Staff opinion survey to help UNE's development

October 24, 2007

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Alan Pettigrew, has launched an organisation-wide survey of UNE employees by the Sydney-based company Voice Project, giving it his "strong personal support".

The University of New England Staff Opinion Survey seeks the opinions of staff members on a range of issues that affect their feelings of engagement with the University, its objectives, and its operations.

Many organisations have found this Voice Project "climate survey" to be an effective tool in their development. In launching the UNE survey last Thursday (18 October), Professor Pettigrew emphasised how important it was for all staff members to become involved. "The results are based on aggregate scores," he explained, "so the more people who participate in it the more accurate the results will be – and the more meaningful for our institution."

"The data will highlight areas of the University that require additional support and attention," he said, "as well as those areas where internal and external service or work satisfaction is high. A further survey will be run in 18 months' time, enabling us to revisit our data and search for other areas of improvement or additional support. We are committed to ensuring that this mechanism for assessing and improving our work environment provides abundant and robust data – meaningful to all staff – and a significant tool to measure and move to improve all aspects of work at UNE."

Kay Hempsall (pictured here), Organisational Development Manager at UNE, pointed out that the survey had already been conducted at 16 universities. "At one university which has already run the survey twice," Ms Hempsall said, "its value to staff was reflected in a significant increase in participation from the first survey (62 per cent of staff) to the second (76 per cent)." She added that the same university had reported corresponding improvements in staff attitudes to some aspects of the work environment.

Responses to the survey are anonymous, and the results will be reported back to UNE from Voice Project in a way that will prevent any individual person's responses from being identified. The survey takes about 20-30 minutes to complete, and is available online.

Voice Project, based at Macquarie University, operates through that university's commercial arm, Access Macquarie Limited. Since its inception in 2002, Voice Project has worked with more than 1,000 organisations across a broad range of business sectors and industries, in Australia and overseas.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at October 24, 2007 10:26 AM