SPSS - UK Customers

Glasgow City Council

Improving stakeholder consultation in local government

The situation

Glasgow City Council has the largest social work services department in Scotland, with over 5,000 staff serving a population of approximately 600,000, many of whom live in some of the most deprived areas in Europe. In fact, Glasgow has a majority of the ten poorest constituencies in Britain.

Serving such vulnerable members of the community can be particularly challenging and stressful. It was essential, therefore, to ensure the correct policies and systems are in place to support staff. With a change of director, it was decided to capture service-wide satisfaction levels to identify issues that may have been affecting them. “In addition, it was important to establish a mechanism that would allow staff to notify senior management about any issues that could influence the service, thereby, ensuring continual improvement,” said Dr Iain Inglis, Research Manager, Performance Standards and Strategic Management at Glasgow City Council.

The challenge

This project was undertaken in partnership with market research firm MORI Scotland, which provided consultation services, a template questionnaire and analysis services, while Dr Inglis’ department – part of the strategic arm of the director's office – undertook all complementary tasks.

The critical issue was improving the means by which the service consulted with its stakeholders. One of the improvements identified included the requirement to increase consultation flexibility, and to allow both staff and stakeholders to interact electronically. In turn, this would complement the service's modernisation strategy to encourage the use of new technologies and gain a positive return on investment from the IT infrastructure recently put in place.

Glasgow City Council’s requirements were threefold. First, the system chosen should be able to link easily to both existing SPSS Inc. analysis software and MORI Scotland's information systems; second, the solution should be of enterprise strength; and third, it should be simple to use and require minimal training and maintenance.

The solution

“SPSS Inc. had already provided data analysis software for the council, so we decided to contact them with regards to reviewing facilities for supporting the consultation strategy and, in particular, discussing what tools were available to allow questionnaires to be designed, as well as making them Web deployable,” explained Inglis.

SPSS Inc. advised the Council to consider two products: a questionnaire design tool, and an enterprise Web server component that would allow it to publish surveys either to the council’s intranet or the Internet. After considering options from other competitors, the decision was made to go with SPSS Inc.’s recommendations. Inglis explained the choice by saying: “We recognised in SPSS Inc. a brand leader. This solution capitalised upon our existing investment in analytics, and gave us a seamless system for questionnaire design and deployment. It would also add an additional channel of communication between stakeholders and ourselves.”

Staff were asked a range of questions on all aspects of employment within the Service (under the headings of 'Working within social work', 'Management style', 'Communications', and 'Change and the future'), and given the opportunity to complete the questionnaires electronically or on hard copy. Approximately one third did so electronically.

We recognised in SPSS Inc. a brand leader. This solution capitalised upon our existing investment in analytics, and gave us a seamless system for questionnaire design and deployment.
Dr Iain Inglis
Research Manager, Performance Standards and Strategic Management
Glasgow City Council

The results

Thanks to SPSS Inc., the service could focus upon the important aspect of promoting the survey and encouraging responses. By publishing the survey online, a significant amount of time and money was saved in the reduction of manually entering data and, for the first time, the quality of data entered was of the highest standard. “In addition to more flexible and professional consultation tools, the system SPSS Inc. helped to implement is expected to save the council approximately £10,000 per annum in data-entry and process time efficiencies,” concluded Dr Inglis.

Interested in improving stakeholder consultation in local government? Download the Glasgow City Council PDF here.