Summary of meetings in March 2009
We met with representatives form a wide range of organisations – both from the public and private sectors as well as a significant number of member organisations.
We thought it would be useful to to summarise some of the key points that came up at meetings with employers and the member organisations in Barbados, Trinidad and Jamaica – mainly about how to engage people in taking part, and achieving high response rates.
- Running employee and stakeholder surveys internally carries the risk of lower response rates due to concern over confidentiality – people are less likely to give completely open and honest feedback if they believe responses could be traced back to them
- Need to fully explain / reinforce how people’s confidentiality will be assured … externally hosted, can access it from any PC if concerned, results not being attributable to an individual level at any time (i.e. not reporting results where there is less than 10 respondents in the grouping) etc.
- Offering some kinds of incentives – both personal and / or related to the business – particularly for the customer / member / stakeholder research, but can even be done with employee surveys without breaking confidentiality
- Building up to the launch of the survey, publicising / promoting it and providing a full range of information in advance of opening the survey
- Being clear on why you want / need their input / feedback – how the results and input will be used – what you will be doing to provide feedback / a summary of the findings – what actions you will be taking – providing a good level of transparency in the process
- For employee surveys, running a mirrored version of the survey for the ‘senior managers’ so that the phrasing of any questions about leadership assesses their beliefs in terms of effectiveness, and therefore enables you to make a direct comparison with employees’ ratings and views
- For member / customer / stakeholder surveys, using information you already hold which is tagged to their login PIN (which could be their membership number or customer account number) – this sets up the ability to analyse the results by the different demographics, avoiding the need to ask questions at the start of the survey and ensuring integrity of data, with them only being able to participate once.
- Using smart question-flow so that people only see questions relevant to them – this can be determined by the demographics they select e.g. if they select ‘less than 12 months’ for the length of service, then it’s only these people that see questions on recruitment and induction
Here are details of the organisations we met:
Barbados
- Banks Holdings (Brewers)
- Barbados Chamber of Commerce
- Barbados Conference Services Limited
- Barbados Employers’ Confederation
- Barbados Small Business Association
- Barbados Tourism Authority
- Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation
- Catalyst Consultants
- ECSS Ltd
- Ethnic Vision
- Global Directories (Barbados) Ltd
- Profiles Caribbean Inc.
- Systems Consulting Ltd
- The Barbados Light & Power Company Ltd
- The Productivity Council
Trinidad
- T&T Police Department
- T&T Chamber of Industry and Commerce
- TATT
- Carribean Telecomms Union
- Superpharm
Jamaica
- Jamaica Chamber of Commerce
- Jamaica Employer’s Federation
- CARI-CODE (Caribbean Centre for Organisation Development Excellence)
- Jamaica Customer Services Association
- S.A.M.S. (Security Advisory & Management Services)
- Jencare Skin Farm Co. Ltd.
- Anne Martin Medi Spa
- Jamaica Customs
A further visit is planned in May 2010 and if you are interested in coming along to a drop-in session, or would like to arrange a private meeting then please contact us by using this e-mail link - just giving us some brief information about what you would like to discuss, along with your contact details.
As soon as the dates are confirmed we will then contact you.