Dear Financial and Administrative Services (FAS) Community,
Following Chancellor Hawgood’s message about the 2018 Staff Engagement Survey results, I wanted to share more details about our FAS results and next steps. This feedback is important to understanding your perspective because one of our guiding True North pillars is to create an optimal work experience for you. What’s important going forward is that we take meaningful action in response to your thoughtful feedback so we can improve UCSF for all of us.
By the Numbers
- 78% of FAS staff took the 2018 survey versus 76% in 2017.
- We met our True North target to improve our grand mean (the average of all numbers), up slightly from 3.96 to 3.98. This puts us in the 46th percentile--closer to our 2020 target of the 50th percentile.
- Overall, the FAS 2018 grand mean is in line with rest of UCSF:
- FAS 3.98 (46th percentile)
- Campus 4.02 (49th percentile)
- Health 3.88 (39th percentile)
- UCSF 3.94 (43rd percentile)
- See the FAS Engagement Survey update (pdf) for more details. See the FAS Engagement Survey info sheet (pdf) to get more background about the survey.
What We Learned
Overall, our results are positive but there is still much work to do. Since the survey started in 2011, FAS has increased the percent of engaged staff from 23% to 48% and decreased actively disengaged from 23% to 12%. This is in line with the rest of UCSF, and better than the US working population overall.
While strengths and opportunities vary among FAS departments and work teams, overall:
- Strengths: Our greatest strengths are having supportive peers (best friend at work) and talking with staff about their progress.
- Opportunities: Our greatest opportunities for improvement are helping staff know what is expected and feeling a supervisor or someone at work cares about us as a person.
What We Heard
As the Chancellor’s message and the Pulse story highlighted, some groups are less likely to be engaged, particularly our Black and Hispanic staff and those who are represented by unions. We also heard this directly in your comments on how we can make UCSF a better place to work. The FAS Executive Team and I genuinely look forward to continuing these discussions and working together to make our environment an inclusive space for everyone.
We also heard that you want to know more about other departments within FAS, and more opportunities to learn and grow. It reminds me once again how fortunate we are to have staff that seek out information and want to improve.
Next Steps
While some activities are happening at the campus and FAS levels, the most significant work in the coming year will happen at the local level, with teams in your department. Developing team action plans is still considered best practice to impact engagement. FAS leaders will be sharing your department’s results soon, and refreshing action plans over the summer.
This fall, look for broader UCSF-wide efforts to promote conversations and enhance action planning, such as a Town Hall with the Chancellor, employee focus groups, and manager and ambassador trainings.
Thank you for your continued efforts to improve our workplace, and especially to the ambassadors and staff who were involved in implementing the survey. As always, I welcome your direct feedback in any way that feels most comfortable to you!
Paul Jenny
Senior Vice Chancellor
Finance and Administration