Creating a new engagement survey for Permanent TSB

Challenge

Structured, straightforward and engaging

Irish retail bank Permanent TSB started working with ETS back in 2016, selecting us as their exclusive engagement survey provider. We support them in running an annual employee survey (called ‘Every Voice Counts’). This goes out to all of their 2,500 employees. The programme’s aim is to capture both employees’ feedback and views, and their engagement levels in a structured and straightforward way. A key aspect is the ability to track progress at both an organisational and functional level and to engage their people in the process along the way.

Solution

Refreshing their approach

We have been able to support Permanent TSB with a number of aspects of the programme, a factor which was crucial in them in choosing ETS as a partner, as Fiona Taylor, Head of Employee Relations, explains:

“When selecting a provider, we wanted a flexible survey tool, but also wanted to ensure we received end to end support with the entire survey process from question design to detailed insights and action planning – that’s what ETS offered PTSB.”

The close partnership we’ve forged with the Permanent TSB project team has enabled us to gain a deep understanding of their organisation, people and strategy. And this has meant we could design and refine their question set to give an accurate measure of their employee experience, configure the survey platform to fit their needs and put in place a timeline for each rollout.

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We’ve also helped them to strike the right balance where survey participation rates are concerned – a really common challenge area. The key here has been to be proactive in encouraging participation on a voluntary basis but without making employees feel overly pressured into completing the survey.

For their latest survey, they were keen to refresh their approach in line with business priorities, adding in a new culture index to help them further embed key behaviours and measure ongoing progress against these. At ETS we saw our role in this process to be to challenge their thinking, and offer advice to ensure they got the very best outcome at the end of it.

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Result

The ‘link and label concept’

The survey results have been used to brief the executive team at Permanent TSB, highlighting both the priority development areas and strengths to build upon. Beyond this, the results are also cascaded down through the organisation. It has proved to be an invaluable way for them to influence and link organisational change with employee feedback using the ‘link and label concept’ and ‘you said, we did’ communications. The latest survey revealed three priority action areas from an organisational perspective: wellbeing, workplace/ways of working and speaking up. To enable effective action planning at a functional level, each team prioritises their own areas of focus, based on their results, and is supported by an ‘Every Voice Counts’ Lead. Furthermore the ETS survey platform offers access to an online action planning tool, which is useful in allowing central oversight and transparency of action plans.

Case study