Metrics: Employee Satisfaction

Introduction

The essence of any good technology organization is good people. Measuring employee satisfaction—and then taking steps to enhance it—is essential to attracting and retaining the caliber of staff needed to deliver high-quality IT services to the UW community.

UW-IT’s 2013 staff survey

UW-IT measures employee satisfaction through an anonymous survey, conducted most years, in which staff are asked to rank factors that make an exemplary organization. UW-IT senior leadership then develops an action plan based on the results. The results of the last survey, conducted in 2013, show positive ratings in all aspects, with the highest scores in Pride in Work, Empowered Staff, and Work and Life balance. The opportunities for continuous improvement are developed into an action plan, with the following goals.

Action plan goals for 2014–2015

 

  • Increase staff understanding, knowledge and use of new tools within UW-IT including the Dynamics AX financial management system and UW Connect service management system
  • Clarify roles and responsibilities of different types of managers, including functional manager, service manager and project manager
  • Increase understanding of internal and external governance
  • Implement a resource planning process across UW-IT
  • Identify a core set of required tools for staff, and provide training
  • Provide increased transparency using improvement and organizational metrics

Supplementing the staff survey—employee interviews

To build on the 2013 survey results and to refresh the action plan, UW-IT conducted interviews of 25 staff from across the organization to learn what they most appreciated about their work and what they would change. Interviews are ongoing and focus on what motivates staff to remain with UW-IT. The discoveries include:

People work for UW-IT because it offers:

  • Engaging work and challenging problems to solve
  • Meaningful and purposeful work
  • Smart and helpful colleagues
  • Flexibility and balance

 

Motivators to remain with UW-IT:

  • Encouragement to apply individual strengths
  • Empowerment to do job well
  • Ideas are listened to and considered
  • Informal culture
  • Hiring of smart people
  • Open communication about strategy
  • Old systems and process deprecated
  • “No-meeting Fridays,” held once per month

Refreshing the action plan

UW-IT’s current continuous improvement focuses on:

  • Building and fostering a sense of community
  • Listening to ideas and insights from UW-IT staff
  • Identifying what matters most to UW-IT individuals and teams

A key approach to ensuring continuous improvement involves the Vice President for UW-IT and Chief Information Officer’s ongoing accessibility to staff. This includes holding monthly brown bag lunches to meet informally with staff, leading the quarterly all-staff “Town Hall” meetings, writing a blog on important issues and offering an anonymous “WebQ” for staff input. In addition, this year the VP & CIO will meet with teams and staff across the organization, engaging in ongoing conversations to learn about:

  • Individual and team accomplishments
  • Work people are most proud of
  • Challenges we face
  • Ideas for making the future better
  • People who have impacted us the most 

 

December 2013 survey results

The most recent staff survey was conducted in December 2013. About 37 percent of staff (256 employees) completed the survey, rating 16 aspects of an exemplary organization on a nine-point scale. Staff ranked each aspect from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The results show positive ratings in all aspects, with the highest scores in pride in work, empowered staff, and work and life balance.

Legend and rankings

The numbers inside the circles show the averages from all responses for each aspect.

legend

survey results graph

 

Archive: See UW-IT's 2012 Organizational Pulse survey results and action plan.