Jul 21, 2021
Human8 Response
4yPosted on behalf of Niels Schillewaert, PhD, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of InSites Consulting.
I’m sorry that you did not enjoy your time working at InSites and feel so negatively about the business. Of course, just like every organization we face challenges but we put quite some effort into dealing with these and have a culture of continual improvement at InSites that we are very proud of. I would also like to provide context to your review and provide people with an alternative perspective on the business.
Our consultancy business and the research profession as a whole is driven by clients with high standards and comes with strict deadlines. Part of the excitement of working in our industry is meeting this challenge. But when things do not run perfectly, we have to put things right which can also bring pressure. But we deliver projects in teams and ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is never due to one individual. One of our values is being ‘daring’. It implies that we sometimes propose a less conventional or innovative method or approach, which can bring unexpected situations and some challenges. But we also learn from it, we progress and our clients praise us for it. Admittedly, we have had capacity issues over the past year that have required our people at times to working harder than we wanted, but as we speak we are getting our resources back to where they are needed with over 70 vacancies worldwide so we can catch up with our 10+% growth of the last year. Work-life balance in our industry is not an easy thing to manage and it is a process we are perfecting, that is true. But we do not at all take it lightly. We have a flexible working policy and a hybrid working policy allowing people to adjust their hours and place of work enabling our people to balance their home and work commitments. We are about to introduce a well-being platform available to all enabling them to take part in wellbeing classes such as yoga and mindfulness. We are investing heavily on leadership and management training to ensure our managers are equipped to support their people and help them achieve better work life balance. And InSites Consulting’s leadership team are very focused on our people and creating a great place to work. At the moment when COVID hit in early 2020 our leadership and management team immediately committed to protecting our people’s jobs and it is a promise we have proudly kept! Despite the pressure on our returns over the course of the last year we did it for the benefit of our employees.
Next, what is extremely worrying in your review are the strong words and allegations of “verbal abuse”, “lack of empathy” and the supposedly disrespectful fact that junior employees have to clean up dog refuse. These are very serious accusations that we take very seriously. If this is true, we invite you to discuss the matter further with us in all confidence, respectfully and in concrete detail, so we can take appropriate action. We do have an (anonymous) whistleblowing procedure available to all employees for these matters and encourage anyone experiencing wrongdoing to use that procedure.
We annually ask all staff at InSites to complete an anonymous survey about what it is like to work at InSites Consulting and in the most recent survey conducted in May 2021 over 80% of the InSites Consulting team members based in our US/NYC office explicitly label our company as a “great place to work” and whilst the verbatim comments highlighted the usual challenges the overall picture was of a strong and happy team.
When it comes to your references about research quality and fraud we would like to point to the following. It is true that respondent quality is a big talking point in our industry and it is a collective responsibility. One we at InSites take very seriously while talking openly about the challenge and how we address it. This includes working with reputable, vetted sample partners with agreements on the quality we accept and can reject. This is coupled with our own quality detection steps including digital fingerprint technology and procedures for checking for instances of low quality in communities and surveys. And since it is high on our strategic list of priorities we have built a central team dedicated only to respondent quality consisting of both data science and network quality innovation roles. A specific KPI for respondent quality is on our list of strategic KPIs and is managed by this network quality team as part of the broader consumer networks function. So while the industry grapples with this challenge, we have taken structural steps to ensure we develop ways of staying on top of this in a meaningful way. When you refer to “rampant respondent fraud” which is “flagged but ignored”, we feel that is not fair and you are projecting an industry-wide phenomenon solely to InSites Consulting while ignoring the significant measures we have in place to address this. Overall, we hope we have provided more context to your review.