Xref met with Isabelle Swanston, Chief People and Culture Officer at Deaf Connect, to learn how Xref Engage surveys helped gauge staff sentiment after a significant merger and rebrand.
“Xref Engage displayed so much insight into our sector. They steered us in the right direction and added value to the survey process.” Isabelle Swanston
Engagement rate
Confidence in executive team
Staff aware of future vision
Xref met with Isabelle Swanston, Chief People and Culture Officer at Deaf Connect, to learn how Xref Engage surveys helped gauge staff sentiment after a significant merger and rebrand.
Deaf Connect is the largest whole-of-life service provider and social impact organisation for deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing Australians.
The organisation is passionate about empowering their community through support programs and advocacy measures. Deaf Connect offers everything from educational courses (short courses through to diplomas) in Australian Sign Language and interpreting to early intervention programs, therapy services, aged care and more.
Chief People Officer, Isabelle Swanston, joined Deaf Connect in March 2021. At the time, the organisation completed a significant merger and was undergoing a rebrand.
“Every Australian state has Deaf Societies that have been around for decades. At the end of 2020, in a move to become more sustainable, the NSW and Queensland societies joined to become Deaf Connect,” explains Isabelle.
All mergers present obstacles but this one was unusually challenging because it occurred during the pandemic and involved the loss of a senior staff member.
During this period, employees had to adapt to a new organisational structure, navigate through COVID-19 lockdowns, and cope with the grief of losing a beloved member of the Deaf Connect leadership team.
“I joined the organisation during this difficult time. Our priority was to ensure our employee's well-being and begin to pave our way to a better future,” says Isabelle.
Rebranding meant understanding what previous organisations meant to everyone on the team, and finding ways for the new brand to create a community where everyone feels connected and proud to be a part of it.
To best assist their people, the leadership team at Deaf Connect needed more insight into how their employees were feeling.
A community-focused organisation, Deaf Connect takes staff sentiments seriously and wanted to ensure the leadership team was doing the best by their organisation during a particularly hard time.
Isabelle enlisted the help of Xref Engage (formerly the Voice Project) to run an employee engagement survey to understand how leadership initiatives were being received and what employee sentiments were post-merger.
Engagement surveys reveal an organisation’s strengths and areas of improvement from the perspective of their staff.
In the case of Deaf Connect, some results were surprisingly positive. “We weren’t expecting engagement levels to be so healthy. We knew our community had been through a tough time,” says Isabelle.
Other results revealed areas in the organisation that needed development. “We learned our middle managers were struggling and that our learning and development systems weren’t up to scratch,” says Isabelle.
We interviewed Isabelle about her experience running an employee engagement survey with Xref Engage. Read on to learn more about how Isabelle ran the engagement survey, what the results revealed and how they were used to shape Deaf Connect’s HR strategy.
Since 2022, we have also merged with the Western Australian and South Australian Deaf Societies and so our staff are across the country.
We’re a community-orientated organisation and our culture reflects that. We are dedicated to the well-being of our staff and wider community and put a lot of effort into understanding how our people are feeling and creating improvements around the feedback we receive.
We operate using two languages, English and Australian Sign Language (Auslan). Many of our staff members are Deaf and learn Auslan as their first language with English as their second language. Auslan is therefore really entrenched in the way we do things.
We work hard to ensure information in both languages are as accurate as possible so all our people are included.
The first merger and surrounding events put a big strain on the organisation.
Our staff was grieving over the loss of a leader, adjusting to a new organisational structure and working remotely because of lockdowns.
Facing a mixed bag of emotions in the face of so much change is natural; in this case, there was an added layer of grief that made things harder for our people.
Also, Auslan is a face-to-face language and the need to work remotely due to lockdowns made communication between our people harder. Due to the impact of all the changes and the pressures of lockdown, burnout was a concern.
In 2019, both the Queensland and NSW Deaf Societies ran separate engagement surveys using Xref Engage (formerly the Voice Project).
The surveys acted as a health check for both organisations. Leaders used the results to understand each organisation’s strengths and weaknesses before uniting.
Coming into 2021, our main motivation was to understand how the impact of the merger on our people. We wanted to create improvement plans but to do that we needed to know about:
We planned to use 2021 survey results to lean in on what was working and change what wasn’t. It was incredibly helpful that we had 2019 benchmarks to measure against.
We worked closely with an Xref Engage consultant who was really wonderful. Our Xref Engage consultant was incredibly well-versed in Deaf culture and was able to provide insights into best practices for our sector.
We worked hard to create a custom survey in both English and Auslan. Our consultant was engaged in helping us create an inclusive survey that helped us understand our employees' sentiments after the merger.
Auslan required video-based questions instead of text. The outcome was a survey created in both languages so our entire staff could interact with our questions in the format that suited them best. We carefully selected questions that would give us the answers we were looking for and had help from the Xref Engage team in assessing the results.
I’m proud of the survey we created overall I think all organisations should aim to create inclusive surveys. Deaf, deafblind and hard of hearing people work in organisations across the world, not just ours.
The survey results surprised us! We scored really well in trust and engagement.
We had an employee engagement rate of 89%, up 7% from the premerger levels in 2019. 90% of our staff felt a strong connection to the leadership and management team, up 27% from 2019 and 88% were aware of our vision for the future, up 25% from the premerger levels in 2019. Each of these scores indicated extraordinary increases since our 2019 survey; these scores are uncommon for mergers.
We also learned that since the last surveys:
Results showed staff felt safer speaking up and raising concerns and more involved in decision-making.
As for areas of improvement, our middle managers were struggling with new processes and our learning and development systems weren’t as effective as we’d like. We had to create last-minute online training during lockdown so we weren’t surprised by that insight.
We also found the levels of satisfaction with employee benefits were lower than expected and there were some pain points around cross-unit cooperation.
When it came to styles of working, we found most people preferred hybrid work, which influenced our decision to move to at least two days in the office.
All this data was extremely valuable when it came to adjusting our strategies.
We used survey data to define how we would strengthen and improve processes.
Communication was a strong point and we decided to lean into the result. How could we do even better?
Soon after the survey, we conducted a town hall in every major office to talk with staff who could openly raise concerns. This was valuable as we realised many staff had the solution to their problems, they just wanted the authority to act!
Monthly Q&As were also introduced. Once a month, the whole leadership team attends a Zoom call where staff can ask us anything.
We created more transparency around remuneration and benefits packages and took steps to improve communication between teams.
For the middle managers who were struggling, we invested in a management retreat and regular training.
There’s a lot more, these are just some of the main steps we took using the results!
We’ve experienced two more unplanned acquisitions since our 2021 engagement survey. We now plan to conduct another engagement survey to understand current sentiments and learn whether or not our new processes are working.
What I’ve learned is that it’s important to understand how your whole team is feeling because feedback from a smaller cohort may not reflect the majority viewpoint. Surveys give you a chance to learn how all staff members feel allowing you to use fuller insights to inform decision-making.
Deaf Connect has experienced significant changes and challenges over the years. The entire workforce has rallied together to get through lockdowns, grief, multiple mergers and other changes in the world at work.
Xref Engage survey insights and benchmark points are helping Isabelle and the leadership teams create strategies that drive real impact in the organisation. Keeping on top of employee sentiment has helped the team continue to build a strong work culture, which in turn, helps the entire organisation create a more significant and positive impact on the wider community they service.
We look forward to continuing to help the team at Deaf Connect learn and improve!
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