What is: Have Your Say

Why is this important?

The Have Your Say survey allows employees to express their opinions about our workplace culture and our progress in reaching Metro North Health strategic goals—to become an employer of choice, a great place to work and to take care of our own staff as well as our patients. It gives them a chance to let us know what support they need at work. It also gives managers the information they need to build a positive work culture that aligns with Metro North Health values.

What’s my role in this?

It’s your responsibility to actively shape your team culture so it aligns with Metro North Health values of:

• respect
• integrity
• compassion
• high performance

When there are behaviours or practices that don’t match these values, it’s up to you to address them. Have Your Say gives insights that can help you assess your team culture and address any issues you need to deal with.

What do I need to do?

It’s up to you to:

• encourage staff to participate in the survey
• analyse the survey report
• develop and implement a local action plan.

The survey report

The Have Your Say survey is conducted by Best Practice Australia (BPA) Analytics on behalf of Metro North Health.  BPA Analytics reports on trends, such as the percentage of people who agree or disagree with a statement, and how they compare with relevant benchmarks. In some cases, they draw comparisons between outcomes in your service and other services nationally. It’s up to you to analyse the report and identify where your team’s performing well, and where you need to improve. You may need to sensitively explore with your staff some views expressed in the survey.

Your local action plan

Work with your team to develop an action plan for building on your successes and addressing areas of challenge.

Assure staff of privacy and confidentiality

Some staff may be concerned about privacy and confidentiality when completing the survey. There are a number of ways in which this is protected.

BPA Analytics hosts the survey on its servers. When employees access the survey, they’re submitting their feedback directly to BPA Analytics. Metro North Health has no role in collating or compiling reports. BPA Analytics collates feedback and compiles reports which are given to Metro North Health approximately 6 weeks after the survey closes. Reports are delivered to each team by HHS, who also provide support to interpret reports and develop action plans.

The contract with Metro North Health requires that BPA Analytics:

• comply with Australian privacy law
• not disclose personal data to any third party
• does not include the employee details in reports returned to the HHS.

BPA Analytics is entrusted with minimal employee information; employee name, payroll ID, employee professions and email address. The employee profession data only includes the employee’s stream (e.g Nursing, Administration).

BPA Analytics collates responses into work units so that deidentified reports can be released to Metro North Health. The only effective way to link a respondent to a work unit is through their payroll number.

• BPA Analytics can’t use the payroll number to identify an employee.
• The payroll number must be removed from any data before it is returned to Metro North. This prevents Metro North Health from using the Payroll Number to identify an employee.

When a payroll number might be released

If BPA Analytics identifies a response that warrants a welfare check, they may contact Metro North Health’s Chief Wellbeing Officer to raise their concerns. If the Chief Wellbeing Officer agrees that a welfare check is appropriate, only then will BPA Analytics release the payroll number of that respondent to the Chief Wellbeing Officer so they can conduct a welfare check with that employee.

The payroll number is not used for any other purpose and is not provided to Metro North Health in any report or aggregate data.

The purpose of collecting general demographic data

Some employees are reluctant to give demographic data in case they can be identified. The reason we collect some demographic data is to allow for more in-depth analysis of the feedback. Mostly, reports are generated on a team-by-team basis. Sometimes it’s more relevant to capture the feedback of a certain group of employees, for example Registered Nurses, Interns or Admin Team Leaders. This can help reveal the the needs of certain groups not otherwise captured in standard team-by-team reporting.

Also, an Executive Director of Medical may be interested in the feedback provided by their Resident Medical Officers. They can only get this if RMOs indicate their role when completing the demographics.

The minimum 10 rule

When providing demographic information, the ‘minimum 10 returned surveys rule’ applies. That is, for a report to be generated a minimum of 10 surveys need to be returned by people who fit that demographic. Here are two examples:

• 12 Females aged 25-24 in a team, 8 returned surveys = no report available.
• 15 male Registered Nurses in a team, 11 surveys returned = report available if requested

This rule’s designed to protect privacy and anonymity. Metro North Health doesn’t intend to isolate individual pieces of feedback. The intention is to understand trends and patterns in survey responses.

Useful Links

• Have Your Say information page