Nova Scotia Community College
PA-13: Assessing Employee Satisfaction

NSCC recognizes that employees are key contributors to the successful achievement of the College goals. We incorporate employee feedback (through surveys) as part of our organization’s regular cycle. The College reports on employee engagement to our Board of Governors every two years, highlighting how important our Board and NSCC feel the employee experience is to our success.
In the past NSCC has participated in externally driven surveys – i.e. AonHewitt 50 Best Employers in Canada, and were 41st on this Best Employer list in 2009. We have also worked with Corporate Research Associates in Halifax to do a “deeper dive” into areas employees cited as important to them in surveys.
In 2013, NSCC moved to an internal survey process (administered by our Institutional Research department) to address employee concerns that external surveys were not designed to capture the unique environment of education. We designed a customized survey that continued to track and measure key drivers from past surveys while expanding the survey to include strategic priorities, teaching and learning and a greater emphasis on work environment and culture.
The methodology for surveys has remained consistent regardless of the survey tool used. Research has shown that engagement is a measure of an employee’s emotional and intellectual commitment to an organization. An individual is considered to be engaged when they display three engagement behaviours:
• Say- Consistently say positive things about the organization
• Stay- Intend to stay with the organization
• Strive- Strive to achieve above and beyond what is expected in their daily role

Using these drivers as our index of overall engagement, the employee engagement surveys employed by NSCC employ a broad range of questions specific to organizational culture, performance, work environment and leadership (by way of examples) that feed into the overall measure of engagement while providing detail on specific areas important to the employee experience at NSCC. We review these results and our progress year over year and develop plans for improvement accordingly.

In addition, the College periodically conducts cross-organizational employee focus groups in an effort to understand the gathered information (from survey), engage in dialogue, and identify priorities that could help us build on our strengths as an organization. While employee engagement surveys occur every 2 years, work towards employee engagement is an ongoing endeavor of the organization.
Bernadette Campbell (HR Planning Consultant with Human Resources) has worked with external providers on past surveys and on the development of the current internal survey. Questions regarding both the employee engagement survey, process and engagement initiatives can be directed to her.
The 2017 Employee Engagement Survey was sent to an audience of 1,759 employees. With a response ratio of 73%, the survey was broken down by "Connections to my Work", "Connections to my Team", "Connections to our Mission, Vision, Values" and an Overall Index which is based upon 6 key questions designed to measure overall engagement. A 5-point Likert-type response scale is used, and each section has a series of questions measured both individually by question and by overall for the section.
The overall index is a measure of "say, stay, strive": employees say good things about NSCC, employees want to stay at NSCC, and employees strive to do their best for NSCC.

Overall survey results, including employee comments, are posted online for all employees. Department results are cascaded through the organization via managers who are asked to meet with their employees to engage in dialogue about the results and develop plans for action to improve engagement in their areas. Managers are provided with conversation models and action planning tools to aid in this process.
o Reports are developed by College, Campus, School and departments. Only areas with a response rate of more than 10 employees receive a report to protect confidentiality. Each area receives their report, a conversation guide and a priority planning tool and are expected to engage their respective groups in conversations about their results, how people are feeling, potential roots causes and a plan to address issues raised and/or improve or maintain engagement within that group.
Areas are offered the assistance of Human Resources in facilitating conversation and planning should they want the additional support through the conversation and planning process.