At the Victorian Public Sector Commission, we collect data through the People matter survey to:
The survey is part of our functions under the Public Administration Act 2004 that helps us improve the performance of the public sector and deliver the best outcomes for the Victorian community.
As an employee, it’s up to you if you want to complete the survey or not. As this is an anonymous survey, there are no consequences if you don’t do it.
You must be 18 years of age or older to do the survey.
You can choose to stop part way through the survey.
Your answers won’t be lodged unless you select the ‘submit’ button at the end of the survey.
But we encourage you to have your say, as your participation in the survey helps improve public sector organisations.
In the survey, we ask questions about your experiences at work that may cause discomfort.
If you feel uncomfortable at any time, you can:
If you’d like to talk to someone or need support, you can contact your organisation’s employee assistance program.
You can also contact:
When you do the survey, we protect your anonymity and privacy rights in line with the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 and Health Records Act 2001.
We run the survey, manage the data and do all research and reporting in a way that protects your identity:
You can enter your email address if you start and want to continue the survey later. We’ll delete your email address at the end of the survey period and never use it.
We give public sector organisations their survey results and benchmark data to:
We give them data as documented reports, spreadsheets and online dashboards. The results have been combined and anonymised.
To protect your anonymity and ensure people can’t identify you in this reporting, we:
In addition, if we get:
Here is a list of what we give your organisation:
These provide:
We deliver this report in PDF, Excel and Word formats.
This report has benchmarked survey results for groups, divisions or branches in an organisation.
We deliver this report in PDF, Excel and Word formats.
This dashboard has detailed and summary demographic results that an organisation can use to generate reporting analysis, such as heat maps and visual comparisons.
We deliver this report in an online dashboard and downloadable PDF formats.
This dashboard has results for custom questions an organisation has asked we include in their survey.
We deliver this report in an online dashboard and downloadable PDF formats.
We only provide this dashboard to the head of your organisation.
They may authorise other members of your organisation to view the dashboard by emailing [email protected].
To protect your privacy, we don't link comments to any survey data that will identify the employee who wrote it.
We deliver this report in an interactive dashboard, which a user can filter by topic or keyword or download an Excel version of the data.
We publicly release survey data on our website to promote transparency on the strengths of organisations and where they can improve.
This includes:
With all results we publicly release, we ensure others can’t identify individual participants.
We share the survey results of organisations with some Victorian government agencies and departments.
This is to help them monitor the performance of organisations they oversee.
We currently share survey results with:
We also share data with partners such as universities, to do research in the public interest for the public sector.
We only share data to research partners when we can:
Under the Freedom of Information Act 1982, we may release organisation results in response to freedom of information requests from interested parties.
We consider each freedom of information request on its terms and in line with the law.
If a request includes documents that affect personal privacy, they may be exempt from release.
Find out how you can make a freedom of information request.
The survey collects personal, sensitive and health information.
In the survey, we ask questions about:
At the end of the survey, we ask you information about your:
You can select ‘prefer not to say’ in response to all demographic questions.
We don’t use any information we collect to identify anyone’s survey responses.
Take care not to identify yourself or others in any responses you write yourself.
The public sector uses this information to find out how diverse groups of employees view aspects of their workplace.
This includes things like equal employment opportunity, discrimination, fair and reasonable treatment and how inclusive workplaces are.
You can choose if you want to do the survey to share your workplace experiences. There are no consequences if you don’t do the survey.
We have contracted an external service provider to support us in delivering the survey.
We work with our external service provider and use Qualtrics to run the survey and securely collect, store and manage your data.
We do this in line with our contract with our external service provider and its obligations under Victorian Government ICT policies, standards and other relevant guidelines, and the Privacy and Data Protection Act 2014 and Health Records Act 2001. Our external service provider uses data management systems and a security policy that are ISO 27001 (Information Security Management System) certified.
We maintain a copy of the data from Qualtrics, which is securely stored in an Australian data centre.
At the end of our contract with our external service provider, they'll delete the data stored in their data management systems and Qualtrics.
We tightly control and restrict survey information access to nominated people.
To access or change the information you enter in the survey, email us at [email protected].
You can’t change your survey responses after the survey period has closed.
Due to the safeguards we have in place to protect your anonymity, we may not be able to retrieve your survey response.
If you have any questions about the People matter survey or how we handle your data, email us at [email protected].