Virginia Commonwealth University
PA-13: Assessing Employee Satisfaction

VCU Inclusive Excellence established VCU Universe to monitor and report on the university's progress toward meeting its commitment to building and sustaining a diverse and inclusive community where everyone has the opportunity to engage and be successful.

VCU Universe is the university’s assessment and evaluation platform for culture and climate. VCU Universe uses two innovative tools to assess culture and climate and reports its findings: The VCU Organizational Culture and Climate Survey (OCCS) and Climatext. Culture and climate are considered mutually influential and interactive in that people’s day-to-day feelings and perceptions about the normative aspects of our campus or organizational culture can influence theirs and our university’s success and wellbeing

VCU Universe administers the OCCS every 18-months to university faculty and staff. OCCS is a multi-index tool to monitor and record institutional as well as unit-level progress toward diversity and inclusion goals. The multi-index tool collects employment and survey data from several sources to include VCU Human Resources, Institutional Research & Decision Support, and academic and administrative unit leaders and faculty and staff. These data produce four separate yet interrelated indices: Diversity Index (DI), Inclusion Index (IE), Engagement Index (EI) and Performance Index (PI).The indices are used as a diagnostic tool for units to identify problem and promise areas across faculty and staff demographics.

The survey analytics feedback allows the VCU Universe team to work with units on specific ways they can improve, showing them exactly where a unit is perceived to have inclusivity shortcomings.

VCU Universe receives ongoing feedback that is both encouraging and informative, including providing ideas of ways to make improvements as it revises the dashboard. Tthe surveys and dashboard will only grow in usefulness the longer VCU employs them because the work will begin to illustrate trends while strengthening suggestions for pathways to continuous improvement.

Upon completion of the initial survey, new measures were put in place, including:
- Updating university policies and procedures related to equal opportunity, gender discrimination, affirmative action and pay transparency.
- Starting a process that will make reporting incidents of bias easier. This project, part of LGBTQ-specific Campus Pride Index, involves divisions across VCU, including Assurance Services, Equity and Access, Inclusive Excellence, Human Resources, Student Affairs and University Police. We also launched a Bias Response Team as part of this project.
- We have established a diversity index, which is a score derived through our VCU Climate Report to track progress and guide new policies.