Below and attached is your copy of the message to chancellors regarding the launch of the 2020 UNC System Employee Engagement Survey.                                        

TO:                         Chancellors

Next month, the UNC System will launch the next cycle of our system-wide employee engagement survey in support of the UNC System Strategic Plan. The baseline survey was conducted in 2018 and will be repeated every two years to create a longitudinal view of faculty and staff engagement throughout the UNC System.

As in 2018, the survey will be administered by ModernThink and uses basically the same instrument that is used for the Chronicle for Higher Education’s “Best Colleges to Work For” survey. The survey is administered to all permanent benefits-eligible faculty and staff unless your institution chooses, for an additional fee, to extend the survey population to other employee groups.

The UNC System Office continues to provide the core funding for administration of the survey, including a suite of standardized reports and benchmarking comparisons. Each constituent institution has a separate opportunity to purchase additional survey questions, reports, benchmarks, and its own reporting gateway.

As in 2018, we are coordinating this effort system-wide through the chief human resources officers (CHROs). We will continue to ask CHROs to partner with you and your key leaders in drilling down into the resulting survey data to identify specific, actionable engagement issues and gaps within your institution. This provides a valuable opportunity to focus leadership attention, employee relations efforts, increased supervisory training, and other workplace initiatives where they may be most needed within your institution to address employee engagement gaps. My System Office team along with our survey vendor ModernThink are available to support these efforts as much as possible.

We understand and appreciate the level of effort this initiative requires, and I want to offer my thanks in advance to you and your teams for your partnership as this new survey cycle moves forward. We hope that this program will continue to provide each institution with valuable, useful, and actionable information to enhance the University’s work environment positively for our faculty and staff and to achieve our goal of recruiting, retaining, and developing the most talented and diverse workforce possible.

If you or your teams have questions throughout this process, please feel free to contact either myself or Kathy Bryant, director of HR Policy, Planning, and Programs, who is heading up this initiative for the System Office.

Sincerely,

Matthew S. Brody
Senior Vice President for Human Resources