TWI Surveys

Research is the cornerstone of strategy

Who We Are

Our Story

TWI Surveys Inc. is a research company based in Vancouver, Canada.
A subsidiary of Tekara Organizational Effectiveness, Inc.,
TWI has proudly served clients since 1999.

Read Our Story

What happens when you mix a chemistry teacher with a sense of adventure and an insatiable appetite for research? You get the creation of an award-winning research company, of course.

Founded in 1999, TWI Surveys Inc. was the culmination of 20 years field-testing and developing research tools, survey processes, and communication best practices.

The journey began when Tudor Williams left England to “see the world.” His starting place: teaching high school in central Canada. Little did he know, the world ended up being Canada.

Never one to turn down an adventure, Tudor left the teaching profession and joined Syncrude in 1975. His task:  attract the top engineering minds to a relatively unknown mining and oil production town — Fort McMurray. It’s one thing to bring in top talent; it’s another to keep it. So, he was asked to design a communication plan to retain these young, smart engineers.

With research in his nature, Tudor explored how the world’s best companies were attracting and retaining their employees. What he discovered was these companies were surveying their employees to see what their needs were. He conducted the first employee engagement survey at Syncrude in 1978.

This was the beginnings of TWI Surveys. During his years at Syncrude, Tudor used research in its many varieties — surveys, focus groups, interviews — as the foundation for creating communication plans, employee engagement processes, and talent management strategies.

With the advent of the Internet and email communication, Tudor seized the opportunity to do research online — other companies had not yet made the move. Teaming up with his son, Ryan, he set out to create a way to do surveys online. In 1998, TWI was founded. One year later, the company became a pioneer in online research and surveys.

Research doesn’t just inform decisions, the process of research and surveys involves people in the decisions that we make. Surveys are tools that allow us to connect people and start a dialogue — a group can see what they’re saying as a collective, where they agree, and where they disagree. Essentially, a survey is a big conversation.  Done well, research and surveys serve as critical pieces in our communication process.

Over the last 15 years, TWI has established itself as one of the best full service research and communications companies. It has worked with organizations of all shapes and sizes, from Fortune 500 companies to local non-profits to government bodies.

In 2011, TWI took hold of another opportunity by partnering with Tekara Organizational Effectiveness. With over 30 years of experience in the communications field, TWI recognized the behaviours of leaders and employees either build influence and trust or they undermine it. By marrying communications and organizational development, TWI is now capable of helping clients truly become influencers.

What We Love To Do

Engagement Surveys

Employees, members and clients can share your passion and vision.

Through a survey process we benchmark and track what degree they are willing to use their effort and talents to make an impact.

Evaluation Surveys

Courses, events, and publications need to delight their audiences.

Grow your readership, increase attendance and improve your delivery by asking for and evaluating participant’s preferences, satisfaction and interest.

Assessments

Individual, 180, 360 and team questionnaires enable us to gain personal insights to better relate to one another.

We provide standardized and customized approaches to measure competencies, behaviours and relationships effectively.

Resource Development

We gather normative data for team and organizational surveys.

We also track industry trends, methods and the best practices to enhance gathering and using feedback.

To help people see each other to pursue a healthy, harmonious and productive world.

Apply listening, reporting and facilitation to solve communication and decision making challenges

Trust – integrity and the quality of our data allows the confidence apply valuable insights

Credibility – a 20 year history of results and serving diverse clients around the world

Creativity – we are experts in what we do so we can design for your unique needs and situations

We use the best commercial software available for our online surveys data collection. Your data will be hosted on our server in Canada. Your confidentiality and data security are protected. Our methodology supports capturing and holding your data to maintain the most secure environment possible.

TWI Surveys online forms are accessible on desktop, mobile and tablets. We ensure that while we would like to have all the design bells and whistles, the most important feature in a survey is accessibility. We continue to advance as quickly as the respondents behaviours match our data gathering.

The quality of our work has been recognized internationally with the International Association of Business Communicators Gold Quills and the Institute of Public Relations’ Golden Ruler.

Top Five Best Practices for Stakeholder Surveys

  1. Employees, members and constituents want to have their voices heard
  2. Sharing feedback about what was learned from a survey is the minimum to achieve a better relationship with the audience
  3. Surveys need to be shorter and more focused when respondent are on mobile devices
  4. You don’t have to ask every person every question; you can ask a few different questions to many people
  5. Ask questions that have a clear research question; questions that are relevant to the respondent

Tudor Williams

More to come…

We are happy to share samples and recommendations, please contact us to set up a call.