Posted 16 Mar 2023
In the interest of Knowing Our Stuff and Doing it Right- two of our four core values, Field recently conducted our first ever all-team pulse survey. We decided that it was the right time to start gathering data to better understand how our team feels about their work and the culture that we’re building at Field.
We need this to understand where our attention should be focussed, and to track changes (and hopefully, improvement) over time. We’ll be conducting these surveys every 6 months, and wanted to share our findings and immediate actions from our first survey because we believe transparency helps to drive accountability.
We surveyed our team across 4 different areas:
- Safety, Empowerment & Commitment
- Clarity, Recognition & Reward
- Working Relationships, Leadership & Feedback
- Overall Engagement
We used a 10-point Linkert scale, as it provides structured and quantifiable responses and allows people to make more nuanced choices between ‘strongly disagree’ at one end and ‘strongly agree’ on the other. We also asked 1 question using the employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) format which has a 10-point scale, as we wanted every question to use the same response method for ease and simplicity.
We achieved an excellent overall response rate of 88%. A response rate of between 80-90% is considered to be a good benchmark for small companies (less than 50 people), as it accounts for 4 out of 5 people on average.
As a construction and infrastructure business, we put employee safety at the centre of everything we do, so we were particularly keen to see the results of the Safety, Empowerment & Commitment section- which were excellent overall positive responses. We asked the team to respond to statements such as “Field takes my safety seriously” and “I am motivated by Field’s company mission”, and saw an average overall score of 8.7/10. This shows us that our team is motivated and aligned with the company mission and vision, which is great to see.
In Clarity, Recognition & Reward, we saw our biggest opportunity for improvement, with our lowest score of the whole survey seen in response to “I know what to do to improve my compensation”, which came in at 4.6/10. This wasn’t entirely unexpected as a scale-up company which has seen significant growth in the last year (which coincides roughly with a lot of our teams’ service length). Our commitment, based on this result, is to build out our internal levelling and promotion processes, so teams and individuals can clearly understand their career maps and what is required to improve their compensation package as they develop in their careers.
Working Relationships, Leadership & Feedback was largely positive, with scores of more than 8/10 in both “My team lead is a role model for our company values” and “The senior leadership team care about the success of Field”. One of our biggest focus areas is around feedback, as the results show a disparity in how much we share feedback VS how much we receive it. We saw a score of 6.5/10 for “I regularly receive feedback”, compared to 7.4/10 for “I regularly share feedback”. This could potentially be because people are giving feedback in an ad-hoc way, and this may not be registering as receiving feedback. Based on this, we have begun implementing a more structured, thoughtful feedback process into our 1:1s with team leads, and firming up our 360 feedback and performance review processes. We’ve also already designed and delivered our first feedback training session for the team, which was very well received.
To get our Overall Engagement score, we used the eNPS (Employer Net Promoter Score). This score is a number between -100 and +100, and shows how likely respondents are to recommend their place of work to others. This score is an internationally recognised measure of employee engagement, which allows us to compare ourselves externally across industries and geographies- which will be particularly important as we continue to grow and open new international offices.
The eNPS scoring methodology is widely recognised across industries, and due to how the scoring is calculated, many companies find it difficult to get a good score- especially in the early stages. As the eNPS only takes into account subtractors (scores of 1-6) and promoters (scores of 9-10) and disregards neural scores (7-8), you end up with a clear indication of responses that are strongly positive or strongly negative, and lose those who sit somewhere in the middle.
Our eNPS result was +36, which industry experts agree is a ‘good’ score overall (especially for the size and age of our business), indicating that we have a high level of engagement. We’re proud of this as a first result, but we’re focussed on improving this to move into an ‘excellent’ score next time.
So, what do these results show us? Overall, we have an engaged and motivated team who are aligned with our company mission to build the infrastructure to deliver net zero. We have faith in the decisions of our senior leadership team and believe that they are committed and passionate about empowering our team to deliver our goals. While our team believes in our mission and what we do, there are a few things we can do to better support them in their journeys, such as building structure around career progression and reward and fostering a more structured feedback culture. We’ll now be doing all we can to do just that, and are pleased to say we already have the wheels in motion. True to form, we’re Moving Fast on this, having already facilitated 4 workshops to develop team-specific action plans for the next few months.
We’ll be conducting the pulse survey again in June - so stay tuned.
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