UC Experience Survey Talking Points

Several of the Next Lives Here pathways are working together to conduct a campus climate survey, entitled the UC Experience Survey, to better understand how faculty, staff, and students feel about their place within the University. The results will help drive future strategic university efforts by the pathways and potentially individual units. 

In this model, we are transitioning from simply counting people to making people count by assessing progress along the following indices:

• Belonging:  The degree to which one feels supported, connected, valued and respected. 
• Agency:  The ability to use one’s personal power to impact positive change.
• Cultural Competence: The awareness, knowledge and skills to interact comfortably across difference. 
• Accountability:  The obligation of individuals to acknowledge their behaviors, accept responsibility for them and correct them, if necessary. The expectation for managers and leaders to ensure those in their charge comport themselves accordingly.
• Job Satisfaction, Engagement, and Growth (staff only): The degree to which staff are happy with their current job, skill development, and career path.

• 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.

As members of the university community, we are well aware of the over-surveying of the university community. Many units on campus conduct annual surveys and we are subject to several state and federal surveys each year. Asking for 10-15 minutes of our colleagues’ precious time is no small request. Thus, we’ve thought a lot about how to ensure we illustrate how much your opinions matter.

• This survey will help set priorities and focus for university efforts over the next several years. You’ll be answering questions about how you feel about being part of the UC community. In actuality, you will vote on what our priorities should be. The results of the survey and the subsequent priorities will be publicly available on the Bearcats Landing intranet. 
• We are working on a long-term solution to over-surveying. This past fall, we held two events to gather insights from students, faculty, and staff. Many creative ideas were generated, and the pathways are determining how to best use these ideas to streamline surveying.
  

• 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. 

We have taken extreme care in reducing the number of questions on this survey. It should only take about 10 minutes. In fact, many individuals who tested the survey took it in under 7 minutes.

If you have questions about how to complete the survey, how to change your answers, how to restart the survey or how to pick up where you left off, contact Susana Luzuriaga (susana.luzuriaga@uc.edu) or see the first page of the survey. Similarly, if you have concerns about anonymity, contact Susana.

Thank you for giving us your best consideration in deciding whether to be a respondent.