3/3 Your Feedback Is Needed For The Workplace Environment Survey An important message from Brian Powell, vice president and chief human resources officer

Periodically, we ask staff to participate in institution-wide formal feedback mechanisms to tell us what they think, feel, and observe at work. While we all have heard our fair share of anecdotes, where informal feedback makes a mark based on how loud it is, formal feedback will make its mark based on how large the participation numbers are. As such, formal feedback is an important tool for decision-making at strategic levels. And this is definitely the case with our main institutional surveys like the Workplace Environment survey and the Campus Climate survey.

While one of the main responsibilities of any supervisor is to give respectful, constructive, and frequent feedback to their employees, it is also the employee’s responsibility to provide such feedback to their supervisor. If either part of this loop is broken, that relationship, and the subsequent work and environment, will suffer. This is true irrespective of scale, whether we are talking at the individual level about a single employee and their immediate supervisor, or whether we are talking at the institutional level about all employees and their senior leadership, this remains true.

It is due to the results of similar formal feedback mechanisms that we, as an institution, have launched some of our most recent work within The Chapman Experience initiative: the revamp of our Hire and Onboard processes, the Working@Chapman hub, and the revamp of Staff Summit, just to name a few examples.  So, one of the easiest and most impactful ways of making our voices heard is to participate in formal assessments (department-wide or institution-wide), candidly and fairly.  The higher the participation numbers, the more representative the responses, and, therefore, the stronger of a tool the survey will be.  You have nothing to lose and everything to gain; rich feedback allows us all to know as a community where we’re doing good and where we can do better.

The best and most enduring outcomes of The Chapman Experience are the lifelong bonds we build between the University and us, and between each other.  Indeed, that is the initiative’s key focus:  you, and how, together, we build a community where we can engage, achieve, and belong. 

You can complete the survey by clicking here.