My UCL Experience FAQs

It’s been close to five years since we last ran an engagement survey in 2017.  

The world has changed radically since then and we need a better understanding of how you feel about your experience of working here so that we can celebrate the things we do well and improve the things we aren’t so good at.

While we’ve been running the people pulse checker surveys, the uptake has been low, so this is our chance to get a much clearer picture of life across all parts of the university. 

By launching in March 2022, we expect to be able to share the results of the survey early in term 3, which means that the findings can feed into the Strategic Plan 2022-2027 project before it is submitted to Council for approval later in the year.  

The survey will be sent out to all employees who have a UCL contract and therefore a current HR record. This means that it won’t go to some agency workers or consultants, to people who are employed by a partner organisation, or to our outsourced members of staff. However, we are actively looking into improvements around how we might capture more temp staff next time.

The survey is confidential. What we mean by that is that we use some of your information from staff records to map where (in the organisational hierarchy) responses are coming from across the organisation. This means we will be able to see areas where the scores are lower or higher so we can try and find out why. However, there won't be any way of linking responses back to a given user.  

No one at UCL will know who has and who hasn't completed the survey. To protect your anonymity, we won’t be reporting free text results where there are fewer than 10 responses, and won't share quantitative data where there are less than five responses. This means that it won't be possible to see any individual sets of data either. 

My UCL Experience survey should take less than ten minutes to complete on average. Most people have told us that it took them much less than 10 minutes, but this depends on how detailed you want to be in your open text responses, as this might take longer to complete.

Our survey partners, Qlearsite, will have emailed you a link.

To complete the survey, look for an email sent by Qlearsite on Tuesday 8 March.

If you can’t find it, they will be sending reminder emails on Monday 14 March, Monday 21 March and Friday 25 March.

The responses we get will help us to identify areas to celebrate as well as those that need our support, and we will ask local teams to commit to three actions aimed at improving them. We will also commit to three actions to improve scores at an institutional level.

We will then monitor progress throughout the year against those actions using the People Pulse checker survey for regular monitoring.

We will receive lots more analysis than we ever did from previous surveys – including dashboards for teams where 10 or more people have responded, and natural language processing of the free text questions to identify themes, patterns, and sentiment to help us understand why people scored the way they did.

We are pausing the People Pulse Checker while the all-staff survey is live, and hope to then improve the efficiency of this survey in time for when we relaunch. We are aiming to make the following improvements:

• Reduce the questions focusing on the data that really matters
• Approach different random sets of staff each time we ask the survey
• Send the survey link directly to your inbox when you are invited to respond to it

Hopefully, this should mean that we will only need to ask each member of staff to complete the survey once every couple of months

The survey will be available for three weeks from 7 March, so you have until 11pm on 25 March to complete it.

We plan to run this survey, or one that is similar, annually from now on.

Your first name was pulled in as a field from a report we ran using MyHR. We asked for "first name" rather than "preferred first name". We have checked with the HR reporting team, and we are able to change this in time for our next survey.

We had the survey tested by UCL's digital accessibility team, hoping to make the survey as accessible as possible. It's really important that we get the views and experiences of all our staff including those who use keyboard/voice controls or who have other accessibility requirements. However, we know we can do better and will act quickly on any issues raised.

For any members of staff who are experiencing problems with accessibility, please contact hrweb@live.ucl.ac.uk and we will do all we can to help. We would also really like to identify more members of staff who can help with future accessibility testing, so we might ask to keep your details on file for this purpose.

Within the survey, we’ll ask you to provide some personal data about yourself, such as your gender and ethnicity. We’re asking these questions as we know some staff face additional challenges at UCL based on who they are.

We'll use this information to examine the experiences of different groups of people. Understanding the difficulties and barriers faced by these groups enables us to target our initiatives and improve our policies and procedures. Search UCL EDI for our work on equality, diversity and inclusion.

We were keen to minimise the number of questions people have to complete particularly where we have reliable data on file. So for the demographic questions, where we have reliable data, we have pulled the information directly from your HR record. This includes your sex and age.

Where we are asking for demographic data in the survey - it will not be kept on file against your name or employee number, and it will not be used to update your HR record. For more information about anonymity, see the question "Is this survey anonymous?"

Cohabiting was not included as a response in this survey. We’ve made a note of this on the issues log and will make sure to add an option for "cohabiting" for future surveys.

You should choose the option "White or White British - Irish" however, we will change this option to remove "or White British" from the response as it is confusing. 

You should choose the option "White or White British - Gypsy or Irish Traveller" however, we will change this option to remove "or White British" from the response as it is confusing. 

You should choose the option "White or White British - Other" however, we will change this option to remove "or White British" from the response as it is confusing. 

We have noted that certain sexuality options weren't listed here, for example pansexual and queer. We will review this list in collaboration with Out@UCL in order to ensure the list is more inclusive next time.

We have noted that there were some overlapping responses for Christianity in the drop-down choices. We have made a note of this on our issues log and will review the options under religion for future surveys.

For this question, it is possible to select “Children at a mixture of different points of education” and “A mixture of both child and adult dependants” from the single choice drop-down options. However, we believe it would be simpler, and more informative if we made this question type accept multiple choices (similar to the disability question). We will change this so that next time we run the survey it will appear in a similar format as the new disability question, where you can select several options