Your voice counts! Take the Climate Survey by Nov. 16
November 5, 2012 •
Just by answering a few questions, you could help improve the work environment for everyone at UC Office of the President.
All UCOP staff last Friday, Nov. 2, received a personal invitation from Executive Vice President Nathan Brostrom to take the UC Campus Climate Survey, part of the systemwide effort that will survey all 185,000 faculty and staff and all 235,000 students at 13 UC locations.
Already, 21 percent of UCOP staff have responded.
The UCOP survey, which will remain open until Friday, Nov. 16, is tailored specifically to OP’s workplace environment. It includes questions about institutional climate, inclusion and work-life balance and allows you to describe your personal work experiences at UCOP. It should take only about 20 to 45 minutes of your time and is completely confidential. Paper surveys are also available upon request from Jesse Bernal at jesse.bernal@ucop.edu.
“UC is committed to creating a positive environment for our students, staff and faculty,” said Bernal, UC interim diversity coordinator. “The survey data will help assess the learning, living and working environments, or campus climate, for people who go to school or work at UC.”
It’s important that a broad cross section of the UCOP community participate; the more people who take the survey, the better the results, according to Rankin & Associates Consulting, which worked with UC to create the survey and will compile the results independently.
Believed to be the largest study of institutional climate ever conducted, it will cover all 10 campuses, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources and UC Office of the President through February 2013. The effort is funded entirely by the UC President’s Initiative Fund, an endowment for special projects, and no tuition or taxpayer dollars are being used.
Once complete, survey results will be used to enhance the atmosphere of inclusiveness and respect at every UC location across the statewide system. Final data will be available in spring 2013.
To encourage participation, survey takers who answer at least half the questions will be entered automatically into a random drawing for prizes. UCOP will give away five $2,000 professional development grants and two iPads to survey participants.
Find out more about the survey on the Campus Climate Study website and see a short video encouraging you to participate.
I hope that the survey is similar to the U Penn survey tool. It is a campus climate survey that was initially developed in the late 90s and was approved by the UC LGBTI Advisory Board has a good evaluative tool. Of course it was improved upon and the most important was that it was collected in a way that was highly confidential so more campus staff, students and faculty felt comfortable with being anonymous.
I am glad that we are finally doing this after all these years of pushing for it to be done systemwide. Some of our campuses used the U Penn tool in the 90s and early 2000. Now we have our own – using the cliche better late than never.