Worker voice - improving surveys
- timnicolle7
- Jul 16
- 6 min read
Technology that connects business and workers in order to understand how labor rights are being respected has been around for more than 15 years.
The idea behind worker voice surveys is a simple one:
Workers are directly asked questions by voice call, SMS or via a webapp.
Data is collected, anonymised, and analysed.
A report is prepared.
This should be an efficient system, avoiding the costs of sending people on site to conduct interviews, and capable of connecting to a large number of workers at the same time.
Knowing that labor rights (labour rights in the UK!) are being respected, especially in supply chains and in locations where there are multiple labor providers, means:
connecting directly with workers.
After all, who else are you going to ask? No labor-provider or employer will freely admit to compromising the labor rights of its workers.
But whilst the theory is good and most ethical and responsible sourcing teams have trialled one or more providers, there is no stand-out technology that has scaled to significant size or developed to become a core component of ethical and responsible sourcing programs globally.
Worker voice – what’s up with surveys?
The theory is a good one.
A survey is a checkpoint that has a defined objective with a start, a middle and an end supported by a budget. This makes it easy for business to procure and for delivery to be organised and then evaluated.
Most surveys start by defining parameters and a standard model might be as follows:
How many workers are to be consulted?
How are the workers going to be selected?
What languages need to be supported?
How are workers going to be engaged (voice, SMS, webapp, interview)?
What are the questions going to be?
When is the survey going to happen?
How are the workers going to be told about it?
How is worker confidentiality going to be preserved?
So far so good – so where do we start going wrong?
If you want to jump straight to a solution - click here.
Cost:
The survey itself: most surveys involve a consultation process to set them up and configure them. A provider has to be booked, since the survey should enable workers to be confident their answers are confidential. If the survey is delivered by humans and / or if answers are to be interpreted by humans, each cycle of a survey can run into many US$1000s per cycle.
Interruption to production: workers need the process explained and to be given comfort that they will remain anonymous; on top, often there are 20/30/40 even 70-80 questions to be answered, and this takes time away from work – maybe even a few hours. That’s a significant cost for the worker and for the business, especially if a large number of workers are involved.
Follow up: the results are in – but the feedback indicates that there are further questions to be asked, with issues to be logged, tracked and followed up over time. Root cause diagnosis, remedy design and delivery – and then checking that remedy is working – these are expensive processes – and these are not part of the survey itself. These tasks fall onto the business and many hours can be consumed in these activities.
Its a one shot process:
Get the questions right because there are no second chances. We met one client recently whose survey pack going out to several hundred suppliers was missing key questions that they only realised after it had gone live.
Snapshot: In workplaces using agency-employed workers, seasonal workers, with foreign migrant workers, and / or turnover of labor providers or workers – the survey can be out of date quite quickly after it is done.
Black holes: emerge in the data in the gaps between surveys and remedy takes time to organise after each survey because the results have to be processed and analysed.
Scale and bias:
Number of workers: reaching all the workers can be difficult as a practical and cost matter, so then only some of the workers are consulted. Survey management can also be delegated or influenced by local supplier management and experience shows that this provides opportunities for coaching and for selection bias to creep in.
Number of questions: each question is a cost; this leads to a temptation to reduce the number of questions in order to minimise costs and the disruption to workers and labour providers. But this can also lead surveys to miss key findings because the scope becomes too narrow.
Forewarning: surveys need to be planned in advance with management teams at labour providers being given plenty of notice that a survey will be done – giving them time to prepare workers for the process and enabling them to influence responses.
Survey fatigue:
Survey results can rarely be shared: most surveys of labor providers across locations and supply chains are commissioned and paid for by a business for its own purposes. Results are not shared with others, as a result. Moreover, each business has its own reporting cycles and needs data to be reasonably comparable across suppliers, so surveys done for one business might not be useful to another.
Suppliers are tired of this: the inability to share survey processes means that suppliers and labor providers are inevitably suffering from too many surveys and the resultant disruptions to their business.
See here for a recent summary of some of the challenges faced by brands, retailers, construction companies, location managers, and responsible sourcing teams generally.
Worker voice – if not a survey, what do we want?
A continuous worker voice solution like "Ask the workers" is the answer. It neatly addresses the shortcomings mentioned above.
Continuous worker voice is implemented in the Ask the workers app. It is simple:
Anonymous operation: Workers download the Ask the workers app, and register with where they work without giving any personal, identifying information and without any typing. The app is installed on the phone making it easy for workers to return to it.
Anonymous outputs: Ask the workers operates on a truly anonymous basis (no personal data is collected). Worker responses are also fully anonymised when each individual response is combined with the whole population of responses.
Large question panels (Ie: number of questions) are supported – 70, 100, even 150 questions can be feasibly asked across the worker population.
Add questions at any time, since new questions just slot into the process easily – which means there is no pressure to get everything right on day one.
One minute to answer: When workers answer questions, it takes only a minute since they only see 10 questions from the larger panel. There is no interruption to production. But since all workers can participate, each individual question in the panel is seen and answered multiple times every day in each workplace.
All the workers, all the time: the open access model pioneered by Ask the workers means that workers cannot easily be excluded from the process.
Easy to share because workers own the data they provide. Anonymised reports based on that data can easily be provided to multiple interested parties. Since data is always real-time and up-to-date, reporting cycles can easily be met. Since questions are easy to add, any particular requirements for data can be addressed.
Follow up is built in because, with Ask the workers, workers continue to provide their views and so sustained remedy delivery is automatically tracked.
Self-remedy by workplaces is encouraged because Ask the workers dashboards are available to workplaces as well; this means they tend to fix issues themselves before stakeholders have to get involved.
Prevention becomes encouraged because the mere presence of the Ask the workers technology in the workforce motivates workplaces to maintain good practices.
Cost is low: a continuous model sounds like it should be more expensive but in fact costs are much lower - perhaps 1/10th of the cost to implement and operate when compared to surveys. There is no “stop-start” and the standard Ask the workers product can be implemented (and changed over time if needed), and most importantly because the expensive shortcomings of using surveys are mitigated.
Continuous is simpler, more efficient and more effective
The development of Ask the workers - the world's first continuous worker voice solution - is a game-changer for labour-rights due diligence processes.
It is now feasible to consult directly with large numbers of workers at scale across any number of suppliers and locations.
Moreover, with costs for Ask the workers as low as US$10 per month per location at scale, there is no reason why this should not become a standard part of your process.
If you are a small ethical and responsible sourcing team managing 100s or 1000s of suppliers, then Ask the workers is what you need. This new technology can enable you to implement an effective labour rights model consistently across your entire supply chain with ease.
It will also allow you to reduce reliance on self-assessment questionnaires and social audits – reducing their scope but also focussing these other tools onto the areas where they are effective.
If you would like to contact us to discuss any aspect of this post and to see the Ask the workers platform in action, we are delighted to talk:
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