Surveys help us communicate and improve

As was recently shared in E-News, we have the results of the 2022 employee engagement pulse survey. It and previous employee engagement surveys  provide us with a sense of where we are at and where we can make improvements. While things don’t change overnight in an organization as big as the CoM (nor the university and the healthcare system!), these surveys do provide a valuable internal communication tool from which we can all benefit through participation in the survey and our response to the survey results.

With this blog, I want to share some general information about the results of the pulse survey, and provide a heads up to you of a bigger survey coming up in 2023.

The 2022 pulse survey showed that College of Medicine employees’ overall engagement and that of employees across USask both came in at 58%. What wasn’t shared in E-News was the varying degrees of engagement employees identified beyond that figure. A further 22% identified as ‘almost engaged,’ which tells us with a little work, this group could move to ‘engaged’ and we would be reporting 80% in the engaged in their work category! Importantly, we learned that 8% of CoM employees identified as ‘indifferent’ and 11% are ‘disengaged’—concerning numbers because we aim to have a workplace where all employees are engaged in what they do. So of course we know that we can do more to get all employees more full involved in positive ways that inspire engagement.

Among the 20 survey questions, one was open ended, allowing for more individual thoughts and responses and capturing important themes for our college. For instance, faculty and staff have a general appreciation for the college with a high regard for people leaders and coworkers. Employees also feel a high sense of pride in the work that they do.

The 19 closed questions rolled up into the following 9 engagement drivers, with the resulting scores:

2022 College of Medicine Employee Engagement Pulse Survey results

As well, there were many valuable comments related to areas that the college can improve upon. For example: there were several mentions of disrespectful behaviour not being addressed; there are concerns around equity, diversity, and inclusion; and there were also a number of comments related to workload issues. College leadership is committed to both leveraging our areas of strength related to employee engagement, and more importantly, focusing on ways to improve the areas of concern. Thank you to those who took the time to provide us with this valuable feedback. We continue to work on ways to improve the CoM for all employees.

A larger, more comprehensive employee engagement survey will be taking place in late winter or early spring 2023—be sure to participate! More detailed information on the 2022 survey results and the upcoming survey will be provided in the dean’s blog next week.