Croydon College’s action plan for engagement success

About Croydon College

Croydon College delivers education and training from entry level to level 6, degree level, for those aged over 15 years old across a wide range of vocational subjects, general subjects and academic pathways. Coulsdon Sixth Form College concentrates on the delivery of academic pathways for 16 to 18 year olds. Coulsdon Sixth Form College is incorporated into Croydon College as one legal entity, though both continue to operate for students with their own unique identities.

When Helen Langford, Head of HR, joined the college, her first task was to pull together a new HR strategy. The voice of 450 staff was essential to feeding into future HR practices. The college also had new leadership and a bold corporate strategy, creating an important moment to listen properly, understand the employee experience and shape action around what staff needed.

Working with People Insight helped Croydon College run its first externally managed employee survey in a decade. The partnership gave the college confidentiality assurances, robust survey design, Pearl™ engagement insight, benchmark data, dashboards and reporting, response tracking and practical support to turn results into local action plans.

Changing the culture at Croydon College

One of the pillars of the strategy was investment in staff as the college’s greatest asset. Guided by this principle, Helen and the leadership team wanted to build a trusting, empowering culture and show colleagues that their opinions were heard and valued.

As the new leadership team brought in more in-person staff briefings, staff forums and focus groups co-facilitated with the unions, the college was beginning to change from hierarchical, central decision-making to more of a listening culture.

A key metric for this new culture would be improved feedback from staff surveys throughout the strategy period.

This made employee listening a central part of the HR strategy. Croydon College needed more than a one-off survey. It needed a credible process that would help staff feel safe to give honest feedback, give leaders clear data they could trust and support action planning across schools and professional services.

People Insight’s role was to help make that possible. Through expert survey design, confidentiality guidance, benchmarking and clear reporting, the college could move from broad ambition to practical insight.

Setting up the employee survey for Croydon College

Helen commissioned the first externally run employee survey in a decade, choosing People Insight based on a previous experience with us in another higher education institution. Helen said:

When deciding on the survey questions, Helen chose the Pearl employee engagement survey model as it is well researched, robust and provides extensive comparative benchmark data.

People Insight also added specific questions under the theme of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, a key priority in the Croydon College strategy for students and staff alike.

When it came to launching the survey, Helen and the team invested effort in good preparatory communications. The team created the “Have Your Say” brand. They explained that the survey was coming, how it was confidential through People Insight, that the findings would be robust and, importantly, acted upon. They used posters, online communications, union meetings and staff meetings to get the message out.

See here for advice on communicating about your surveys.

Once the survey was launched, a live response rate tracker provided by People Insight meant Helen’s team could communicate a leaderboard of departments and their response rates, creating a friendly competition between leaders to maximise survey responses.

Sharing and reviewing the college employee survey results

When the results were in, Helen was able to develop results presentations from the survey dashboards, first to share with the leadership team. 

Following the executive team meeting, Helen was able to share more detailed findings with the Principal and VP of Finance, discussing what the high-level action areas needed to be.

Next, Helen held an all-staff Zoom meeting and shared a presentation of the top-line results. This was an essential step in continuing to develop the transparent and trusting relationship with colleagues. Fuller details were subsequently shared with union groups and the staff forum.

The overall survey results showed three key areas for further investigation:

1. The sense of purpose amongst staff
2. The desire for more autonomy
3. A continued focus on EDI

Helen co-ran staff focus groups with the unions to deep dive into each of these topics and explore solutions further. The HR team are engaging with internal networks and the National Centre for Diversity to take some of the actions forward.

Within three weeks, all stakeholders had the chance to see and discuss the results, which is best practice in order to maintain momentum and move to action post-survey. Each school and professional services area had their own presentation. These served as an opportunity to discuss results and as a brief for action planning.

This fast, transparent sharing process was a real strength. Croydon College did not wait months to tell staff what had been heard. Results were shared with leaders, staff, unions, forums, schools and professional services areas while the survey was still fresh in people’s minds.

People Insight’s employee survey platform supports this by giving organisations clear dashboards and reporting that make results easier to understand and share. Dashboards help leaders identify priorities, compare results and focus discussion around what needs to happen next.

Prism-supported insight can also help organisations identify themes in open-text comments, summarise feedback and move from survey results to practical next steps more quickly, while keeping expert interpretation and human judgement at the centre.

Action planning

Helen supported each school and professional services area to create their action plans. It was the first time this had happened and, in line with the survey feedback that people wanted more autonomy, the freedom to choose actions and make change happen was very well received.

Feedback from the local action plans has gone into the overall college action plan, so there’s a clear thread throughout the college and a clear sense of direction.

This was a major step in making the survey feel useful. Instead of creating a single central HR plan, Croydon College gave local areas ownership of their own results and actions. That supported the move towards a more empowering culture and helped show staff that feedback would shape practical decisions.

People Insight helps organisations make this move from insight to action through dashboards, reporting, benchmarking, expert interpretation and employee survey action planning support. For Croydon College, this meant staff feedback could influence both the overall HR strategy and local improvement plans.

Learnings for other FE Colleges when undertaking employee surveys

Get the set up right

Being clear on the data outputs you require will help you structure the survey set up. For example, making sure your survey participant information is organised correctly with teams, managers and demographic information will mean you can slice and dice the results to understand what’s happening in particular groups of employees.

Your employee survey partner will help you make this happen. People Insight supports this through survey design, implementation guidance and reporting structures that make results easier to use once the survey has closed.

Communicate well before the survey

Getting staff to participate in a survey requires trust. Ensure you are clear about confidentiality, as working with a third-party survey provider will really help with this. Communicate well in advance of the survey and leading up to it, with honesty and transparency about what you will ask, why you are asking and what you’ll do with the results.

Enlist the help of key stakeholders to support the survey. Your Principal’s visible backing is absolutely essential. Involve staff groups and unions, so if they are asked, they can be supportive.

This is where survey communications make a big difference. A good communications plan helps staff understand the purpose of the survey, trust the process and believe their feedback will be used.

Create healthy competition to improve your response rate

The communications to heads of department and schools, sharing ongoing response rates from each team, really helped improve response rates. What was important here was getting the tone right. It was healthy, fun, light-hearted competition, not a threat to force people to participate.

People Insight’s live response tracking helped Croydon College create this momentum. It gave the HR team the data they needed to encourage participation while keeping the campaign positive.

Cascading the survey results to all the right stakeholders

Planning how you will communicate the survey results is important to do well in advance of the survey closing. Getting results out quickly was helpful in supporting the transparent, involving culture Croydon College was trying to develop.

Making sure each group, including the executive team, managers, unions, staff forum and teachers in the classroom, had a results presentation that was relevant to them, in the right order, was also important.

Results presentations for communicating and discussing survey results

This is a useful lesson for other FE colleges. Dashboards help leaders explore results, but teams also need easy ways to share those results in meetings. iDeck can save time by turning survey results into ready-to-use presentation decks, helping managers focus less on slide creation and more on discussion and action.

Finally, how was it working with People Insight?

Croydon College’s story shows how an externally run, professionally designed employee survey can support a wider HR strategy. The survey helped the college understand staff sentiment, investigate key themes, involve unions and staff forums, create local action plans and strengthen a more transparent listening culture.

People Insight supported the full journey, from question design and confidentiality through to communications, response tracking, dashboards, benchmarking and action planning.

The result was a 66% response rate, a 72% engagement score and a stronger foundation for staff voice to shape future HR priorities.

Check out more case studies

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