430 responses.  Wow.

About 75% of Augustana’s full-time employees responded to the Augustana College Employee Survey over the last three weeks. Moreover, we got a great response from each segment of Augustana employees – faculty, staff, and administrators. I have to admit, after doing almost everything I could to encourage responses short of marching around campus in an sandwich board and chicken costume, I am thrilled. I would have been genuinely happy with 350 responses.

So … Congratulations! This means that the average response to each item is almost certain to closely reflect the perception of the entire employee population. As a result, we can be confident that whatever issues emerge from this data are not mere artifacts of the numbers we happen to collect. In addition, the quality of this data set will allow us to pursue all sorts of interesting analyses of various smaller segments of our employee population, further improving the potential for this study to help us legitimately improve the environment in which we all work.

Of course, this also means that if your earnestly held belief about a prevailing attitude among Augustana employees is contradicted by the findings of this study, you are going to be faced with a gnarly dilemma. Either you’ll have to accept the strong likelihood that your opinion has turned out not to be so, or you’ll have to present compelling evidence that refutes these findings. I suppose you could choose to double down on your belief, facts be damned, full speed ahead. But the reality of a 75% response rate means that, like it or not, the findings from this survey are pretty solid. And just so you don’t think that I’m trying to be some sort of righteous researcher revelling in my own rectitude (that line sounds great if you roll your R’s), I’ve already had to eat crow on one issue where the data makes it pretty clear that I was dead wrong. (Yes, it tastes about like what you’d think.)

Today (Monday, April 20th, 2015) we start collecting data for the second half of our employee engagement project. Later today I’ll send out an email with an invitation to participate in the The Gallup Employee Engagement Survey (otherwise known as the Q12 if you want to sound hip and “in the know” around other geeked out quant researchers). While our first survey was designed internally so that we could hone in on some important questions specific to Augustana College, the second survey, the Q12, gives us some comparison data that can function as a sort of grounding point to more realistically assess ourselves. Moreover, we will be able to get data from Gallup that we can use to compare ourselves to other educational organizations, giving us an even better sense of how we might realistically improve. The Gallup Q12 Survey is built on several decades of in-depth research on employee engagement. Some of the questions might strike you as unusual at first, but know that a virtual ocean of analysis has gone into developing the questions that compose this survey.

And in order to ensure that we don’t unintentionally bias the responses to the Q12, we won’t publicly release the results of our own Augustana Employee Survey until the Gallup data has been collected.  Even though the questions in both surveys are not identical, there is enough overlap that we need to be careful. Beside, this will give me a few weeks to process all of the data and turn it into something that will be a lot easier to read. As much as my inner quant geek would love it, I suspect that you don’t want me to send you a massive excel spreadsheet and call it good!

You will receive an email soon with a link to participate in the Q12. You’ll hear about this survey from me more than a few times in the next three weeks. Just like the first half of this project, your participation in the Q12 matters immensely.

430 responses to our first survey makes a giant statement about how much we value making Augustana a great place to work and a great community to join. It also means that this community made the collective commitment to improve – even if you did not individually complete the first survey. Whether you like or not, the improvement train has left the station and we’re all on it.

Make it a good day,

Mark