Employees will get chance to assess their workplace when survey kicks off
When the employee survey, "Assessing the Workplace," is released
next week, it will provide the opportunity "to find what the ground
truth is on the floor of the Lab," said Director Bruce Tarter.
During his state-of-the-Lab address last Friday, and in a separate interview,
Tarter urged all employees to take the time to fill out the survey, which
will be available to employees beginning May 29. Over the last two days
employees should have been mailed a list of instructions from International
Survey Research, which is conducting the survey, a password allowing access
to the survey Website and a memo from the Lab director. (Note: employees
who have already received their passwords will not be able to access the
survey site until May 29.)
As Tarter explained in his televised talk, over the past two years the
Lab has become a different workplace due to new polices and procedures
regarding safety and security, a booming economy and competing pressures
from Silicon Valley that have hindered the Lab’s ability to recruit
and retain, and numerous review panels and external oversight.
"People have made numerous comments on ways to respond," Tarter
said. "Some we can respond to and some require trade-off."
Tarter said a survey is the best way to find what that tradeoff is. Tarter
called for the survey back in January as a way to measure broad Laboratory
views, identify employees’ priorities; identify specific local issues
for potential local solutions; solicit data; and benchmark against other
laboratories.
"In order for us to make positive impacts, we must know what you
are experiencing, what you think about your work environment and how you
view the quality of life at the Lab," Tarter said.
The survey will take approximately 30 minutes to complete, can be conducted
via the Web or in booklet form, and will be completely confidential. Questions
focus on issues such as job satisfaction and work environment; growth
opportunities, career development and retention issues; diversity and
equal opportunity issues; work/life balance issues; and overall management
of the Lab.
In putting the survey together, ISR consulted with a Lab steering committee,
various employees and employee interest groups, post-docs, foreign nationals,
first-line supervisors and senior management in order to formulate questions
that will guarantee a "broad range of responses."
"There will be a lot of issues in this survey that will be of vital
interest to some groups but not as much interest to others," Tarter
explained. "But as we learned during the presidential election in
November, one vote does matter." Through the survey the Lab will
be able to respond to interests "that didn’t get the majority
vote."
"We need to better understand the needs of today’s employees
in order to assure that we maintain the high-quality workforce that has
served the Laboratory so well," Tarter added. "Our understanding
of these issues, which is also central to our ability to take advantage
of the increasingly diverse workforce of the 21st century, is critical
to the future of the Laboratory."
The survey will be available to employees via the Web through June 22.
For those who wish to take the survey via booklet form, the survey is
due June 15. For more information on the employee survey, see the accompanying
story, page 7.
