John Lewis Partnership  The John Lewis Partnership is one of the UK's top retail businesses with 26 John Lewis department stores and more than 160 Waitrose supermarkets. It is the country's largest example of worker co-ownership. All 60,000 permanent staff are Partners in the business. It believes that the commitment of Partners to the business is a unique source of competitive advantage which has fuelled 75 years of profitable growth and a reputation amongst customers and suppliers unparalleled in the UK retail industry.  It has a sophisticated range of ways of listening to Partners, and in 2002 engaged People in Business to help them add to this range by developing a regular way of monitoring Partners' views and engaging them in discussions about improvements. The preparation had two main thrusts: topics to cover in the questionnaire and managing the practicalities. For both strands there was extensive consultation with management at all levels and the various democratic and Partner listening bodies, as well as focus groups of front-line Partners. The questionnaire was designed from the themes emerging from both senior management and from Partners themselves, with the basic design principle that the questions should be short, use everyday language and cover the main subjects squarely without pussyfooting around them. It was decided to run the survey on a rolling basis, with each Branch covered once a year and all Partners in that Branch completing it within a two week window. This design put much of the onus of acting on the survey within local Branches. The challenge was to devise a process for communication that would encourage a high response rate and, even more importantly, ensure that everyone in a Branch received the results (including seeing all the write in comments from that Branch) and had a chance to talk about them and what could be done to improve low scores or surprising findings. One of the exciting features of the survey was the variety of ways Branches involved Partners in thinking through future actions. At a national level, there was a major feature in the house newspaper, the Gazette, and a couple of high level projects looking at worrying issues which emerged. Survey results form a major part of the Chairman's report to the organisation.