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 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.
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:
Motivators to remain with UW-IT:
UW-IT’s current continuous improvement focuses on:
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:
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.
The numbers inside the circles show the averages from all responses for each aspect.
Archive: See UW-IT's 2012 Organizational Pulse survey results and action plan.