The Survey Initiative offers excellent value and service levels says Ascential

Ascential is a specialist, global information company. They enable smart decision-making for the world’s most ambitious businesses. In an increasingly complex, digitally-driven world, Ascential helps the world’s top consumer product and service companies understand what’s important and how to act on it – today, and in the future. Ralph Tribe, Human Resources Director at Ascential, explains why an innovative worldwide company listens to its employees…

“Our organisation employs over 2100 staff members in 14 countries around the world. Ascential owns a range of Design, Marketing and Sales content brands, such as WGSN, Cannes Lions, EDGE and Flywheel. The industry is competitive and fast-paced, so it is vital that we understand our employees, retain top talent and maximise productivity.

“I joined Ascential nearly three years ago and came with some good experience in managing employee research at Sky and other large corporates. I had worked with some of the better-known employee research providers and online platforms, such as Glint, so I was somewhat ‘intrigued’ to see how The Survey Initiative would compare. I have to say I’ve been somewhat surprised and delighted by their exceptional value and excellent service levels. Normally in life I think you get what you pay for, but comparing The Survey Initiative to other providers, they offer remarkable value for money, plus a speedy response service that blows many of their larger competitors out of the water.

“At Ascential we take employee research and employee engagement very seriously. Our talent makes us stand out from the crowd, so it’s essential we partner with an employee research agency that understands us. The team at The Survey Initiative has worked with us to create a robust survey, we’ve paired back the question set to really focus our understanding of what’s going on in our organisation. We’ve achieved very high response levels and the data has enabled us to forensically examine what’s going on in each sub-brand and which department/manager is doing well or requires support. We’re an organisation that acts, so if intervention is required, we’ll make it happen.

“We set our targets high and work to achieve our goals. Just two years ago our employee engagement was at around 70% we wanted to reach the 80% marker and in the last survey this target was reached thanks to our many interventions and hard work along the way. Ideally, we would like to reach 80-85% for employee engagement, but we do realise it’s harder to make that shift when you already have high scores for engagement.

“In terms of what’s driving this improvement, recently we’ve made some big moves; to ensure we attract the best, we know we need to offer exceptional rewards. To be one step ahead of the curve we made a big shift and moved away from bonus for most of our people and instead simply incorporated peoples’ variable pay into a top rate salary. It’s been a big cultural change, but one that was supported by the senior management team and it’s been widely appreciated by all. It’s also sharply improved people perceptions of their market pay level across the business and on average we now sit 16% above The Survey Initiative’s external benchmark in this area.

We strive to support our managers and the investment has really paid off; the survey demonstrated that leadership was strong with scores in the high 80s. “We’ve also worked hard to deliver new career pathways for staff to develop their careers within the organisation. However, we never standstill. We’re currently launching a new programme which looks at why our top 10% of managers are so effective – what do they do? Here we’re sharing best practise with our managers who need to boost their skillset. We’ve also launched a number of new flexible working schemes, which have been rolled out across all Ascential’s sub-brands. This became invaluable as people suddenly had to move their working patterns en mass during the ongoing COVID-19 situation.

“For us it’s nice to see that our efforts are creating change and a better place to work, which is excellent, because that means we’re all working more efficiently and being more productive. Without The Survey Initiative’s research, we wouldn’t be able to identify the areas that are doing well, and which departments need support. The results are crucial to help us move forward and to also track how our interventions have transformed the workplace. We’re delighted with the support The Survey initiative provides for us and would never move to another provider; they offer such a great service and exceptional value for money.”

To find out more about Ascential, please visit www.ascential.com.