UC Community Experience Survey launches Feb 24

The Inclusive Excellence, Faculty Investment, and Staff Enrichment pathways of the Next Lives Here Strategic Direction are collaborating to conduct a campus survey, entitled the UC Community Experience Survey, to better understand how faculty, staff and students relate to each other and understand their perceptions on the working and learning environment at the university.

The survey, scheduled to launch February 24, 2020, will measure belonging, agency, cultural competence, accountability, employee engagement and job satisfaction. Faculty, staff and students will be asked to rank the most important problems that need to be addressed at the university.

The results will help drive upcoming strategic university efforts by the pathways and individual units. Extreme care has been taken to reduce the number of survey questions. The survey should only take between 7 and 10 minutes to complete.   

• The university has not conducted an in-depth climate assessment since 2014. While we have demographic data to illustrate how our populations have changed over time, we need to be more innovative in inclusion practices—we need to stop counting people and look to make people count.
• The Next Lives Here Strategic Direction pathways are planning how to focus and sustain efforts to improve UC. Only when we know the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of our community can we develop strategies to move forward. This approach is a blending of traditional Higher Ed (educational benefits of diversity) and business (leveraging diverse talents and skill sets).
• The existence of the Staff Enrichment pathway is the first time the university has placed a significant focus on the needs, support, and development of critical staff. The university has also never collected information from staff to gauge job satisfaction, engagement in positional duties, and professional growth opportunities.
• The periodic COACHE survey does not gather information from adjunct faculty. This survey is inclusive of all employed populations, including adjunct faculty.

• The survey has been reviewed by university IRB and aligns with all best practices for respecting anonymity.
• Institutional Research is only tracking personal response completion so they can tell whether to thank participants for completing the survey or to send reminders, not to decipher individual responses.
• The pathways will analyze these data, using dashboards containing a degraded dataset which has the personal identifier removed. Importantly, the dataset will be further degraded so that pathways cannot do analyses of subgroups that do not meet the minimum criteria for protecting respondents’ confidentiality, either directly or indirectly.

The first wave of results will be shared at the Equity and Inclusion conference on April 1. These will be high-level, quantitative aggregate results for all students, faculty, and staff. Additional results and a qualitative evaluation will be posted on the Bearcats Landing intranet as soon as they are available. Pathway leaders also plan on presenting the results, and subsequent action plans, to constituent groups over the summer and fall semesters.