Customer delight

Case studies

ICON employee opinion survey

ICON plc is a global provider of outsourced development services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries. Sarah King, Project Analyst for Strategic Human Resources, is responsible for the new all-employee global survey.

ICON had previously conducted surveys across a number of regions and divisions using different formats, systems and approaches. This was the first global survey and its aim was to source both local and global perspectives and to identify development areas across divisions and teams.

ETS’ role included the provision of survey guidance the design of the report outputs as well as consulting on how to analyse the data. ICON had a specific need for the survey response data to be categorised and stored in a way that gave multiple people access to it and also to create action plans specific to their teams.

The survey has met its goal of giving an insight into employee views globally and by divisional and regional categories. The results confirmed where ICON is doing well and also highlighted potential development areas. King commented:

ETS offered us the flexibility we needed to meet our goal for the survey system; we could not have achieved this without a partner that allowed us that flexibility. Also, the report and action planning tool was ideal for our needs, particularly with so much data to analyse.

ICON is made up of five divisions across 71 locations in 38 countries. A benefit of the action planning tool was that divisions can take responsibility to produce reports and use their local knowledge and analysis to drive actions.

How close was the ETS solution to ICON’s ideal world? Sarah King responds:

In designing the survey process we had a number of key objectives and these were met fully by the system provided by ETS. However it also exceeded our expectations with the availability of the action planning tool, which will help us greatly in monitoring our action plan progress going forward.