At Glasgow, we have conducted a whole university staff attitude survey about every two years, and will shortly be contacting staff to begin the 2012 survey. I hope you will want to complete it.

More information will be coming to you the week after next when the survey is launched, and we plan to keep it open for a few weeks until later in April.

It is short but comprehensive, and seeks to get information about how you feel about your working environment – such as communications, working with your manager, support from colleagues and work-life balance. A major part of the survey uses the Health and Safety Executive’s standard survey to allow us evaluate changes over time, and look at how our results compare to others in the Education sector.

It is anonymous.

We do ask for a lot of information, and some people may worry they could be identified that way. That is not our plan or wish. We have a policy of feeding back only to groups where the sample size is large enough to ensure no individual can be identified;  if necessary we will aggregate data to ensure this happens. Some information such as a minority group’s views will only be fed back at University level.

What will we use the survey for, and who gets to see it?

Court has asked for the staffs’ attitudes to be surveyed every two years, and we will report on the whole University to Court.

We will also be feeding back the findings to staff and managers, on as local a basis as we can, consistent with preserving anonymity. It is important that local managers and leaders know what all of their staff think so they can focus on improving matters at work such as communications and helping teams work more effectively together. Depending on the outcomes, we would want local action plans to be developed, fine-tuned to local views.

Of course the outputs will also be fed back to staff generally, and to the Trade Unions, as well as to the Diversity and Health and Safety Committees.

Ian Black, Director of Human Resources


First published: 16 March 2012

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