City Of Edinburgh Council Staff Survey 2009

We recently completed our fourth City of Edinburgh Council employee engagement survey. Previous council-wide surveys were conducted in 2000, 2003 and 2006.

The principle purpose of the 2009 survey was to identify and explore the issues important to employees and the impact of these issues on their working life. However, the survey also set out to assess changes in views, perceptions and experiences of staff since 2006, with an awareness of changes over the whole of the last decade. Importantly, we set the findings in the context of similar studies conducted by Ipsos for other local authorities and the public sector as a whole. This helped to identify what is realistic and where the council is ‘under-performing’.

The questionnaire was designed around a core of past survey questions, inclusion of appropriate other Ipsos normative questions and new questions reflecting current priorities.

The survey went ‘live’ on 9 September with all staff being invited to take part by completing a paper self-completion questionnaire or their individual online survey questionnaire. Over the following four weeks, we reported response rates at department level to the Council, to encourage ‘slow’ departments and running ‘live’ online results (only available to the core Council project team).

We provided the Council with Corporate and Service level presentations, including Ipsos comparative data, trend data and our interpretation of the key findings. In addition, we provided detailed Service and department results (with past and normative Scottish local authority and Scottish public sector comparisons), an anonymised data file and a final report including Key Driver Analysis on key aspects e.g. job satisfaction, advocacy and pride in working for the Council.

Technical details

All employees, including teachers, were invited to participate in the 2009 employee survey between 9th September and 2nd November 2009. 5,700 received a paper questionnaire ‘pack’ and approximately 17,000 staff received an email invitation from Ipsos containing a unique link to the online version of the questionnaire. A number of Services for Communities staff (particularly Manual/Craft grades) had the opportunity to complete the survey at group self-completion sessions administered by the Council. These sessions involved a PowerPoint presentation of the survey questions and completion using handheld electronic voting devices.

A total of 846 employees returned a paper questionnaire and 5,732 completed the survey online. A further 461 employees completed the survey at one of the group self-completion sessions. Overall, this represents a response of approximately 35% (based on 20,250 staff).