Also using ORC and have been very impressed with the service and the highlights toolkit – very intuitive. I’ve had great support from the team there.

We’ve had HE benchmark data of 20plus universities for 2014 so clearly many people using them . Our Executive have also been very interested in the public/private sector benchmarks. Will continue with ORC for our follow up survey at the end of next year.  Have certainly been worth the additional costs. Have paid for a few extras – e.g. summary document of the free text comments – but well worth it – extremely time consuming task. Agree with Linda re multiple demographics – I did add.

Ease of the reporting tool has certainly helped with buy in of results – particular at a local level. Went down to Academic Department. Inevitably the survey is just the start - now concentrating on action planning – both locally and institutional.

Kind regards

Natasha

Natasha Bennett

Deputy Director, Organisational and Staff Development

Middlesex University

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0208 411 5237

What I forgot to say was that we met with CAPITA, Robertson Coopers and ORC International. We selected ORC and have had a really good experience with them. They aren’t the cheapest (in the region of £25K) but they have been really easy to work with, and very responsive to requests. We opted for their tailored package which included the Highlights Tool (online results) as part of it and have no regrets. The tool is robust and useful. The only additional feature I would have liked was to have paid about another £1100 to be able to use up to 4 different demographics rather than just one. At present we can cut the data by job family, or gender, or age, or length of service, or disability, etc. etc. the extra money would have meant we could have cut the data by job family and age and gender for instance.

We will use them again in future for an interim/pulse survey and again in 3 years’ time

Best wishes

Linda

Hello Deborah/all

Last October I asked this question and the results I obtained back then were as follows:

Summary

·         10 out of 19 Universities who responded use CAPITA. Prices vary according to numbers of staff, length/type of survey used. £6K to £25K – some hidden costs depending on types of reports

·         2 out of 19 have devised their own in-house survey. Leeds - working on a School/service basis providing a traffic light report and find more of a buy-in to the outcomes – pretty inexpensive using BOS

·         7 others use – Aon Hewitt (£39,080), ORC International (£30-35k), Priority Research (?), Valuentis (£15K). Robertson Cooper’s ASSET tool (?),  Edgecumbe Research, Real World Group (£10K - £14k) Prices vary

I have got details of which University uses which provider if anyone wants the information

Best wishes

Linda

Hi

We are about to start planning for our next staff survey and were wondering who other universities use to undertake their survey – and what their experience has been?

We would appreciate any feedback and look forward to hearing from you.

Debbie

Debbie Blundell

University of Central Lancashire

Human Resources

Fylde Building

Preston

PR1 2HE

Email:  [log in to unmask]

Tel:  01772 892328