JRA Newsletter December 2008

Christmas Best Wishes

With the end of the year upon us, we’d like - first of all - to thank all our clients for trusting us with your business during 2008. We never take this for granted, and value you all highly. The pace of life continues to quicken, and no doubt the year has been a busy one for you and your colleagues. With that in mind, the team at JRA wish you and your families a happy, safe, and especially restful Christmas, and a prosperous New Year!

Christmas Opening Hours

We will be closed during the Christmas period from COB Wednesday 24 December, reopening on Monday 12 January. If you are running a survey with us, email support will still be available, at support@survey-online.com. If you would like us to contact you to discuss running a future survey for you, please feel free to reply to this email and we will respond on our return.

Team JRA expands

2008 has again seen Team JRA expand. Over May and June, Jessica Xu and Jenni Blake joined the team and immediately became familiar to many of our clients as they provided survey administration support during the unlimited/JRA Best Places to Work Survey. Just prior to their arrival, Jenn Edwards took maternity leave, and shortly after we were introduced to baby Milly. Amy Shipley, who left to have baby Holly towards the end of 2007, has begun making a much-welcome part-time return, while in December we bid farewell to Rob Veitch who has left New Zealand to join the love of his life in Denmark. Rob made a significant contribution to our research activities during his 18 months with us, and we all miss him.

Other highlights of the year included:

• Our ninth, 2008 ‘Best Places to Work in New Zealand’ survey, saw 217 organisations and over 27,000 employees take part during the period June through August. By running the survey one month earlier than in previous years, we were able to bring the Awards Evening into the same calendar year as the survey itself. On top of that, 2008 saw the first ‘stand alone’ Awards evening held in the 5-Star Langham Hotel in February (to celebrate the 2007 finalists and winners), and AGAIN in November to celebrate our 2008 finalists and winners. 2009 promises some real surprises, and we have great plans for what we intend will be our most memorable year yet - watch this space!
• Our first Employee Engagement publication (the ‘green book’) was so successful in 2007, we repeated the exercise again in 2008 – twice! Our ‘blue book’ Employee Engagement: From Insight to Action was released February, and discussed the concept of employee engagement and also offering ideas on the post-survey process. Then again in November we published our ‘silver book’ entitled Employee Engagement: Stories of Success, where the focus turned to illustrating through a series of case studies how a range of very different organisations have gone about strengthening the ‘four pillars’ of their great workplaces via innovative yet practical initiatives. Recession or not, all of these case studies demonstrated that creating an engaged workforce has probably never been more important, given its impact on organisation performance and bottom-line profitability.
• In September we sponsored the ‘JRA Great Places to Work’ pavilion at the New Zealand Herald YourCareer Expo. The expo ran over the weekend of 27-28 September, and with more than 6,000 people attending over the two days the event was a great success. Thank you to all those who managed to stop by our stand for a visit, it was great to see you there!
• Our online survey technology featured some outstanding new and well-received developments this year. Notable among these was the introduction of our ‘engagement analysis’ reporting. This new reporting feature includes the Engagement Profile report and Key Driver analysis report, two powerful analyses that will be enhanced further in 2009 by the addition of the ‘Anatomy of a Great Workplace’ report and the Consolidated Engagement Report. Also introduced during the year was the JRA IdeasBank™, a searchable database of anecdotes that now allows us to better share the ‘great workplace’ stories we hear from our ‘Best Places to Work’ CEOs with our wider client base.
• Exciting developments in Australia – JRA Australia Pty Ltd continues to grow, with our latest client-signing being television and media player SBS. We are confident 2009 will be ‘the year of the kangaroo’, so watch this space also!
• Outstanding customer feedback – to prove we ‘practice what we preach’, we continued our regular quarterly customer feedback surveys to make sure we are meeting your needs and expectations. Our latest survey included 129 organisations – ‘Overall satisfied with products and services’ scored 95.3% level of agreement, ‘would use JRA again’ scored 96.1%, while ‘would recommend JRA to others’ scored 93.8%. Naturally we are thrilled to receive such positive feedback, something we place high value on as we constantly strive to ‘lift the bar’.

Once again, thank you so much for your business, and a Merry Christmas to you all. We look forward to working with you again in the New Year!

Best wishes,
The Team at JRA