Home Office

Since implementing the SmartSurvey platform, the Home Office has gained a powerful survey tool that is helping it to capture employees’ views on a huge range of different issues

As is the case with most prominent organisations, it’s imperative for the Home Office to be able to collect and analyse feedback internally and externally, as the data is pivotal in helping to inform its decision making.

In this case study we focus on how the Home Office is using SmartSurvey’s platform internally and the benefits it’s delivering for them.

The requirement

For a high-profile organisation such as the Home Office, which employs more than 35,000 people and whose mission is to keep our citizens safe and our borders secure, obtaining internal feedback from its employees is equally as important as the feedback it collects externally from stakeholders.

Over time the Home Office has increased the number of surveys it sends out, with use cases currently ranging from online questionnaires to collect staff feedback about internal events and projects, to pulse surveys that measure employee opinion on internal communication channels and employee feedback surveys to help gauge employee engagement and staff sentiment on an array of different issues.

Most recently the organisation ran an employee feedback survey to assess how staff were feeling following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. This focused on areas such as whether they felt they had sufficient equipment and other resources to work effectively from home, with the survey’s results essential in helping to inform the decisions taken by its Executive Committee.

While previously the organisation ran internal surveys through its own custom-built solution, as its survey demands and range of application uses grew, it became ever more challenging for the existing custom system to meet its needs.

It became evident that an alternative survey solution was required, that could provide the enhanced performance, functionality and features needed to meet and grow in line with Home Office requirements.

The solution

Having started out with one of the basic plans of the SmartSurvey platform, the department progressed a couple of years ago to an Enterprise plan, which provides access to all of SmartSurvey’s features to create intuitive and dynamic surveys with access to the most advanced level of reporting.

Since it first began using the platform, the Home Office has gained an off the shelf solution that is extremely easy and intuitive to use and adapt for a myriad of applications. Thanks to a user-friendly interface, customisable templates and smart features such as skip logic and piping that make surveys more relevant, personalised and faster to complete – teams within the organisation can create a new survey in minutes.

Distribution is quick and easy thanks to a wide range of options for sending or sharing survey links. It’s also simple to access and analyse results, with the ability to view responses historically, in real-time, or export and share the data with others when more teams, or individuals need to be involved in the evaluation process.

The functionality and features provided by the SmartSurvey platform have enabled us to create some really engaging surveys, with the training we’ve received from the SmartSurvey team helping us to maximise the value we can obtain through the platform. SmartSurvey are really prompt and proactive in their support too and have provided us with out-of-scope consultancy support on numerous occasions, which has really useful._{David Cooke, Head of corporate internal communications}

The results

Thanks to the ongoing performance, functionality improvements and new features the SmartSurvey development team continue to add to the platform, it’s become even more simple and beneficial for the Home Office to use.

SmartSurvey’s continual development of the platform has helped us to get more out of our investment. The new features and ongoing improvements in functionality are a good example of this, improving our ability to interrogate data and generate reports, which is proving useful in helping us to influence our key stakeholders_{David Cooke, Head of corporate internal communications}

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