Our 2024 staff survey

Our School runs a staff survey every few years to check in with staff and identify areas for improvement and development. The most recent full survey was run in 2018-19, followed by three pulse surveys from 2020-2022.

Your feedback helps us to identify both the School’s strengths and where we need to improve – it’s important that we receive as many views as possible to inform our future planning and the ongoing development of the LSE 2030 strategy.

The staff survey is a 10-15 minute online questionnaire which asks all staff about their experience of working at our School.

In the questionnaire, you select from the multiple-choice boxes to show to what extent you agree or disagree with a number of statements, and then have the opportunity to write free text comments on what you like about LSE, and what you would change.

All staff on the LSE payroll as of 1 February 2024 are eligible to complete the survey. It’s your opportunity to use your voice to make a difference and help us improve LSE.

It’s important to note that your unique survey link / ID badge number is not used to identify your response directly. There are two key reasons why we use unique survey links, which are standard practice in employee surveys – both of which help to ensure the quality of our data and our ability to usefully analyse it: 

1. Consistent, accurate data helps us analyse the outcomes 
Being able to look at segmented audiences – whether that’s by attribute, pay band, or area of work – is a hugely important part of understanding the outcomes of the survey. Our HR systems team has ensured we have consistent, accurate data for this, and your unique link contains pre-populated School-wide categorisations for you (your job type, department, etc.) which make it possible to analyse this without knowing your identity.

2. Understanding our completion rate and statistically significant data
Using your unique link means that individuals can’t complete the survey more than once. This is important in providing us with accurate information about completion rates - which is essential to ensure we have a statistically significant data set to analyse and also helps to ensure equal representation of responses.  

When using open links (so everyone can use the same link), we will ask the respondent for an identifier – this means that their responses will be tied back to their data on where they work in LSE. For this identifier we chose to use the staff LSE ID badge number; this works essentially as a respondent’s own personal “password” to their survey. This method of using an easy to access identifying number is very common practice.

We have asked People Insight to conduct our survey and use their expertise to advise us on what to do as a result. They ran our 2021 and 2022 pulse surveys and have extensive experience in running employee surveys with organisations across the UK and internationally, especially in the Higher Education sector.

One of the benefits of an outside agency like People Insight administering the survey is that all your answers go to them, including whether or not you individually have completed it. This means that you can be completely honest with your responses since LSE has no way of tracking them back to any individual. People Insight administers the staff survey according to strict confidentiality policies and takes this very seriously.

At no point will anyone at LSE, including senior leaders and managers, be privy to knowing who has made the individual responses. The reporting threshold for the survey is ten, so although you may only be one person in a certain category / demographic the organisation will not be able to cut that data by that demographic unless it includes ten people or more. Your results will therefore then be included in the overall survey results and will not be broken down further by demographic i.e. gender, ethnicity. For free text comments, the threshold is 30 and any comments that may identify an individual will be redacted or removed and only available for thematic analysis at the School level.  

We do encourage you to answer the survey as honestly and openly as possible so that we are able to take the most effective actions to improve our community and experience of our staff.

Want to know more? Watch this 2-minute video from People Insight, which summarises their approach to confidentiality and data when working with organisations.

This survey is just one of the ways in which LSE staff can share their views. Depending upon the issue, you may find that you receive a quicker response by using one of the other ways within the School  to share ideas, provide feedback or raise a concern. These include:

Your HR Partner
HR Partners support managers and staff with a wide range of HR-related issues. Each Partner works with different areas of the School. You can contact your HR Partner if you would like support or advice with a particular HR matter.

Report it. Stop it.
LSE’s online reporting tool can be used to anonymously report sexual violence, bullying, discrimination, hate crime and/or harassment.

Safe Contacts
Our network of trained Safe Contact volunteers around the School can offer confidential signposting if you have previously experienced – or are currently experiencing – some form of bullying or harassment.

Our online Comments, Compliments and Concerns form
Staff and students can use this online form to tell us what you think and share your ideas for improvements, giving you the option to leave your contact details for follow up, or keep your response anonymous.

The survey’s open text comments are a useful opportunity for staff to give their views about aspects of their time at LSE that are not covered under the set questions or where staff wish to add more information. These will be provided to HR on an anonymised basis and an analysis will be carried out to help identify themes that can then inform appropriate actions at a School level. 

Open text responses will only be shared with local areas if requested and where at least thirty responses are recorded. They may also be shared with recognised trade unions and staff networks as part of the School’s collaborative approach to responding to the survey’s results. Prior to doing so, all open text comments will be screened to ensure as far as possible that responses identifying individuals are not shared. HR Partners can also work with local areas to analyse the open text comments where thirty or more responses have been provided. This further analysis can be especially useful for identifying any themes in the responses that can subsequently feed into local actions.

When responding to open text questions, you are encouraged to comment openly and honestly about your experiences but please try to avoid providing information that could identify you or anyone else.

Heads will be provided with a copy of the local quantitative results by their HR Partner where there is a minimum of ten respondents within that area. 

HR Partners can also support local areas in understanding their results by producing further analyses, e.g. responses by job type, contractual status - again, where there is a minimum of ten respondents in any one group. For open comments, please review the question above for fuller details.

The security of your information is important to us. All your data is private and confidential, and we take all reasonable steps to ensure that your information is handled securely and in accordance with People Insight's Privacy Policy, as well as our own.

All personal data held by People Insight is held in accordance with the requirements of the GDPR and Data Subjects’ rights, as set out in our Data Protection Policy. We will retain and use your information for only as long as necessary to provide you with our services, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our legal rights. Formal processes and procedures are in place to securely dispose of devices that may contain client Data.

If you have submitted your answers and would like to amend them, please contact support@peopleinsight.co.uk and let them know. They can either reset the whole survey for you or reset the survey without deleting any data so you can make any amends from the start of the survey.

People Insight’s online surveys have been developed following best practices in accessibility and web standard compliance. We follow WCAG 2.0 AA recommendations whenever possible during the development of the survey and are externally accredited.

The usability has been tested using most common readers such as Jaws, NVDA or MacOS Voiceover. However, due to the wide range of available screen readers and their frequent changes and updates, different interpretation of standards and different methods available for browsing a web page within said readers, they are unable to guarantee error free operation in all available readers and their versions.

If you are struggling with the format or would like additional support with a more accessible format, please contact support@peopleinsight.co.uk.

The survey has also been translated into Spanish and French for staff who do not speak English.