​Surveys – what a contentious issue they can be! Do you get the right value from the data, are you asking the right people the right questions at the right time…

Well we chanced it for 2022 and shared our survey out across all our various sectors, it was sent to the contractors that worked via MPI during 2021.We received responses from approximately 25%.

The survey typically took on average 4m 3sec to complete. It is a confidential survey to ensure that everyone feels able to be completely honest with any fear of reprisal in the future.

We received a 4.2 average star rating out of a possible 5 stars with regard to how satisfied our contractors are with us. Of course, we are delighted about this and feel it demonstrates our commitment to people as our core value but also highlights the positive experience our contractors receive from us and believe us, they hold their agencies to the highest standards and rightly so!

We received a 3.9 average star rating out of a possible 5 stars with regard to our ability find them work. We have to take into account that it was a struggle to find our aviation contractors work during 2021 with so few planes being able to fly and that’s right we are playing the COVID card on this one. We will be comparing this result with next year’s to see how we got on.

We asked some questions around what resources the contractors find useful when finding their next contract and it was clear that MPI’s Network plays a big role for them, 44.64% of people confirmed so....Get in touch to find out what’s different about MPI! Contact Us

 We asked what the biggest issues are that contractors face, we know about IR35 and pay rates so we asked them to identify issues other than those two. However, 68% of responses confirmed that pay rates and IR35 are the big issues and are still causing contractors to turn down work and/or find work in other areas. Other concerns were work bank visibility is lacking and shift details are so late being confirmed it makes planning for the shifts condensed into a rush.

We asked what were the positives of being a contractor and we will leave the results of this to another blog as they were quite interesting. Given that IR35 has removed most of the common reasons such as being able to earn more when you are working to compensate for when you aren’t working and not having any of the benefits that come with being employed and being able to offset your travel and accommodation costs it was interesting to see what people thought.

80% of respondents felt that MPI’s attitude towards safety was either very positive or positive.15.5% felt neutral and just 2% felt that it was negative, the rest skipped the question.We will be investigating further what caused that 2% of people to say it was negative so that we can take some action to remedy this. 

93.91% of people said they felt that if they reported making a mistake they were confident that they would be treated fairly by MPI. However, 6% said no they didn’t feel they would be treated fairly and we will be looking to use our site visits and safety tours to understand more about this and educate our contractors on the support available and work safe policies we have and how to be empowered to use them.

96% of responses said the practise of safety on site is effective and some contractors don’t work on site so were unable to comment on this question. There will be opportunities across our client meetings to discuss this data further and look to create a collaborative action plan to improve.

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Our PPE scored an average of 3.8 stars out of a possible 5 stars.PPE isn’t a requirement in all of the sectors we supply so the responses on this question were varied but included comments such as I don’t need it but I know how to order PPE and there were some positive suggestions on brands that could be trialled and ideas for issuing the PPE more effectively which we will be looking into with our PPE Supplier.

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We asked about our briefings website, only our rail sector currently use it and it’s clear from the survey that other sectors feel they would benefit from it too, some people commented on the functionality and we know it needs some modernising as it was a pioneering system back in it’s early days in 2014 but now is the time to rejuvenate the system with latest technology and make it available to all sectors we supply.

We looked at our Out of Hours Support – of those that have used it, 49% confirmed it was helpful and solved their problem.47% of responses confirmed they had not had any reason to use the service so were unable to comment. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the team that run this service, they give up nights and weekends to be on call and ensure the smooth running of works for our contractors and clients.

Finally, we asked if there were any other comments that people would like to share, we received 193 responses in total.116 of those either skipped or said they had nothing further to say. 57 said they were happy with everything or to keep up the good work.10 commented that our staff are always helpful and friendly and there were a few other comments such as find me some more work and pay me more money – we are pleased to say it’s our intention to do both wherever possible!

We did give the option for the respondents to give us their name if they wished to be entered into a prize draw with chance of winning a voucher or a donation to charity worth £50.170 people entered their name and hopefully the video of our Managing Director: Simon Henser picking out and announcing the winner, Ian Maguire, is what convinced you to read this blog in the first place.

You might be wondering why the survey didn’t include anything specific about on time payments and pay related questions? It’s because we already measure this on a weekly basis for any issues and complaints at the time, they are logged and categorised and action plans put in place if the error is ours. We have an average error rate of less than 1% that we could control (rather than it being a late timesheet or anything like that) and we pay on average 965 timesheets per week. This meant we didn’t feel we needed to add more questions to this survey and waste anyone’s time to learn something we already know and work hard to reduce every single week. We understand the primary reason most people go to work and we commit to ensuring payments are accurate and on time, every time.

So in conclusion we have a few small areas to work on but for the main part our contractors feel we are doing a good job in supporting them in all areas and we can feel proud that we are redefining recruitment and flying the flag for the ‘decent agencies’!