The Daily Bulletin

From the Chair of the Institutional Innovation Advisory Council
The Institutional Innovation Advisory Council (IIAC) is excited to report that more than 50 percent of the campus community (928 out of 1,844 employees) responded to the Campus Culture and Employee Engagement and Satisfaction Survey earlier this semester. Buffalo State College conducted this survey to better understand our collective workplace, campus culture, and employee engagement and satisfaction, and how these factors affect institutional performance. This high response rate will enhance the college’s ability to better understand the complexity of our lived workplace experiences and priorities, and the needs of our campus community. This, in turn, will help us identify strengths to leverage and areas for improvement that can be addressed through immediate short-term cross-divisional initiatives and long-term strategies to be embedded in the college’s next strategic plan.

In order to ensure these beneficial outcomes and to accurately represent the narratives of the many faculty, staff, and administrators who took the time to write comments, it is essential that the results of the survey be carefully analyzed. The high volume of qualitative data generated, specifically, 2,070 total comments, which equates to 169 pages of text and 98,631 words, combined with the current COVID-19 crisis, mean that the IIAC does not have the capacity to perform this kind of analysis before fall 2020. To address this, the council will explore working with an outside partner—within the college’s current budget constraints—to assist in the analysis and interpretation of the data.

Given these considerations, the IIAC unanimously voted on Tuesday, April 14, to move the sharing of the report to the fall 2020 semester, while also acknowledging flexibility may be needed in this process as the campus continues to respond to COVID-19. The report will be shared through a series of town hall meetings (either in person or virtual), providing an opportunity for the campus to ask questions about the data and survey results, while also initiating discussions and focus groups that begin to address areas for improvements and how to better leverage our strengths. The IIAC will issue a written report to the campus community summarizing the survey results, campus feedback, short-term strategies to immediately implement, and long-term strategies to include in the next strategic plan to ensure that Buffalo State thrives in the future. We will continue to provide regular updates to the campus community about the survey process.