Results of the questionnaire: Come and discuss with us

After a memorable year, with plenty of high-profile events in 2013, CERN will celebrate its sixtieth birthday in 2014. For a very long time the Organization has been a centre of excellence, cited as an example of a successful European, even world-level, scientific collaboration. This acknowledgement is not due to chance, but is rather the result of the continuous efforts, and devotion, of the staff members and the users, for decades. To guarantee that CERN keeps its place on the scientific research laboratories’ podium, the Organization must be able to attract, motivate and retain the best specialists from all Member States. To achieve this, a five-yearly review of the employment conditions is foreseen in the CERN Staff Rules and Regulations. The conclusion of the next review is foreseen for December 2015. The list of topics to be considered has to be defined by the CERN Council in June 2014, upon suggestion of the Director-General.

To help us prepare the discussions with the Management concerning this list of topics, all staff members were invited last autumn to reply to a questionnaire which has allowed us to know your wishes for the five-yearly review of 2015 (5YR 2015). As promised during our public meetings of October 2013, we will present the results of the survey and discuss them with you at our next public meetings during the second week of February (see table).

Come and participate in these meetings, we need your involvement, your opinions and advice to complete successfully this five-year review.

Questionnaire 5YR 2015: some statistics on participation

Below we show you some statistics concerning the questionnaire 5YR 2015. A total of 1463 staff members replied, but if we limit ourselves to questionnaires that have been filled in completely, we have 1382 answers (described in Fig. 1 with the label SA 2013), corresponding to a response rate of 55%. This response rate is comparable to the one of a HR survey in 2009 entrusted to the University of Lyon (labelled HR 2009 in Fig. 1) and compares very favourably with the Staff Association’s previous questionnaires in 2003 and 2008 (respectively, SA 2003 and SA 2008 in Fig. 1), and with the Staff Survey organised by HR Department (HR 2011 in Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 : Taux de réponse pour enquêtes récentes / Response rate for recent staff surveys

To allow us to verify whether the results of the 5YR 2015 survey are representative with regard to the staff as a whole, we have looked at some important distributions (Figs. 27). A comparison of these different distributions for those persons having responded to the survey and for the global population of staff members does not show any significant difference, which allows us to use the replies to the questionnaire as a basis for our discussions with Management and Member States.