Business Reporting

New survey process gives pub company insight into employee engagement

Project: change++ built a data process to present employee survey results back to large pub chain managers, providing an improved insight into employee engagement.

Services: Power BI.

Results: Managers can easily view timely and relevant primary data from employees to inform decision making.

The Client

A large pub company that employs over 14,000 people across over 4,000 sites.

Their Needs

As a large company with thousands of employees all over the country, it regularly conducts anonymous company-wide surveys to measure morale and employee satisfaction. The data is fed back to managers, who can then action changes if necessary.

In the past, the pub company used a third party to carry out the survey and reporting. But in 2019 it acquired another business, adding thousands of new employees to the survey. This entailed a much higher volume of data to process, and additional cost. Faced with the impact of the lockdowns on its revenues, it was keen to save on costs but realised the importance of continuing the employee survey. It decided to bring the survey in house, which also enabled the company to run more frequent surveys and gain a more consistent view on employee engagement.

Importantly, the company’s Director of HR operations needed to ensure the responses were gathered anonymously. Ideally, it wanted to give different users access to different data. For example, a manager should be able to see their team’s data while a senior manager should have access to the data of the multiple teams they oversee.

What we did

The pub company didn’t have sufficient data analytics resource internally and turned to change++ for our expertise in this area. We had previously worked together so the company had confidence in our teams’ abilities.

change++ worked closely with the company’s Director of HR Operations to ensure we understood its needs and to help create a custom process which could be reused for future surveys.

The company had already built an initial survey in SurveyMonkey to gather the responses anonymously. Using Azure storage and a Power BI dataflow, we built a process to take in the results and present them back in the form of reports shared as a Power BI App to all of its managers.

Each manager has secure access to an app published in Power BI that gives them a personal view of the data, allowing them to see the survey results relevant to their team. With this insight, managers can implement changes to improve employee experience. The solution presents the results to managers within a week of the survey being completed, allowing them to respond quickly to important feedback.

As the survey project evolved, and the questions being asked developed, change++ helped adapt the reports and the process to handle multiple survey results – presenting trends over time. We also provided ongoing systems support for handling the results of repeat surveys and overcoming any challenges the company’s teams encountered and responded to any further changes to the employee survey.

In fast moving sectors like hospitality, workforce data challenges arise as people move around the business and join different teams. change++ help to address these and other data issues including incorrect email addresses, inconsistent names, incorrect teams/manager etc. to provide consistent and accurate results that the HR team were able to use for analysis and decision-making.

“change++’s expertise and ongoing support was essential for smooth processing of valuable data.”

Director of HR Director Operations

The Results

The new Power BI data process solution has allowed the pub company to view the anonymous responses of up to 2000 staff. 225 managers, senior managers, directors and board members have been able to view data that is directly relevant to them, without undermining the employees’ anonymity. Furthermore, because the solution used Power BI, which it already had and did not use any backend database or ETL tool, running costs were negligible.

Regularly observing the wellbeing and satisfaction of employees has enabled the pub company to view trends over time and know when to implement changes. The Director of HR Operations said, “We really value hearing from our employees to help drive improvements in the way we operate. I think it’s important that our employees have a channel to anonymously provide honest feedback that can help managers make decisions and to make them aware of problems that need to be resolved.

“Thanks to change++’s Power BI solution, our managers can access the relevant results from the team or teams they oversee. This insight allows them to understand where to focus attention. Ultimately, its happy employees that leads to the fantastic customer service we deliver across our pubs.”

 

Benefits include:

• Managers have access to a user-friendly report that enables them to easily interrogate the data for their own specific team.
• The fast return of results allows managers to be reactive to evolving trends and implement changes quickly if necessary.
• Armed with fresh insight, managers can understand the trends in employee feedback and use this information to drive informed business decision making that improves employees’ experiences.
• Increased employee engagement ultimately leads to enriched customer service.
• Enabling employees to give their honest feedback promotes a positive working environment and ensures that the company can effectively support people throughout all aspects of the business.