University of Southampton’s outstanding approach to employee listening

The University of Southampton (UoS) has been recognised as one of the top universities for staff engagement in the Inspire HE rankings.  

The rankings highlight universities that have consistently demonstrated their commitment to listening to their people and improving the employee experience.

The University employs over 7000 staff across five campuses, with a new Delhi campus due to open in summer 2025.  

As part of the University’s commitment to its people and acting on feedback to improve the employee experience, the UoS Employee Listening team has developed an employee listening plan including an annual staff engagement survey and a leavers survey. They are looking to develop an employee lifecycle survey approach to seek views from colleagues at the different stages of their employment journey with the University.  

In 2024, the University was able to provide access to the interactive results dashboard to over 300 managers, an increase on previous years, so that they could work with their teams to develop their action plans and take steps to make improvements. 

One challenge the HR team has been conscious of is survey fatigue. This is being addressed by collaborating with other teams to ensure there is breathing room between surveys across the organisation.  

The 2024 staff engagement survey resulted in a completion rate above the industry average, as well as a score that was 13% higher than the benchmark for health and wellbeing. 80% of staff also said they were proud to work there. The University is also performing well in questions relating to inclusivity, scoring higher than the Russell Group benchmark.  

People are at the heart of UoS’s triple helix strategy, and the University of Southampton’s people plan links directly to the wider goals and ambitions of the organisation to ensure everything is aligned. There are staff engagement survey KPIs within the University’s people plan and progress against these is reported directly to the senior leadership team.  

While the university is early in our employee listening journey, they are aware from previous engagement surveys, and also anecdote, that workload is a concern in the HE staff community.  They therefore embarked on a workload principles project as part of their People Plan.  The project  included surveys and focus groups to understand how staff feel workload is currently managed and how the University can develop its approach. Since then, the final set of workload principles have been launched to help all staff engage in conversations about workload to help tackle the challenges experienced at UoS and, of course, by many other UK universities too.