UCL Staff Experience Survey 2024 FAQs

A staff lived experience survey is a tool used by organisations to gather insights directly from employees about their personal experiences, challenges, and perspectives within the workplace. These surveys aim to capture the authentic views of staff members, providing valuable feedback on various aspects such as workplace culture, job satisfaction, mental health, and overall well-being.

We can reassure colleagues that UCL won’t be able to link the responses a staff member provides back to that staff member. This is because we use a pseudonymisation functionality, which hides personal data from the response and replaces it with a unique code. This process ensures that the survey is confidential, and the privacy of the respondents is protected. 

However, to allow us to map where responses are coming from in UCL’s organisational structure and across different types of roles and demographic groups, we use some of your personal information from staff records. This means that your responses will be grouped together with those from other employees in your work area, to allow UCL to identify key themes across the organisation, as well as explore any notable differences across different demographic groups.

Any comments you share in the free text questions will be confidential and will be reported back exactly as written. Therefore, it is important that you do not say something or name anyone in a way which may inadvertently identify you or others. To protect your anonymity, we will not be reporting results where there are fewer than 10 responses. For example, if a team (or a demographic group) had 9 responses, the results would not be available. But results would be visible for a team which has 10 responses or more.

As a university, we are committed to listening to our staff and responding to feedback. The consultation that informed our Strategic Plan 2022-27, along with the issues highlighted in the all-staff survey 2022, helped us form a detailed picture of the challenges faced by our staff.

We are keen to hear from our staff about how they currently experience working at UCL.

The last UCL staff survey was in spring 2022 and provided many departments and project teams with key data to benchmark and measure their progress. In addition, the survey data has also been useful for the Data and Insights team to develop strategic KPIs for reporting to the Council. Several departments and many of these initiatives are now reliant on data from subsequent surveys to measure progress against KPIs and targets, as well as feed into the requirements for various equality charters.

The survey will be sent out to all employees who have a UCL contract. This means that it won’t go to agency workers or consultants, to people who are employed by a partner organisation, or to our outsourced members of staff.

The survey is administered by Feedback Works on behalf of UCL. Feedback Works is a consultancy firm that offers listening advisory and implementation services, helping organisations improve by actively seeking and acting upon feedback from employees. They have partnered with Qualtrics, a software platform which will be used by UCL to create, distribute and analyse the survey online. Their generated dashboards will be used to track metrics specific to different areas of the university.

You will receive an invitation to complete the survey from the email address: UCLstaffsurvey@qualtrics-survey.com.

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

A more detailed analysis will be available from the dashboards 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. However, the details of that will be known at a later stage after the survey closes.

*natural language processing: a machine learning technology to analyse and comprehend human language.

The survey should take 20 minutes to complete on average. But this depends on how detailed you want to be in your open text responses, as this might take longer to complete.

The survey was tested by UCL's digital accessibility team, to make the survey as accessible as possible, as it is really important that we get the views and experiences of all our staff. We will act quickly on any issues raised, so if you are experiencing accessibility issues, please contact digitalaccessibility@ucl.ac.uk and we will do all we can to help.

We should receive the results from the Staff Experience Survey in January 2025. The project team will then conduct an initial analysis of the results before sharing them with senior leadership and working on the next steps. We will aim to share a summary of the results with the wider staff community before the Easter closure.