Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) Employee Experience

To enable benchmarking with similar organisations, Parliamentary Health and Service Ombudsman (PHSO) participated in the Civil Service People Survey (CSPS) – a large-scale staff survey for Civil Service organisations throughout the UK – in 2018 and 2019. Although support for non-Civil Service organisations like PHSO to join the CSPS was withdrawn in 2020, PHSO continued to conduct their annual staff replicating the same approach. M·E·L Research were commissioned to deliver an organisation-wide staff survey using the same approach.

The survey design and reporting metrics had close alignment to the Civil Service People Survey to allow for benchmarking of the results. Additional questions were also built into the survey to understand more around hybrid working and productivity, in the context of the post-pandemic workplace. The survey was conducted online across a mix of geographical locations and a set of FAQs were drafted to help inform staff of the purpose of the survey and to help alleviate any concerns on confidentiality and M·E·L Research’s role in undertaking the survey.

A response rate of 81% was achieved for the survey and following fieldwork a range of reporting outputs were produced at both the strategic level and at a team level to support action planning. A total of 25 unique reports were generated including an organisation-wide report or the headline findings (including CSPS benchmarking), individual team-level reports, a key insights report and a report showcasing the qualitative, free-text responses from the survey thematically. The key findings were also presented to the Senior Leadership Team.