How our employee survey drives continuous improvement at Bristow & Sutor

In this weeks Leading the Way blog, Kim Parsons, Group Employee Experience Manager, explains how the results from a recent company-wide survey are now influencing ongoing change and continuous improvement across the Group.  

 

Over to Kim … 

At Bristow & Sutor, we are very proud of the great work we do as a Group, but we are always looking for ways to improve and a big part of this is listening to feedback from our employees.  

 

Measurable change  

In March, as part of our ongoing partnership with WeThrive, we asked employees from across the Group to complete an anonymous survey. The results will help us all work together to safeguard employee wellbeing, improve productivity and improve our working lives. In total, 74% of all staff across the business contributed their thoughts and we were really pleased with such a high completion rate especially as this was our first full survey. Senior leadership across the Group have now been briefed on the findings ready for wider roll-out to the managers across the Group. We recognise it is incredibly important that employees see real outcomes after taking the time to share their thoughts and feelings and we are committed to keeping everyone updated on progress and involving employees themselves in making positive changes. 

Rather than creating extra work for our busy Managers, the WeThrive platform smartly converts feedback into suggested actions and immediately links to e-learning and other support like webinars. This means managers will be able to implement the actions required right away with the support and guidance of HR and the involvement of their teams wherever possible. It is intended that this data is utilised as an additional resource in the comprehensive toolkit available to our managers, empowering them with the insightful data needed to help support the wellbeing and success of their teams.  

 

Managerial Thoughts 

Less than a month after our latest survey closed, managers within the business are now undertaking training so that they can properly understand, assess and act upon the feedback at their disposal. The internal response to the WeThrive platform and training from managers in the business has been one of excitement – our managers are keen to use the data proactively and regularly and to quickly act on the findings wherever possible. 

Alison Edwards, Group Financial Controller said: “Capturing data and converting it into Management Information (MI) is instrumental in measuring the health of a business and its people. The impact of Covid 19 on businesses has been well documented but now is the time to act and ensure challenges and concerns around workplace wellbeing are addressed swiftly. By conducting these surveys through WeThrive, we will continue to have access to valuable information and counter concerns, increase productivity and give our employees a sense of empowerment and ownership over improvements in the business.” 

We are committed to repeating similar exercises via WeThrive as this will help us to identify other areas for improvement and allow us to measure our progress. Committing to this process over time will allow us to see the impact of the changes we make. Now that results are beginning to be shared with managers, actions plans are set to be developed over the coming weeks and outcomes from this initial exercise will begin to be seen across the business.  

 

Immediate reflections 

We ensured that the survey was anonymous to encourage honest and open feedback and we are delighted to report that a lot of responses celebrated the great working environment many employees feel Bristow & Sutor already has. This is really encouraging and is just as important for us to analyse and celebrate as recognising the challenges employees currently face. We will celebrate and seek to share best practice wherever we can. The balance of existing positivity and room for improvement can be seen in the two ‘wordclouds’ below, which were derived from the survey results and highlight the most common words and phrases across all responses.

Team spirit is something we take pride in and it is great to see that this shines through. Many employees commented on the support they get from colleagues and team support was highlighted as a positive area as well as the overarching feeling that we are a business which is keen to prioritise employee needs alongside those of our clients. Our company ethics and direction came in for particular praise and seems to be aligned with the thoughts of most people within the business.  

Taking more time after experiencing negative calls is one area where some survey responders identified possible improvement and it is this kind of self-reflection that will help improve our wellbeing support and guidance. The Health and Wellbeing survey we carried out last June gave us lots to work with to address concerns related to the impact of COVID-19 and we continue to operate in what continues to be a very unusual time. We are subject to circumstances beyond our control and we recognise that we must continue to identify what can be improved and adapt our ways of working as we move back to some kind of normality. Ways of working and living have evolved and by encouraging open and regular feedback, we have the best chance to flexibly respond to the adapting climate and needs of our people.  

The valuable insight already gained into how Bristow & Sutor employees feel is owned by everyone and every member of staff will have a role in acting on these findings. Adopting WeThrive and creating demonstrable action plans is just one way our business is benefiting from data-driven approaches and we will continue to commit to these solutions as we strive to be Cool, Calm and Collected.