The company, which employs more than 625,000 staff in operations across 150 businesses in more than 120 countries, is providing all its businesses with a compete toolkit of information and marketing communication materials.
The bespoke system, which enables each country to administer the survey independently of other territories, includes a real-time reporting tool for administrators, meaning they can check on response rates, report on results and examine trends before surveys have closed.
The automated system also generates a PDF country report showing how the results map against G4S’s own employee engagement model.
G4S faces challenges in developing its employee survey and engaging its employees, partly due to the fact that many of its frontline employees are remotely based at customer premises such as airports, prisons or sporting events or in volatile and high-risk areas such as Iraq and Pakistan. This means they are often very hard to reach, and may have no access to email or the internet.
Jenni Myles, director of employee engagement and HR at G4S, said: "With many of our employees remotely based and working in high-risk areas, engaging with them is a unique challenge. For our survey we therefore need to adopt a very simple methodology, allowing us to focus on the areas that really matter to our employees and business, but with the addition of sophisticated reporting and benchmarking tools.
"We believe that this will best equip us to identify and act upon engagement levels and trends both locally and globally and encourage meaningful dialogue with our employees."
The company has appointed bespoke HR software provider and consultancy ETS to develop the survey, which will offer the option of paper-based or online completion. G4S begins surveying its employees this month and the survey will run until April and will be available in a number of languages.
