Saving Time, Strengthening Insight and Driving Change in Further Education
With Hive, New College Durham saved hours of analysis, uncovered richer employee insight and strengthened action planning.
Higher Education
500 - 1,000 Employees
The overview
New College Durham had been listening to its people for years, but moving to Hive brought its approach to employee voice together in one place. The team now uses:
- Hive Surveys to understand the bigger picture and dig deeper into specific issues.
- Open Door to capture the stories, comments and suggestions behind the data.
- Connected insight to give senior leaders a clearer picture of what employees are saying.
- Less time spent pulling data together, with richer insight and stronger results.
- Employee insight that informs action, from strategy and action plans to what happens next.
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What brought them to Hive?
New College Durham already knew the value of asking its people for feedback.
For years, the college had been running its own employee surveys in-house. But as its approach to employee listening evolved, the team knew they needed:
- More staff participation: reaching more employees and encouraging them to have their sayÂ
- Deeper insight: looking beyond headline scores to understand what was really happeningÂ
- Greater trust in the process: giving employees confidence that their responses were genuinely confidential, so they could be honest.Â
That’s what brought them to Hive.
The first hurdle was getting people to trust the process
When you’re asking people to be honest about their experience at work, there’s a pretty important question sitting underneath it:
“Can I actually say what I think?”
New College Durham had experienced some of that first-hand.
When the college launched its first full Hive survey, some employees were unsure their responses were genuinely confidential. The team reassured them with Hive’s Confidentiality Commitment, videos and guidance.
And that mattered.
As Karen Milne, Head of Training, Development and Access Fund, explains, having that information to hand gave the team confidence in the approach they had chosen:
“Having that to hand really did help us because we were saying, that’s why we’ve gone with Hive, because we had that underpinning knowledge and confidence.”
Once employees understood how confidentiality worked, the team saw something they hadn’t achieved with their previous approach…
More people spoke up
New College Durham’s response rate rose 19%, and with more employees taking part than the previous year, it meant more than a better-looking response-rate figure.
It gave the team more voices, more data and a much stronger picture of what was happening across the college.
Karen says: “The college had achieved its highest uptake yet, and that was one of the reasons they had chosen Hive in the first place.”
Suddenly, they had a lot more to work with
The survey produced an Engagement Index of 7.6 and eNPS of +23.
But Karen’s enthusiasm wasn’t really about having a nice set of numbers to put into a presentation, it was about what the team could actually do with them.
“The initial survey gave us fantastic data, we were elated. Hive’s dashboards made it much easier to see response rates, explore the results at an overall level and then drill down into individual areas. It’s given us really rich data to work from.”
And, as it turns out, there was a very practical benefit too:
“That’s hours and hours and hours of our lives that we’ve got back. Can’t tell you what we’ve done with them, but we’ve got them back.”
Which is quite possibly the most honest description of a reporting time saving we’ve ever heard.
But the survey wasn't the end of the story
As the team explored the data, one issue stood out: workload.
They could have simply recorded it as one of the survey findings.
Instead, they decided to ask another question. What’s actually going on with workload?
So, they used Hive to run a dedicated workload survey.Â
“We then recognised one of the biggest areas was curriculum staff workload. So we’d done another survey around that to try and do some more digging into how to improve this.”
And that is where the story gets interesting.
Because the first survey didn’t just show New College Durham what employees were experiencing, it helped them work out what to explore next. And now they had a stronger picture with two sets of data to look at together.
From a feeling to something you can take to leadership
The team brought the findings from the main staff survey and the workload survey together to create a report for the Senior Leadership Team.
This was the point where employee feedback became something much more tangible.
They weren’t asking leadership to take their word for it, they could show them what staff were saying.
“These are the things staff are telling us, we can’t ignore them, we need to action them.”
And that gave the conversation a very different starting point.
Instead of “we think workload might be a problem”, it was:
“Here’s what our employees are telling us. What are we going to do about it?”
But there was still something missing. The numbers could show the scale of the issue. They couldn’t always tell you what it actually felt like to experience it.
And that’s where Open Door came in.
Then they listened to the people behind the numbers
Alongside the survey data, New College Durham uses Hive’s always-on listening tool to capture the things that don’t always fit neatly into a survey score.
The team pulled relevant comments from 154 Open Door submissions, with employee suggestions helping strengthen the report presented to leadership and bring the survey findings to life.
“The staff were telling us how to put things right.”
So suddenly they had three useful pieces of the puzzle:
- The main survey showed the bigger picture.
- The workload survey helped them dig into one of the biggest issues.
- Open Door gave them the human detail, and ideas from employees about what could actually help.
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That’s a pretty powerful combination.
What happens next?
The feedback didn’t just sit in a report. It’s now feeding into New College Durham’s operational planning, with staff wellbeing, workload, reward and equality becoming priorities for action. The college is working towards short, medium and long-term goals, with plans designed to be visible to staff.
The insight is also helping shape the college’s new five-year strategy. And rather than assuming the job is done once the strategy is communicated, the team plans to use Hive again to ask staff whether it landed, did they understand it, did the communication work, and how did it make them feel?
“We want to triangulate that a little bit more. So we’re going to use Hive to do that.”
It’s a shift from survey, report, done, to listening, understanding, acting and asking again.
Who is Glasgow Clyde College
New College Durham is a further education college in the North East, supporting students through further and higher education, apprenticeships and adult learning. With a diverse workforce across a wide range of teams and roles, understanding employee experience is an important part of how the college supports its people.
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