Our 2021 staff survey launched this week and you should have received an invitation by email to take part. If you can’t find your invitation, don’t worry – you will be sent a reminder.

The online survey, run by a third-party provider called People Insights, gives us anonymised responses to encourage more people to take part and give an honest opinion of working at Sussex.

We want to reassure you that your responses remain confidential and we have completed a data protection check on the process and on our survey provider, People Insight, to ensure that any data is held and managed in line with legislation. People Insight will provide data reports, but within those reports, we will not be able to link responses to any individual respondent.

All free text comments will be redacted before they are shared to reduce the possibility of respondents being identified. Where data sets relate to groups of less than 10 people, we will not report the data to reduce the possibility of individual responses being identified.

In the survey, we ask staff to answer some demographic questions including some on protected characteristics – this will help us focus our equality charters action plans on the issues affecting you.

Miguel Maravall, academic lead for gender equality at Sussex and Chair of the University’s institutional Athena SWAN Self-Assessment Team (SAT) said: “The staff engagement survey will help the University to better understand how it has felt for staff to work here in this challenging period, and how our policies and practices are perceived to operate - from an equality perspective. We want to identify areas for follow-up consultation and target actions to improve conditions for our staff, especially for those with protected characteristics whose responses show a negative experience or where barriers exist or are perceived to exist. For example, we are including specific questions on bullying and harassment.

"The staff engagement survey is confidential. We guarantee that you cannot be identified or linked to your responses in any way. By completing the sections at the end of the survey where you are asked demographic questions about yourself, you will help us identify where specific groups are perceiving difficulties or inequalities. We are committed to act to address these inequalities, as part of our aim to create an inclusive working environment in which all individuals can thrive.”

So far (28 January) 829 people have taken part in the survey which will run from Monday 25 January 2021 to Friday 12 February 2021. You will be sent reminders between now and then to take part.

Once the survey is closed we aim to share results with staff within weeks and we will now be holding two pulse surveys a year, providing us with the opportunity to find out what matters most to colleagues  so that we can bring about positive change here at Sussex.

This link is unique to you and the survey should take around five minutes to complete.

• Read more about the Staff Survey
• Why your views matter 
• Action taken following previous surveys