[Dec 2006] How could we improve our online survey reporting?

We agree! Since the BPTW 2006 survey finished, we have added a ‘Copy’ button to the Consolidated Report so you can paste it into Word. However what we all really want is a proper ‘Export’ function, so you can send the Report directly to a Word document or pdf. We are currently working on this, and hope to have it available for BPTW 2007!

Question: Allow individual slides to be made of the results.

You can click on the ‘Copy’ button above any of the graphs in your reporting, then paste the graph into a Powerpoint presentation, Word document, or Excel spreadsheet.

Question: We have done the survey for several years and would like to track against all previous years performance, not just the most recent survey.

We can set up trending against any previous survey you have done with us – the cost is $750+gst for each survey.

Question: It would be good if we didn’t have to create new email addresses so people could access the survey – this caused problems!

We have a few different ways the survey can be run in your organisation, but if not everyone has their own email address, then we shouldn’t use the access method that requires email addresses. If you ever have any issues like this, please raise them with a JRA team member ASAP during the survey.

Question: The speed of the reporting could be improved.

The speed of the reporting is something we are very aware of, and are working hard to improve. In the meantime, our recommendations for speeding report generation up include selecting only one benchmark at a time (chances are only one is relevant to your organisation), ensuring that you have selected only the benchmarks/demographic groups you want to report on before you click on ‘Update Report’, and only call up the Consolidated Report when you want to see everything at once.

Question: The tables in the Consolidated Report break over pages.

We are very aware of this issue – it is actually only something that affects the reporting when you view it though Internet Explorer (which almost everyone does!). We are still looking into ways we can stop this from happening, and keep tables together.

If you are able, you can use Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer - Firefox does not allow tables to break over pages. Firefox is the world's second most widely-used internet browser software, and can be downloaded from www.firefox.com. Depending on your System/Network Administrator's security settings, you may or may not be able to download and install this software - but if you can, great!

JRA provides this information as a courtesy, and is not affiliated with this software in any way.

Question: If I add a number of demographics to a graph or the Consolidated Report, the bars become very small and hard to read when printed out.

This is also something we are working on. However please note that if a section has 8 questions in it, and you want to see the results of 6 teams for this question, you are asking to see 48 scores at once on an A4 page. It is very difficult to do this in a graphical format. We recommend that if you want this much information at once, you view the data in a table instead, which the online reporting can do.

Question: It would be good to get a better understanding of how the weighted mean scoring system works, and what the benefits are.

This is something that is often best explained over the phone, but we have also got a written explanation available that every organisation is sent with their report viewing details. Essentially, the weighted mean scoring system is a more accurate scoring system because it takes into account responses across the entire rating scale, and also how extreme the response is. Therefore someone who Strongly Disagrees with a statement has more of an effect on the overall score than someone who just Disagrees. We believe this is preferable to reporting the percentage of people who simply agreed with each statement, as that Level of Agreement system turns a five point rating scale into a two point one – you either agree or you don’t – shades of grey become irrelevant. However, there are occasions where Level of Agreement scoring can be useful, and therefore you can choose to view your results using this calculation if you wish.

Question: The one detractor would be the unsolicited surveys sent for me to complete.

We assume you are referring to the HR Policies & Practices Review, which is part of the Best Places to Work Survey process. We will be making the role of the HR Review more clear for BPTW 2007, on the website and in our one-on-one discussions. The reason for the HR Review is that while the Best Places to Work Survey is primarily a tool for organisations to get high quality feedback from their employees to improve their workplaces, a secondary goal is to conduct New Zealand’s largest research project into ‘what makes for a great place to work?’. Finding out about the HR Policies & Practices of the organisations who participate in the survey is extremely valuable to us as we can conduct cross-database analysis to identify what it is that our Best Places to Work are doing that makes them stand out from the crowd.

We appreciate your time, and will make it much clearer from now on that the survey is an integral part of the process. All organisations that completed the survey will receive an Executive Summary of the results.

*** Edited 3/20/2009 12:08:18 AM UTC by Leighton (JRA)***