The Council is interested to explore the very best practice to further support its employee engagement, building on the strong heritage to date.

We would like to invite organisations to come and hear about Southend on Sea Borough Council and start considering what your organisation could offer, being clear about: why the proposed approach is recommended for Southend; what the heritage and background to the approach are; and what would set your approach out from the rest.

We've done some soft market testing and have seen lots of approaches that we like.

However, no standalone offer has jumped out as being right for Southend.

In an ideal world we'd like to cherry pick the best bits from each offer.

And this is where we'd encourage you to be creative.

We will be holding a supplier market place event on Friday 2nd June where we will present our challenge.

We'd like the suppliers in the room to network and explore opportunities to work together to deliver a unique solution for us.

Our plan is to do a one year pilot to test the new approach, with the potential to extend the contract for 2 further survey periods if the pilot is successful, before going out to formal tender for a 5 year contract.

As our solution, we want to explore an annual survey (which could be extended out to every 18 months), supplemented with always-on or pulse surveys.

We want to retain reporting at each level (organisational, department, director and group manager).

We would like a technology solution which fits the organisation: the majority of our employees are office based, but over 300 aren't.

We'd like to reach them in a different way to the usual sending out paper surveys which tend to have a low response rate.

We also want to become more sophisticated in joining the dots.

We know that excellent performance and engaged employees equals customer satisfaction.

We want to find a way of linking these things together to present the facts.

To be able to celebrate the areas where this is demonstrated and support those where extra support is required.

Please note that after the event we will be publishing the opportunity via contracts finder and our E-Procurement system.

If you want to book a place at this event then please email Procurementops@southend.gov.uk providing your organisation's details.

Please note that the event will take place as follows: Friday 2nd June 2017 10:30-12:30 The Tickfield Centre Tickfield Avenue Southend on Sea SS2 6LL (Please note that there is free parking at the venue or it is a 2 minute walk from Prittlewell Train station on the London to Southend Victoria line)