Customer feedback seems to have been top of many company agendas for a long time now. Not a day goes by without getting asked for views on service, product environment, price and so on.
But while customer views are vital the last few years have seen one crucial group of people missed out, employees.
Who is better placed to give an honest view on any aspect of service in an organisation than the people who work at the heart of it, whether they be front line or back of house, junior or management, every employee has an opinion.
While employee feedback has been limited to an annual survey with lots of questions the day to day views are lost, forgotten or worst of all, never captured because of staff turnover.
Well the NHS are looking to change that and are encouraging it’s hospital trusts to capture employee feedback quarterly using a simple survey known as ‘Staff Friends and Family’ (Staff FFT) .
The Friends and Family test has been instilled for patients in A&E, Inpatients and Maternity for many months and has been a success in many areas. While Patients are asked just one question about recommending the hospital they have visited, Staff FFT seeks to ask colleagues 2 questions based on the patient FFT question. Asking colleagues how likely they would be to recommend their organisation as a place to receive care or treatment and as a place to work.
A key stipulation is that colleagues can only give feedback once per quarter which can be hard to guarantee once a web address or paper surveys are in circulation, especially if the Trust is keen to ensure anonymity of the feedback. Identifiers in a staff survey quite often impact the honesty of the response because of the fear of repercussions.
In partnership with Ashford and St. Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust We Love Surveys have resolved this problem with a closed survey that requires the colleague to identify themselves before the survey begins. After the initial verification using a unique code per employee there is no link to the individual either for the trust or the We Love Surveys business. This guarantees that a colleague’s feedback will be completely confidential other than identifying the ward or department that they work in.
In the first wave of feedback, Ashford and St Peters received feedback from over 10% of colleagues. The trust were very happy with this based on the limited three week window (instead of the standard three months) and are confident that in the next wave they will secure feedback from many more colleagues.
Jules Potter, Head of Organisational Development, said of the initial feedback:
“Its really positive for us to see so many colleagues getting involved in giving us feedback and it has certainly given us some great insight into how our colleagues feel not just about the standard of care we are delivering but also what it is like to work for the organisation.
The feedback will be reviewed with our internal management teams and employee panels in order to agree priorities for the future and we will be looking forward to reviewing the first full quarter feedback when we receive those results in October.”
The solution itself is quick and easy to implement with a simple, responsive web survey for completion and all of the behind the scenes work completed by We Love Surveys. Summary reports are made available both at the end of each quarter and on demand as required by the trust.
It’s not a secret any longer that to improve customer (or patient) experience you first have to take a good look at the employee experience and most of the time real insight can be gleaned from one or two questions and a comment, you don’t need a 50 question, mind-numbing survey to achieve that, believe us, we see that fact proven every day through a number of our projects.
Helen Dargie is co-owner of We Love Surveys, a survey provider specialising in bespoke feedback solutions for a wide range of industries, including healthcare. With a career spanning many disciplines including Retail and Project Management, Customer Service, HR and Business Management she is now focussed on helping business leaders see the opportunities in their business by identifying areas for service improvement, both internal and external.
For more information please contact her by email at helen@welovesurveys.co.uk or check the website www.welovesurveys.co.uk