This is an independent evaluation of your staff communication and engagement activities, policies and processes and is undertaken by suitably qualified external professionals.

In our experience a full audit would take around three months in elapsed time from commission to reporting. 

It is likely to follow the following process:

• Members of the senior executive (including or plus HR and communications directors) complete the online survey so their views are known to the consultants before they are interviewed.
• The University is asked to provide the key documentary evidence that supports the evaluation against the HEliX good practice indicators (e.g. plans, reports, policies, reviews, examples of practice).  These are supplied in print or access is provided to online sources. 
• The senior executive team members (including or plus HR and communications directors) and some Heads of Department are interviewed one-to-one or in pairs to highlight key issues and gain insight into the university and its practices.  The consultant will use the HEliX indicators and the evidence specification to create the discussion guides and to map the evidence gathered in a systematic fashion.
• Either a stratified sample of staff or a census is undertaken using the one of the 'strand' surveys.  The results are analysed and an overall rating for each segment of the staff against each indicator.  These surveys capture verbatim comments and ideas and these are recorded, evaluated and summarised.
• The consultant then completes their independent review, taking account of the ratings and verbatim comments from the surveys.  We recommend that the respondents are asked to provide their email addresses when they have completed the survey (optional) so that they can be contacted to discuss ideas in more detail and/or invited to follow-up qualitative sessions where staff might be engaged in designing solutions and new approaches.
• The consultant then provides an independent 1-4 rating for each indicator of practice with an associated commentary.  It is then possible to compare the evaluations of the consultant relative to the four staff groups to gain a rounded picture.
• A draft report is then issued to the university.  Once this is agreed the results can then be benchmarked against the sector averages (using descriptive variables such as mission or size) to locate relative strengths and weaknesses.