ECS 2009 – Methodology

The survey objectives were to:

• map, assess and quantify information on company policies and practices across Europe on an harmonised basis
• analyse relationships between company practices and their impact as well as analyse practices from the point of view of structures at company level, focusing in particular on social dialogue
• monitor trends
• contribute to the Europe 2020 stategy on the issue of company policies and practices with regard to their impact on quality of jobs, as well as the development of social dialogue in companies. The survey should allow for the development of homogeneous indicators on these issues for a European audience.

The ECS 2009 was carried out in 30 countries: the 27 EU Member States, plus Croatia, Turkey and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. TNS Infratest Sozialforschung, Munich (Germany), in cooperation with a group of experts and national fieldwork institutes, was responsible for conducting the survey.

The survey was conducted by computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI). The companies to be interviewed were selected at random among those with 10 or more employees in each country. See below for more information on sampling.

A management representative and, where possible, employee representative was interviewed in each company. The duration of the interviews was on average 20 minutes for management representatives and 15 minutes for employee representatives. The questionnaires are available.

The survey did not include the agriculture and fishing sector, private households and extra-territorial organisations. Public administration was covered in the sample.

A limited extension of the survey to collect additional information on the financial performance of private-sector companies was carried out in late 2009. This covered establishments in five countries – Finland, Germany, Poland. Spain and the UK – that represent different ‘welfare regimes’. See below for more information on financial performance. 

The unit of enquiry for the survey was the establishment (in the case of multi-site enterprises the local unit). Only the establishments with 10 or more employees were included in the survey. The establishments which were active in agriculture or fishing, private households and the extraterritorial organisations were excluded. The survey covers organisations from both the private and public sectors. The survey universe comprises some 3.2 million establishments, with about 145 million employees in the 30 countries under consideration.

The sampling for the ECS was done on the basis of a matrix, where the universe in each country was divided into 10 cells defined by five size classes and two main sectors of activity – the ‘industries’ sector and the ‘services’ sector. The targets for the sampling matrix were set in such a way so that each cell had a sufficiently high number of net interviews. Larger establishments were therefore deliberately overrepresented in the net sample. A weighting procedure was then applied to correct this disproportionate sample structure.

The table below gives an overview of the number of establishments and the number of management and ER interviews per country.

Source: European Company Survey 2009 - Overview, Eurofound (2010)

The management interviews were carried out in 27,160 establishments from the total of 3.2 million establishments. The number of management interviews per country ranges from almost 350 in Malta to about 1,500 interviews in the largest countries. If possible, an employee representative (ER) was interviewed in addition to the management interview. The number of ER interviews with ER is considerably lower than the number of management interviews as not all companies have an official employee representative body (roughly only half of them) and not all ERs were willing to participate in the survey. Where an employee representative body exists within the establishment, the response rate is approximately 50%.

The fieldwork, conducted by telephone, for the European Company Survey 2009 (ECS) was completed in 2009. Eurofound and its key stakeholders decided that it would be helpful to have some indications of the financial performance of the establishments that took part in the survey. Financial performance can be an interesting background variable to help evaluate the polices and practices that companies use in such areas as flexibility, human resources management and social dialogue.

The main ECS questionnaire included some questions on the company’s financial performance and labour productivity. As it was a telephone interview the answers were the subjective opinions of the managers (without referring to files or other data for validation). In the second module on financial performance, a postal questionnaire was used, giving respondents the opportunity to research and check the facts before answering. The aim was to validate the original subjective measures and to extend the analytical potential of the gathered data. The exercise collected additional information on the performance of private-sector establishments in five countries – Finland, Germany, Poland. Spain and the UK – that represent different ‘welfare regimes’.

There were a number of practical problems that affected the response rates and the quality of the collected data. Nevertheless, some significant statistical relations between the subjective and the objective indicators were found and lessons have been learnt from the exercise.

Some of the subjective performance indicators seem to be fairly good indicators for hard economic facts. Specifically, there is a good correlation between the subjective estimates and the actual situation for:

• developments in the number of people employed
• the development of added value
• the economic situation of the company

The pilot study concludes that some of the simpler questions about hard financial figures could be integrated in the telephone interview in future surveys. These questions should refer to the last fiscal year only. The risks of higher non-response rates to those questions and/or inexact figures can be managed and are less challenging than the two-step procedure (telephone and subsequent mail survey) which was applied in this case.

The module is documented in a technical report, Collection of financial performance information for validation of the subjective indicators from the main European Company Survey questionnaire: Methodology, Fieldwork and Results by Miriam Gensicke, Kristin Hajek and Nikolai Tschersich of TNS Infratest Sozialforschung. The report is available on request from esa@eurofound.europa.eu.

For many years Eurofound has built up considerable expertise in conducting surveys and has developed best practices for quality assurance. The quality assurance framework for the ECS 2009 consists of four main pillars:

• Planning: systematic planning and mapping of the whole research process
• Consultation: consultation with experts, stakeholders and users of the survey in the development of the questionnaire, key survey concepts and methodological strategy
• Transparency: the entire research process will be transparent, both internally and externally
• Documentation: documenting every single step, decisions or occurrences in the course of the project, ensuring that every step can be easily traced back

In order to ensure quality in the survey, and in accordance with Eurofound practices, it was deemed essential to involve from the outset experts and users of the survey, e.g. Eurofound stakeholders represented by members of the Management Board in the tripartite Advisory Committee on ECS 2009.

The report on quality assessment of the ECS 2009 assesses the quality of the survey in all its stages, starting from the sampling design to the final dissemination of data.

For further information about the European Company Surveys, contact Sophia MacGoris.