the survey with all staff from April onwards, as well as our plans to address some of the issues identified. Local action planning will be led at School/Directorate level and their plans shared with their teams directly. A full summary of the survey responses and action taken or planned will be published later in the year, with examples also shared of where improvements have been made as a result.

Contact the Human Resources team if there is something not covered here by emailing uor.view@reading.ac.uk