In February 2023, James Giroux founded TeamWP, a project that aims to advocate for open, people-first workplaces in the WordPress ecosystem. His first initiative was to launch the Team Experience Index, a benchmark employee engagement survey designed specifically for people working in the world of WordPress.
“The distributed nature of WordPress companies means they often lack the resources and knowledge to create truly open, people-first workplaces,” Giroux said. “The Team Experience Index fills this gap by providing insights and benchmarks that help companies identify strengths and areas for improvement, fostering a more open, collaborative, and innovative work culture.”
The comprehensive survey will be aggregated and anonymized. It takes approximately 4-7 minutes to complete and includes questions about employee experience, company culture, leadership, management and teamwork, career progression opportunities, professional development, compensation and recognition, and employees’ individual experiences.
While responses are recorded anonymously, it’s important to note that the company name is required, along with the employee’s role and the number of employees. Respondents should be aware that they are collectively giving away a lot of private information and should only share if they believe the insights will have a positive impact on the wider ecosystem.
Giroux plans to share the initial results of the Team Experience Index at WordCamp Europe in Athens in June 2023. Anyone working at a WordPress product or service company, agency, or hosting company is invited to complete the survey.
Thanks for sharing our story Sarah! In the second last paragraph, you mention the personal information we collect. I thought it worthwhile to provide people with some insight into what information is collected.
We collect the name of the company, the rough number of employees, the type of company it is and the role level of the person filling in the survey. We also collect the country they’re based in, their gender and if they are from a historically underrepresented group if they want to disclose it. Some of this information changes the questions asked in the survey to be more relevant to the person taking it.
This information helps us frame the answers provided but we do not have any way of connecting the response to an individual. We don’t ask for names, email addresses, titles or anything else that could further identify them as part of the survey.
We also don’t disclose individual responses to anyone (especially the companies they work for). The information is aggregated and we get insights about the ecosystem that we can share with the community.
Being willing to fill in a survey like this when your company is the one creating and managing the results can limit the willingness of participants to answer honestly and openly. This makes it really challenging for companies to get the kind of feedback they need to make meaningful improvements to the environments people are working in.
The goal of this survey is to provide a third-party, independent, anonymous and confidential way for people to share about their experience working in WordPress companies. It shouldn’t all be positive, it should be honest and where applicable, constructive. Our community grows when we face challenges and overcome them together.
If anyone has questions about the survey, the data, how we plan to use it and what’s next, feel free to reach out. As Sarah said, we’re aiming to publish the results during WordCamp Europe in Athens and I for one am very excited about what we’ll learn.