HomeMy WebLinkAboutCAO-06-054 - Employee Culture SurveyREPORT
Report To: Finance and Corporate Services Committee
Date of Meeting: September 5, 2006
Submitted By: Doug Paterson, Director of Human Resources
Prepared By: Kate Sullivan, Communications Associate
Wards} Involved: n/a
Date of Report: August 28, 2006
Report No.: CAO-06-054
Subject: EMPLOYEE CULTURE SURVEY
RECOMMENDATION:
That the Brock University Workplace Health Research Laboratory (WHRL) be retained to
complete acorporate-wide Employee Culture Survey.
BACKGROUND:
On April 10, 2006, Professor Lindy Duxbury, of Carleton University's Sprott School of Business,
made a presentation to Council and senior staff about the changing workplace. The need for a
corporate-wide Employee Culture Survey was raised in her presentation, which also highlighted
the urgent need for employers to develop strategies to retain and attract qualified staff in an
increasingly competitive market -especially in light of local, national and international shifts in
demographics. The purpose of the survey is primarily to understand what actions may need to
betaken by the city in this regard.
At the Finance and Corporate Services Committee meeting of May 1, 2006, the following
resolution was adopted:
"That staff be directed to commence the process of obtaining a consultant to design and
administer acorporate-wide Employee Culture Survey to City staff."
A corporate-wide employee culture survey would:
^ Identify the current organizational culture and the gap between it and our preferred culture.
^ Enable us to subsequently measure and monitor our ongoing progress.
^ Serve as a foundation for future plans and strategies aimed at retaining our current
workforce while attracting new employees to the organization.
On June 27, 2006 the City issued a request for proposals to conduct the corporate-wide
employee culture survey. Twelve proposals were received, with price estimates ranging from
$19,000 to $100,000. After thoroughly reviewing all of the proposals received, on August 23 the
City's Employee Culture Survey Committee interviewed two proponents and selected its
preferred proposal from Brock University's Workplace Health Research Laboratory (WHRL}.
REPORT:
WHRL is a contract research and consulting agency within Brock University that develops tools
for the measurement and assessment of key employee and corporate indicators. Their tools are
based on research about the relationships among employee satisfaction with certain "Quality of
Worklife" indicators, employee well-being and productivity, and organizational performance.
WHRL has worked with more than 130 Canadian organizations, including eight cities and
regions with a total of more than 10,000 municipal employee survey respondents. The agency
develops custom survey projects to measure Quality of Worklife over time and link results to
corporate strategy. This allows Kitchener's survey results to be benchmarked with those of
other municipalities in the WHRL database.
At the same time, the survey results will allow us to benchmark individual areas within the
Corporation against one another so that we can identify best practices and share them with
other parts of the Corporation. In other words, it will help us to learn from ourselves.
The Quality of Worklife measures to be included in the WHRL survey and benchmarked with
other municipalities include, among others: organizational satisfaction, job satisfaction,
supervisor satisfaction, organizational communication, training and development, co-worker
cohesion, and employee involvement.
Working with the City's Employee Culture Survey Committee, WHRL will develop and
administer a customized Employee Culture Survey that is designed to generate actionable
results and recommendations to improve workplace culture. Questions would be comprised of
item statements; respondents will be asked to rank items on a scale (strongly disagree to
strongly agree, not at all important to critically important, etc.)
The survey would be completely anonymously and administered both online and in paper
format: online respondents would be given a unique username and password, and paper-based
surveys would be returned to WHRL in sealed envelopes. As a University-based organization,
WHRL is bound by the Canadian Tri-Council Ethical Research with Human Subjects guidelines
to maintain anonymity and/or confidentiality of individual respondents.
WHRL's draft project plan outlines a schedule in which the entire project -from survey
development to presentation of a final report that includes analysis and recommendations - is to
be completed in 24 weeks.
FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS:
The WHRL proposal contains the following basic pricing summary to develop and implement the
survey. While this basic price does allow the Employee Culture Survey Committee to make
some minor adjustments in terms of the exact questions that are asked of staff, if a need arises
to make any substantial changes to the survey, additional costs may be incurred after
negotiations between the City and WHRL. The Employee Culture Survey Committee does not
foresee the need for such significant changes at this time.
The cost for the employee culture survey will be charged against the Gapping account as
directed by Council.
(i) Project Planning and Management $2,250.00
(ii) Survey design, delivery, and data entry $6,858.75
(iii) Data analysis, reporting, and interpretation $6,405.00
(iv) Consulting fees $10,000.00
(v) Reimbursable expenditures
a) Postage paid & courier costs $250.00
b) Estimated Kilometres travel from consulting $927.52
(vi) GST $1,601.48
Total Project Estimated Price $28,292.75
This price includes a corporate level report with interpretations and recommendations of the
results, highlights of findings, overall scale analyses, external benchmark comparisons, and
group comparisons (i.e. by department, union, and job level.) WHRL will provide ten full-colour
hard copies of the report and a CD ROM in PDF format.
The corporate report does not include division comparisons within departments or
interpretations at the team/ unit level. However, such reports can be purchased at an additional
cost. These reports facilitate team/ unit level dialogue leading to action, and can act as a score
card for managers toward their performance on the people management side of their job. The
cost for these additional reports are as follows:
^ $1,000 per department X 4 departments = $4,000
^ $250.00 per division X 21 divisions = $5,250
^ $65.00 per sub group within a department or division (ie. Section) =unknown at this time
(can be purchased at a later date by individual departments)
Based on the City's current structure, staff is recommending that the total cost of the work
performed by WHRL would not exceed $40,000.
COMMUNICATIONS:
Before administering the survey, WHRL consultants would be available to meet with union
representatives, the Employee Advisory Committee, and the City's Corporate Management
Team and Senior Leadership Team to present the survey objectives.
The Employee Culture Survey Committee will develop a full internal communications plan with
consultation from WHRL to ensure that all employees are aware of the survey, and to maximize
response rates.
CONCLUSION:
This survey would represent a significant step forward in the development of a Corporate
Leadership Plan which is an integral part of the City's Corporate Plan. Our leadership plan will
focus on encouraging employees to show leadership daily as we work toward achieving the
community's goals.
Doug Paterson, Director of Human Resources