Your Survey Responses in Action

Dear Colleague,

At KU, we aspire to be an exceptional learning community – a place where each student and each employee is able to grow and succeed – and this begins with listening and acting on input and feedback we receive from you.

Your survey responses drive change at KU. Campus constituent surveys – such as COACHE, the Docking Institute Staff Survey and the National Survey of Student Engagement – are foundational to our Jayhawks Rising strategic plan. In the future, we aim to do better at consistently communicating the resulting activity and progress with you.

Introducing the Campus Constituent Survey Implementation Team

Leaders serving KU Lawrence and Edwards now meet regularly to discuss recommendations from constituent surveys, determine priorities, assign sponsors and set time frames for initiatives. The team includes representatives from University Governance and stakeholders with responsibilities for core campus functions.

The charge of the team includes:

• prioritize recommendations that advance our institutional priorities the most,
• provide updates on the status of ongoing work related to each recommendation.

The Provost chairs the team while AIRE staff provide administrative support, and the team meets three times each year – February, June and October – to track status and ensure initiatives continue to move forward.

We are committed to sharing the team’s updates and summaries with campus through email and tracking documents uploaded to the Campus Constituent Survey Implementation (CCSI) Team website. These tracking documents detail who has responsibility for each recommendation and its activity status and notes from recent meetings.

Your recommendations in action, a few examples

The CCSI Team first met in October 2023 to review the results from the staff and faculty job satisfaction surveys, as well as subsequent feedback from governance-led campus engagement sessions. The sessions generated dozens of recommendations and ideas tied to the survey results.

Here are updates on three recommendations:

Recommendation: Improve compensation, and present information, methodologies and timelines related to compensation initiatives annually. (Docking and COACHE surveys)

Action: A KU team has been developing a market pay philosophy that addresses immediate needs, priorities and implementation. Some job categories, where lagging pay made it impossible to hire, have already seen market wage adjustments. Provost Bichelmeyer and Chief Financial Officer Jeff DeWitt discussed efforts to address market salary wages for Lawrence and Edwards employees during the Feb. 29 Chancellor’s Weekly Update and shared strategies that can facilitate this goal. There will be additional updates on the project this year.

Recommendation: The Chancellor and Provost should host a State of the University/State of the Campus address every academic year. Information shared can live on a website. (COACHE survey)

Action: Chancellor Girod hosted the State of the University Address in early October, which was followed by the KU Lawrence and Edwards State of the Campus presentation later that month. These will be annual events.

Recommendation: The Office of Faculty Affairs should continue to support faculty development programming that can assist faculty who have gotten “stuck” owing to balance issues to rebalance their work. (COACHE survey)

Action: The Office of Faculty Affairs has developed programming this year that focuses on all faculty at various levels of their career and emphasizes strategies around planfulness and balancing their work. This programming consists of New Faculty Foundation Series events; associate deans, chairs, and directors day-long and one-hour workshops; Faculty Learning Circles, and KU Faculty Development Academies. Rebalancing work topics include time management and planning as new faculty, mapping the faculty career cycle to success, writing to publish and associate professors preparing for promotion at mid-career.

Supporting our mission

The work you do in support of students, your colleagues, and other KU stakeholders is central to our mission to educate leaders, build healthy communities and make discoveries that change the world. Through our campus constituent surveys and our implementation team, we are working to ensure you are also supported – personally and professionally. We are committed to surveying you and our other core constituent groups once every three years. You can learn more about these efforts on the new Campus Constituent Survey website. If you have questions, please email jayhawks-rising@ku.edu.

Thank you for all you do for KU.

Respectfully,

Barb and Corinne

Barbara A. Bichelmeyer

Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor

Corinne Bannon

Vice Provost & Chief Data Officer, Analytics, Institutional Research, & Effectiveness