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: Glasgow having the majority of the ten poorest constituencies in Britain.
Naturally, serving such vulnerable members of the community can be particularly challenging and stressful. It is essential, therefore, to ensure the correct policies and systems are in place to support staff accordingly. With a change of Director it was decided to capture Service-wide satisfaction levels in order to identify issues that may affect staff. “In addition, it was important to establish a mechanism that would allow staff to feed back to senior management all issues that influence the Service and, thereby, ensuring continual Service improvement”, said Dr Iain Inglis, Research Manager, Performance Standards & Strategic Management at Glasgow City Council.
This project was undertaken in partnership with MORI Scotland who provided consultation services, a template questionnaire and analysis, with Iain's department, part of the strategic arm of the Director's office, providing all complementary tasks.
The main 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 allow both staff and stakeholders to interact electronically, which would in turn complement the Service's modernisation strategy to encourage the use of new technologies and help gain a positive return on investment from the IT infrastructure recently put in place.
Glasgow City Council’s requirements were threefold. Firstly, the system chosen should be able to link easily to both existing SPSS analysis software and MORI Scotland's information systems. Secondly, that the solution be of enterprise strength, and thirdly that it be simple to use and require minimal training and maintenance.
“SPSS already provided data analysis software within 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 Iain.
SPSS recommended Dr Inglis to consider two products: a questionnaire design tool and an enterprise web server component to allow him to publish surveys to either the Intranet or Internet. After considering various options from other competitors, the decision was made to go with the SPSS recommendations. Iain explains the choice by saying, “We recognised in SPSS a brand leader. This solution capitalised upon our existing investment in SPSS analytics and gave us a seamless system for questionnaire design and deployment. Going forward it will 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 by hard copy. Approximately one third did so electronically.
Thanks to SPSS, the Service could focus upon the important aspect of promoting the survey and encouraging responses. By publishing the survey on-line a significant amount of time and money was saved in the reduction of manually entering data and furthermore, for the first time, the quality of data entered was of the highest standard. “Going forward, in addition to more flexible and professional consultation tools, the system SPSS helped to implement is expected to save the Council approximately £10,000 per annum in data-entry and process time efficiencies”, concluded Dr Inglis.
The complete list of global SPSS success stories can be found here
“Going forward, in
addition to more flexible
and professional
consultation tools, the
system SPSS helped to
implement is expected
to save the Council
approximately £10,000
per annum in data-entry
and process time
efficiencies.”
- Dr. Iain Inglis, Research
Manager. Glasgow City
Council.
Key Products and Services
Resources
Demos and Downloads
Was this information useful?