TWI Surveys
Research is the cornerstone of strategyWho 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
Helping people see each other to pursue a healthy, harmonious and productive world.
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 27 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 build the leadership capabilities to shape their culture, pursue their ambitions, and align around their strategic intentions.
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
- Employees, members and constituents want to have their voices heard
- Sharing feedback about what was learned from a survey is the minimum to achieve a better relationship with the audience
- Surveys need to be shorter and more focused when respondent are on mobile devices
- You don’t have to ask every person every question; you can ask a few different questions to many people
- Ask questions that have a clear research question; questions that are relevant to the respondent
Tudor Williams
The Legacy of Tudor Williams
In the shadow of Stonehenge, in Salisbury, England, Tudor Williams was born during the Second World War. Bombs could be heard in the distance, and with his father away serving in the Royal Air Force, Tudor grew up early. As the eldest child in the family, with two younger sisters, he learned responsibility before most boys learn independence. Those early years seemed to give him both: a strong sense of duty and an adventurous heart.
That same spirit eventually carried him across the Atlantic when the Government of Canada recruited young teachers to serve in rural communities. Tudor, trained in mathematics, science, and education, came to Saskatchewan with the curiosity of someone who wanted to see the world. Canada did more than broaden his horizons; it became his home.
At university, Tudor had developed a love of inquiry, disciplined thinking, and debate. Those qualities would later shape the work for which he became known. In 1975, he joined Syncrude, then a young and ambitious company in northern Alberta. One of its greatest challenges was attracting world-class talent to Fort McMurray, a place that was still far from familiar to most engineers. Tudor was asked to help solve that problem, and he did what came naturally: he researched it.
He traveled, listened, asked questions, and studied what leading organizations were doing to attract, support, and retain exceptional people. At Syncrude, that work quickly grew from recruitment into retention. It was one thing to bring outstanding engineers north; it was another to understand what would help them stay, thrive, and build a life there. In 1978, Tudor led Syncrude’s first employee engagement survey, a practical step that would prove foundational not only for the company, but for the work that followed throughout his career.
From there, Tudor’s path widened. He had not come from public relations in the conventional sense, yet he helped shape the field by grounding communication in evidence, observation, and human understanding.
He found community within the International Association of Business Communicators, where he learned, shared, and helped build a practice that was still taking form. Long before terms such as employee engagement, internal communication, and collaborative strategy became part of everyday business language, Tudor was already doing the work: listening carefully, involving people, sharing purpose, and helping organizations build cultures in which change could take root.
That may be the clearest thread running through his legacy. For Tudor, research was never just about collecting data. It was about respect. It was about giving people a voice in the decisions that affected them. He understood early that when people are genuinely invited into a process, when they are listened to, informed, and treated as capable participants, they do not merely accept change; they begin to commit to it. Much later, in my own graduate studies, I came to a similar conclusion: sound research methods can strengthen leadership itself because they help people want to follow. Tudor understood that long before the theory caught up to the practice.
That same understanding shaped Tudor’s approach to change management. He saw that change is most durable when people are not managed around it, but invited into it. In his work with leaders and teams, he returned again and again to the same conviction: people are far more likely to support what they have helped build. Over time, he became not only a practitioner, but also a teacher, mentor, and advocate for a more humane, research-informed way of leading.
This philosophy became the foundation of TWI Surveys. During his years at Syncrude, Tudor used surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other forms of inquiry to inform communication plans, employee engagement processes, and talent strategies. When the Internet and email began changing the way organizations communicated, he recognized another possibility. Rather than seeing technology as distance, he saw it as access: a new way to ask better questions, hear more voices, and widen the conversation. In 1998, he and I founded TWI. By the following year, the company had become an early pioneer in online research and surveys.
Even now, it is important to say that research at TWI has never been only about measurement. Research informs decisions, yes, but it also invites participation. A well-designed survey is not a cold instrument; it is the beginning of a conversation. It helps people see what they share, where they differ, and what matters most. Done well, research creates the conditions for dialogue, alignment, and wiser action.
This is why Tudor’s legacy still matters. TWI was built not simply on methodology, but on a way of seeing people: as worthy of respect, capable of insight, and essential to solving the challenges we face together. Tudor’s first name was David, so the original company name reflected David Tudor Williams. I am Ryan Tudor Williams, and I carry that name and that responsibility with gratitude. My hope is not only to preserve what my father began, but to continue it: to care for people well, to use research with integrity, and to help leaders and teams pursue their ambitions with clarity and humanity.
This is not a full memoir, nor a complete biography. It is, instead, an invitation into the character of the man whose values gave rise to this organization. If you choose to work with TWI, you are stepping into a story shaped by curiosity, service, courage, and care. We would be honored to learn from you, to walk alongside you, and to carry Tudor’s legacy forward in service of your people and your purpose.