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Find out about the employee engagement survey privacy notice here.
Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council
Employee feedback is essential to ensure we constantly improve our employee offer, identify and act on any challenges, and increase employee engagement. Best practice clearly demonstrates that more engaged employees perform better, have lower absence levels, and are less likely to leave the Council as they feel more valued and trusted so have higher job satisfaction. Therefore, identifying areas to increase engagement throughout the Council will help to improve the councils performance, retention rates, and our employee experience/offer. To better support our employees, having an understanding of their experience overall as well as by various workforce demographics (in an anonymised way) to improve engagement levels and, ultimately, levels of psychological safety and retention across the workforce. This intelligence will form an essential part of our Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and People Strategy, as well as being common practice amongst other Local Authorities when driving employee engagement.
To do all of this we need a mechanism to hear our employees voice and opinions. An employee survey allows us to do this in a quick, easy, and anonymised way.
Personal identifiable data such as name or email is not collected, however, there is a risk that employees may be inadvertently identified if there are low numbers of employees with a protected characteristic within a specific service area. To mitigate this risk, steps will be taken to ensure access to the raw data is restricted to senior managers within Workforce Development, which will be held on a restricted site. The data will not be filtered by more than one question or published if the responses are less than 10 to ensure the data remains anonymous.
We will use questions on a scale from never to always. The topics which will be asked are within the categories below:
The data we collect will be answers to these questions. Answers to these questions will allow us to achieve our purpose by:
We will also collect demographic data by having employees select the option that applies to them. It is voluntary for employees to share this information with us. Employees can choose to share the following information:
Employees will be encouraged to complete the survey, but they will not be mandated to do so. Employees analysing the data will not be able to see emails or names. Data will only be published if more than 10 responses are in that category (this is in line with best practice and to ensure anonymity).
In addition, we may also use your data to support Council recruitment, which means survey feedback/analysed data may be used to support recruitment campaigns and job adverts for roles at Knowsley Council.
The lawful basis for processing the data is:
The relevant lawful conditions for processing under the Data Protection Act 2018 are as follows:
The legislation underpinning this is the Equality Act 2010. The public sector equality duty is a duty on public authorities to consider, or think about, how their policies or decisions affect people who are protected under the Equality Act. Therefore, as a council, we have a public duty to consider the welfare of employees with protected characteristics. As an organisation it is best practice to collect employee demographics to use for equality and diversity planning. The employee survey will allow all staff, including those with protected characteristics, to share their views. This will strengthen the fulfilment of our duties under this act because it allows us to better understand the experience at work of these employees, both what is working well and what can be improved, and how the experience across the different protected characteristic groups compares to the organisation overall (where there are more than 10 responses).
Data will be analysed by a small human resources team.
Results will be published for each question, but only If a question has more than 10 responses. All data will be shared anonymously. This data will be shared with all employees and may be used for recruitment/ employer branding purposes through our online channels, such as social media and websites.
These surveys are voluntary, and there are no consequences of failing to provide demographic data or completing the survey. In the demographic data staff will be asked to share if they wish to complete the survey, there will be an option under each demographic question to put/select ‘prefer not to say’.
If staff don’t provide this information, we may not be able to understand the experience of all staff across different demographic groups compared to the organisation overall and, therefore, may not be able to take the action needed to improve this, where needed. The experience of employees may not improve and, therefore, retention rates may decline, and we may struggle to attract and retain staff.
Personal data is kept for no longer than reasonably necessary. Raw data generated from the employee survey will be kept for up to a year after the survey has taken place. The published data will not be personally identifiable as this data will be broken down by a minimum group of 10 people. This allows us sufficient time to re-analyse results if needed to and compare to future surveys. This published/analysed data will be kept indefinitely.
Data will be stored on the Council’s secure IT systems and on restricted sites. Surveys submitted in paper form will be input into Microsoft Forms by the HR Team before being placed in confidential waste.
No
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Under the UK GDPR, you have the following rights with regard to your personal data: -
To find out more about your rights under the DPA 2018/UK GDPR, please visit the Information Commissioner’s website.
To request a copy of your data or ask questions about how it is used, please download a copy of our form and send it to: -
Data Protection Officer
Knowsley Council
Nutgrove Villa
Westmorland Road
L36 6GA
Or email: Inforights@knowsley.gov.uk
You can complain directly to the Council’s Data Protection Team by writing to: -
Data Protection Officer
Knowsley Council
Nutgrove Villa
Westmorland Road
L36 6GA
Or email: data.protection.officer@knowsley.gov.uk
You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office using the following details:-
The Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Telephone: 08456 30 60 60 or 01625 54 57 45
Website: www.ico.org.uk