Specialist employee research across all market sectors

BMRB Employee team specialises in developing and managing employee research across all sectors.

We offer a comprehensive service using bespoke design and consultancy underpinned by proven methods and processes and we can provide employee norms.

We provide meaningful management information that will enable you to improve your employee engagement using focused reporting and support for action planning.

In the last two years BMRB Employee has surveyed around half a million employees and over 85% of our clients are ‘Extremely or Very Likely’ to recommend us.

We offer a range of data collection methodologies which can stand alone or be combined, depending on clients needs.

Services we offer include:

• Employee engagement surveys
• Exit Interviews
• Qualitative research
• A range of focused reports and deliverables
• Benchmarking – employee norms
• Linkage

BMRB is also experienced in tailoring questionnaires to specific issues and audiences. Previous surveys include:

• Internal communications audits
• Perceptions of internal services (IT, HR etc)
• Perceptions of customer service

Unique team-level reporting

BMRB has licensed unique technology to produce department- and team-level reports that our clients say are “second to none”.

These reports available online in PDF format are exclusive to BMRB and have been developed for the people who are responsible for managing employees at all levels of your organisation, e.g. team, department and regional managers.

Our reports show the key results in a simple way and tell your managers what they need to focus on as a result of employee feedback. We work with clients to decide how best to disseminate survey findings, with appropriate explanations and advice, to enable your managers to take directive action.

Using this approach for one of our clients, we provided over 9,000 team reports and posters in 23 languages. The reports gave managers a summary of their team results and highlighted the main areas for action, together with the tools to discuss the results with their staff, brainstorm ideas, and agree an action plan for improvement. The posters highlighted the primary results in a simple graphical format for the team notice board.

Employee Reporter – a data interrogation tool

In addition to our PDF reports at team level, we offer an alternative desktop application - our Employee Reporter. This is an Excel-based tool which allows users to access data for different departments and drill down into sub-groups, such as demographics. Results can also be compared across departments or regions and trend information can be included.

The user can select the results they want to view and easily produce PowerPoint reports for onward dissemination to local teams. Guidelines for action planning can be incorporated into the PowerPoint template so reports can be used for workshop sessions across the organisation. The tool also allows the user to create an action plan based on their review of the findings.

Qualitative

Employee surveys are primarily quantitative – they measure the proportion of staff with a particular viewpoint. However, it is often useful to understand why people feel a certain way, and so we offer all forms of qualitative interviewing. This can be at the design stage of a survey, to ensure that the questionnaire is relevant to employees, and after the main survey to explore issues raised in more depth.

All our team are experienced in qualitative interviewing techniques, covering telephone and face-to-face depth interviews, focus groups, and online discussions.

Benchmarks for employee norms

BMRB offers a range of benchmarking solutions to give context to your survey results.

National Employee Benchmark Survey

BMRB has been conducting our National Employee Benchmark Survey (NEBS) for the past 6 years. This annual survey of the UK’s working population is a nationally representative survey of over 2,000 people in full or part-time work. Our database now holds over 12,000 respondent records on national employee attitudes which we can segment and interrogate further. With NEBS we are able to help you get the maximum value from your employee survey results.

In addition to NEBs at BMRB we have a normative database of employee survey results from other studies we have conducted. From the database, we can provide benchmark figures as well as guidance on the range of scores we have found on each measure. This allows our clients to compare themselves with the best performing organisations as well as the average.

Linkage

Employee measurement can become even more powerful when it is linked to other business metrics such as absenteeism, turnover, and profitability. Our team at BMRB has worked with clients to incorporate these measures into our research and so that HR managers can use the information to develop their talent management strategies.

Case studies

Below is a selection of case studies to give you a flavour of the work we do:

A consistent approach to Talent Management

This client in the professional services sector with 9,000 employees across five continents operates under a range of brand names. We provided an online employee survey with a core questionnaire and individual ‘add ons’ to enable them to adopt ‘glocal’ approach to talent management. In addition to team level reports in pdf format we provided a data interrogation tool to enable each brand’s HR manager to create their own charts and action plans.

Embedding employee engagement after a merger

Following the merger of two government departments BMRB was commissioned to design and conduct an online survey to measure staff engagement among 30,000 government employees working across sites throughout the UK. The focus of embedding a customer and performance focused culture in the organisation in a context of significant job losses and estate management was at the heart of the strategy, and the employee survey is a crucial element to identify and track the drivers of engagement and responsiveness to change across the organisation. We provided a range of reporting, from strategic reports and presentations to team based reporting to local managers.

Planning for growth

This client in the retail sector was a small company of 130 employees that wanted to create an HR strategy that would enable them to develop their people processes. We designed an online survey that informed them how they could maximise current staff engagement and grow their talent base for the future.

Global reach across five continents

This global foodservice company was looking for a consistent employee loyalty assessment across its diverse operations. We designed a survey to be conducted online and pen and paper. 111,000 employees from 53 countries gave their views in 26 languages. We provided tailored reporting across the organisation, from a global strategic report to regional best in class summaries and 9,000 reports and action plans to local managers based on their own team’s results.

Delivering strategic insight and local focus

A medium-sized UK hotel chain wanted a pragmatic approach to surveying frontline staff and managers about issues that were relevant to them. We developed a multi-layered survey that captured the views of frontline staff about the day-to-day issues affecting their job satisfaction and managers’ views on the organisation’s strategy.

Supporting culture change following a major restructure

Following a major internal restructuring programme, this client was a large but newly formed unit within an internationally renowned bank. It needed to quickly identify demoralised and disengaged units post-change and adopt strategies to re-invigorate the business. We gave it the evidence it needed to launch a new employee recognition scheme and internal communications processes that got to the heart of employee issues quickly and with the desired results.

Building credibility and buy-in at Britain’s busiest train company

Despite achieving consistently low response rates to their employee survey in the past, BMRB Employee and the HR team designed a programme of communications to persuade even the most challenging internal stakeholders of the value of taking part. The result was a 40% increase in participation and action planning from the frontline to the boardroom. High levels of employee pride coupled with recent train operating awards have lead to lower customer complaints and the successful renewal of the franchise until 2017.