News
External consultants highly rate experience of working with NIRAS
In the 2020 Expert Satisfaction Survey, NIRAS development cooperation experts provide encouraging feedback and offer insights into improving collaboration.
May 1, 2020
NIRAS recently released the findings of its third annual Expert Satisfaction Survey (ESS). Based on their experience of working with us in 2019, external consultants scored the organisation an average of 4.2 out of 5 in five areas related to project management, working for NIRAS, country offices, security and integrity, and remuneration.
Between January and the end of March, responses were received from 273 participants – close to 100 more than in 2018 – 61% of whom have worked with NIRAS for a minimum of six months. While most respondents were contracted with our European head offices, there was replies also from those working with Asian and African offices. Respondents worked on projects implemented worldwide, with Kenya and Tanzania being the most common country assignment.
In 2018, while they were proud to work for NIRAS, external consultants did not always feel part of the larger organisation, and we particularly put effort into improving this. We are happy to see in this year’s survey that this is changing. Our outreach efforts through the newsletter and our LinkedIn account are clearly paying off. We were really pleased to count over 100 participants on a recent webinar open to staff and external consultants about smarter ways of working in times of COVID. We intend to provide more opportunities for external experts to join NIRAS webinars on various themes to support capacity building of both internal and external staff.
NIRAS offers a professional working environment where bright ideas are encouraged, promoted, backed up, and nurtured for the purpose of realising intended results.
Survey respondent
In addition to the ratings, experts were asked to elaborate further on areas where there could be room for development. Payment processing could be improved and survey respondents were also looking for more online resources where NIRAS could share tools and information developed by the projects. In this respect, the forthcoming Communications Toolkit, which pools best practice, should be a welcome asset. Stay tuned!
While we are happy to see the strong results, which are on par with last year’s ratings but show improvement in important areas, we are committed to addressing the concerns raised. The results are shared with all managers in NIRAS International Consulting, and specific feedback is given to project managers where this has been submitted. Such information is invaluable in improving our cooperation with experts. In these days of lockdown, we all work remotely so in that sense our experts are as accessible as any other colleague. We will use best practices in digital communication and outreach from this crisis to enhance future collaboration across our networks.
The Survey
Respondents were asked to evaluate the statements using a scale from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree", equal to the numerical score from 1 to 5, respectively. An average score was then calculated for each statement to get an overview of our performance. Feedback on what we are doing well and how we can improve was also requested.