Colleague engagement at UofG

There are two ways to complete the survey.

• All colleagues who are invited (see 'Who can complete the survey?') will receive an email directly from People Insight with an invitation to complete the survey on Monday 20 October. This will be a survey link unique to that person. The email will come from survey-invite@peopleinsight.co.uk and has the subject line "UofG Colleague Engagement Survey invitation from People Insight"

• There will also be posters up around campus with QR codes linking to the survey - to access the survey this way you will need your staff number (available on your payslip or on your ID card) so that the survey platform can group your response in the correct place. Answering the survey this way does not change the anonymity protections in place - see below.

All colleagues who work for the University for more than one day / seven hours per week (0.2FTE) will be invited to complete the survey. This includes colleagues who work for one of our subsidiary companies. Colleagues paid on timesheets are also included; even if you have a contract for less than 0.2FTE, if you worked 0.2FTE or more in the previous academic year (i.e. between 1 August 2024 and 31 July 2025) then you will receive an invitation to the survey.

Those who recently joined the University (from Tuesday 5 August 2025 onwards) will not receive an invitation to complete the survey. Honorary and affiliate staff will also not receive an invitation to complete.

Yes, the survey is completely anonymous, so please use it as an opportunity to be open and honest in your response.

We have asked an external company, People Insight, to conduct the survey on our behalf. People Insight are an independent organisation, who are experts in people surveys and engagement. Their promise to you is that your questionnaire responses will never be linked to you as an individual. Your answers from the survey go directly to them. You have the option to respond or skip the demographic questions included with the survey.

After the survey closes, People Insight will report on your views as part of a group you belong to (such as your job family), but they do not present the details in such a way that you can be identified as an individual. The results of the survey are given back to the University through a results dashboard. The survey results dashboard has an automatic limit to prevent anyone (regardless of their access level) to view responses for groups of fewer than ten people. This means it's not possible to view how any one person answered the survey, or to see all of the parts of their response together. For example, two open text answers are not connected so the answer to the first question cannot be viewed with the answer to the second question.

Please note that any free text comments may be given to the University as written so while the comments might not include your name, you might be identified by the scenarios you mention, therefore please be mindful of this when writing your comments. At no point can anyone at the University of Glasgow see your individual survey response, or see names, email addresses or staff IDs with the matching responses.

See also: Why does the survey ask for my staff number? and What data does the survey use or capture?

Colleagues completing the survey using a link or QR code from a poster will need to input their staff number so that their survey response is included with their team’s. There is no difference between this method of accessing the survey, and clicking on your unique link sent to your UofG email to access the survey - they both bring you to the same place. 

The staff number, name and email addresses are used only by People Insight to ensure survey responses are placed correctly within the results (e.g. within the correct team or job family) and to confirm that a survey response has been successfully completed; this is also how People Insight are able to email individuals to remind them that they haven’t completed their survey yet. Names, staff numbers or emails linked with survey data are not available to anyone at the University of Glasgow; it is not possible for individual survey responses to be viewed by anyone at UofG except for you while you are submitting your own response. 

Once these piece of data have been used by People Insight to run the survey, before anything comes back to the University, name, email and staff number details are separated from the survey responses and scheduled for an automated deletion. Access to results by anyone at UofG is only done through an anonymised platform which does not include these data. 

The survey can be completed on any device, including mobile phones. Posters will be displayed across the campus with QR codes that can be scanned to access the survey, where you will be prompted for your staff number.  You can find your staff number on your payslip, or on your staff card under the photo - this will have six digits (possibly some letters).

Many services will provide devices on which you can complete the survey, if you do not have an alternative option. Please contact your line manager in the first instance to ask about your options for accessing a device to complete the survey.

Yes please, as part of our inclusive approach to this survey we would like you to participate if you wish to, as we want to understand more about all of our experiences working here, whether we work for the University directly or for a subsidiary company. There may be a few questions that feel less relevant to you (this is also true of a number of different groups of colleagues, too) but your answers to the other questions will be really helpful in shaping how we do things. If you do not want to respond to a particular question there is a ‘Neither agree nor disagree’ option you can select.

If you work at the University across more than one appointment, but your hours total more than one day a week / seven hours a week (0.2FTE), you will receive an invitation to complete the survey. Your survey response will be analysed with whichever of your posts has the largest time commitment. If you currently are working across two appointments with same time commitment (e.g. two x 2 days a week appointments, your survey response will be with whichever of role you have been in longest.

Information about what existing data is used in the survey process, and what data is captured during the survey can be found in full in the Privacy Notice. The data captured and its uses are summarised in the table below. 

People Insight are leading experts in employee engagement and surveying and work with the University to deliver our colleague engagement survey.

People Insight is ISO 9001, 27001 and Cyber Essentials certified and is registered with the ICO under number: Z9215857. They carry out all surveys in accordance with GDPR. The University has a data sharing agreement with People Insight, and they provide detailed information about how they process survey respondents' data in their Privacy Notice.

People Insight are ISO 27001 accredited, ensuring an effective information security management system using a continual improvement approach. They carry out all surveys with high standards of risk management and security control. You can read more about their security measures in the "Data security" section of their privacy notice to survey participants.

The survey is shorter than it has been in previous years and is mostly multiple choice opinion questions, where you read a statement and select how much you agree or disagree with it.  It should take around 10 minutes to complete.

If you are seeing the message "Employee number is not valid" before Wednesday 9 October, it is because the survey is not live yet so it is not possible to access it.

If you are seeing this message after Wednesday 9 October, please check the inclusion criteria (see Who can complete the survey? above) to make sure you are among the colleagues invited to participate in this survey. If you meet the inclusion criteria, please email haveyoursay@glasgow.ac.uk noting that you are having a problem with accessing the survey.

No, it is completely voluntary.  However we hope that you will share your views with us. 

The success of the survey depends on all of us participating. Understanding your views on working at the University through this survey means we have the tools to continue to make the improvements that are needed. So, we encourage you to play your part and complete the survey link when you receive it.

Once the results have been analysed, we will share them with you through our normal communication channels and on these webpages. The University’s Senior Management Group will take stock of the findings and then explain how the University will respond to what you have told us.

More localised results will be cascaded appropriately to the relevant units. The results will be used to inform action planning activity both at University and local levels and progress around this will be shared on an ongoing basis and measured again in our next cycle.

Some examples of how past survey results have been acted upon are included on these webpages.

If you have any general questions relating to the survey itself, please contact haveyoursay@glasgow.ac.uk 

If you have any technical problems accessing the survey, please contact People Insight directly on support@peopleinsight.co.uk.

The Colleague Engagement Survey asks about a variety of aspects of your experiences at work, and things which typically affect how someone feels about their employer and their job. 

If you would like, you can read 2025 CES question set before completing the survey.