Your Voice, Your MC: Employee Experience and Climate Survey

With a long-term goal of becoming a great place to work in the country, the College is committed to creating and maintaining an environment that attracts and retains
world-class faculty and staff. Gathering faculty and staff perspectives on their work experiences helps administration understand what currently works and what needs to be improved. Improvement occurs when we openly solicit candid and confidential feedback from all critical stakeholders and act upon this feedback. Disciplined follow-up on the survey findings will help us continue to drive our institution to future success. 

Now more than ever, and especially since March 16, 2020, when the College transitioned to a remote work environment. We need to understand what factors are important to our faculty and staff. The College is committed to our PEOPLE and our COMMUNITY and needs to hear from our full and part-time faculty, staff, and administrators on our direction and our work environment. Administering one comprehensive survey that were three independent surveys – engagement, ethics, and equity and inclusion, will provide the College valuable feedback for action planning.

The survey will also provide a starting point (or baseline) for future input from faculty and staff on College priorities and needs. The feedback opportunities provided by the survey will be in the form of a continuous process, not a singular event. This survey will help inform our strategic planning process.

A request for proposal (RFP) process to solicit bid proposals from vendors to administer an engagement and culture survey on behalf of the College. A committee reviewed the 10 submitted proposals. The committee narrowed the pool of vendor proposals and interviewed three vendors. The Procurement Office awarded the contract to
ModernThink, LLC. ModernThink is a nationally recognized organization specializing in surveys of this kind for higher education.  The higher education benchmark data ModernThink will provide will give our institution valuable insight into how we compare to other schools across the nation. 

A committee with representatives from the Offices of Human Resources and Strategic Talent Management, Compliance, Risk, and Ethics, Equity and Inclusion, the Chair of the Employee Engagement Advisory Group, and the Chief Analytics and Insights Officer, and ModernThink will work in consultation to craft the survey. In the coming weeks and months, ModernThink will work with the committee to customize the survey by reviewing the three earlier survey instruments – Employee Engagement, Ethics, and Equity and Inclusion, administer the survey, ensure anonymity, confidentiality, and aid in the dissemination of the results. 

The survey statements solicit feedback on a broad range of topics focused around 12  topic areas.

The online survey should take approximately 20-25 minutes to complete. If you are unable to complete the survey after you begin, you will have the option to save your responses and access them later. 

The survey consists of statements that employees/faculty respond to using a five-point agreement scale (Strongly Agree, Agree, Sometimes Agree/Sometimes Disagree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree). Additionally, there is a Not Applicable response option. The survey instrument may also include 1-2 open-ended questions. 

There are three demographic questions at the end of the survey (Gender Identity, etc.). Respondents are encouraged to provide responses, however you have the option of skipping any of the demographic questions if you have concerns regarding the anonymity of your responses. (See also “Are my survey responses confidential?” below.)

First, as a full and part-time faculty, staff, and administrator of the College, your voice matters. Second, higher response rates give a more accurate picture of the College and its individual departments. This is a significant opportunity for you to share your ideas, opinions, and solutions by participating in both the survey and the action planning that will follow.

Yes, the survey is optional. We encourage you to participate as this is an opportunity for you to provide feedback confidentially and anonymously. Remember, Your Voice, Your MC: Employee Experience and Culture Survey

Full-time and part-time faculty, staff and administrators are invited and encouraged to participate in the survey. 

Full-time and part-time faculty, staff and administrators will be invited via email from ModernThink (surveys@modernthink.net) to take the survey hosted on ModernThink’s secure website. The survey is available for two weeks (February 6–2023–February 20, 2023) and can be extended an additional week if the response rate is below 30%. Survey closes at 12 midnight on the closing date.

You will be asked to enter a username and password, which will be provided in an e-mail invitation sent to you directly by ModernThink. Using your College MyMC log-in credentials will NOT give you access to the survey. 

You may take the survey at any time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from work or from home. Internet access is required. Survey is accessible to complete on a laptop, iPad, computer, as well as a smartphone. 

The purpose of the survey is to get honest feedback. The College is using an external partner, ModernThink, to administer the survey. It is web-based and automated with a secure internet connection.

Each employee will receive an email invitation from ModernThink (surveys@modernthink.net) to participate in the survey. Once you click on the survey link, you will go directly to ModernThink’s website.  The College has no access to this website.  Your responses will be submitted directly to ModernThink’s database, and all processing will be done by ModernThink. You will not be asked your name on the survey. The email will include unique password information for each user. This information is stored on the ModernThink server. This information is for access only and will not be linked to your individual survey responses.  

At no point will your manager or any other College employee see your individual survey results; they are combined and only reported back to the College in the aggregate/grouped format.  No one at the College will know if or how you personally responded. 

No. The survey will be completed on ModernThink’s private server.  The email address is only used to access the survey and to ensure that only one survey is completed per employee. Emails are purged from ModernThink’s system once the survey project has been completed.  

The survey will include self-selected demographic question such as Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Campus location. The demographic information (i.e. Gender, Race/Ethnicity, etc.) will help ModernThink better understand the patterns and themes in the survey data.  As the confidentiality of your responses is critical, Modern Think will not report your individual demographic data.

Montgomery College will provide ModernThink with demographics such as administrative division, employee type, length of service, and age.

Group demographic data will only be reported when there are five (5) or more respondents in a particular group.  Although the demographics are an optional component of the survey, you are strongly encouraged to provide this information.

Your answers will be stored each time you select the SAVE & CONTINUE button at the bottom of a survey page. If you get interrupted you can come back to the survey.  You will need to log on to the ModernThink survey site to re-access the survey.  To protect your confidentiality, you will not be able to access the survey after you click the SUBMIT button on the last page of the survey. 

For technical questions or problems with the survey site please contact ModernThink at (888) 684-4658 or surveys@modernthink.com, M-F 9 a.m.–5 p.m. EST. After hours, leave a message and your call will be returned as promptly as possible. 

While a 100% response rate is not necessary, we like to see as high a response rate as possible. Average response rates for ModernThink surveys typically range between 40% and 65%. During the two weeks the survey is available we will be sharing our response rate with the community at large. We hope that each of you will use this information and opportunity to encourage your colleagues to participate. 

Dr. Williams and the survey committee are committed to gathering feedback, identifying and prioritizing areas of action, sharing the findings with you, and developing follow-up plans to address your concerns. 

While the formal timeline for the next survey is not yet established, the College will be repeating this process every two years. This year’s results will provide us with important baseline data so that we chart our progress moving forward.

If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions regarding the survey and/or the survey process, please do not hesitate to contact Scot Brown. 

If you have access issues or questions, Contact ModernThink Senior Project Manager Liz Flood at (888) 684-4658.