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Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost

College Leadership Survey Administration

Reference: REG05.50.02: Review of College Deans
Revised August 7, 2017

1. The Institutional Strategy and Analysis (ISA) will prepare all necessary programs to administer the online College Leadership Surveys, including sending e-mail invitations and reminders, collecting and analyzing the data, and preparing reports on results.

2. Confidentiality: ISA is responsible for maintaining the security of the survey data and all associated files. All data and associated files will be stored on a secure, password protected computer. Members of the College Leadership Survey Committee (CLSC) are prohibited from talking about the specific results of the surveys with others not on the CLSC.

3. Questionnaires: ISA will work with the CLSC to revise the core faculty, staff, and external constituents survey questions as appropriate for the college, and, at the discretion of the CLSC, to develop up to ten college-specific supplemental questions to include on the faculty, staff and external constituents surveys. The college-specific questions for the faculty and staff surveys do not have to be the same, but must all be closed-end, and follow the same 4-point rating scale used in the core questions (i.e., “excellent,” “good,” “fair,” “poor,” in addition to a “cannot judge” response option).

4. Survey Populations: ISA is responsible for identifying eligible faculty and staff population members from current HR personnel files. Faculty and staff population members must be in a home department within the college. The faculty population will include all instructional faculty, regardless of rank, and the staff population will include all non-instructional EHRA and SHRA employees. Unless specifically requested by the Provost, excluded from the survey populations are those who are classified as retired or emeritus, ‘no-pay,’ post-docs, graduate or undergraduate students, and temporary employees with less than 0.75 FTE.

ISA will compare the faculty population to the Official Roster of the Voting Faculty for the college maintained by the Faculty Senate Office, and identify any differences. The CLSC is responsible for reviewing the faculty and staff population files, resolving any inconsistencies, and finalizing the population(s).

If the Provost, Dean, and/or CLSC chooses to include a survey of external constituents, they are responsible for identifying population members for the survey, and for providing ISA with the full names, titles (e.g., Dr., Ms.), and contact information (email and mail) for all external constituents.

5. Dean’s Presentation Slides: At least one business day before the presentation, the Dean’s office is responsible for providing ISA with the URL where a copy of the Dean’s presentation slides will be posted Note that the presentation slides do not have to be posted to that URL until end-of-business on the day of the presentation.

6. Survey Notifications: While ISA is responsible for sending all notices about the survey, the CLSC is encouraged to actively promote participation in the survey with the faculty and staff in their college. ISA emails notifications will include:

  • Pre-notification: One week before the Dean’s presentation to the college, ISA will send an email message, using the name of the Provost, to all faculty and staff in the survey population reminding them about the presentation and the upcoming survey(s).
  • Survey invitation: One business day after the Dean’s presentation, ISA will send an email, using the name of the CLSC, to all members of the survey population (faculty, staff, administrators, and external constituents) inviting them to participate in the survey. The email will include the link to the survey as well as the link to the presentation slides and the CLSC chair’s contact information.
  • Follow-up reminders: The survey will be open for 15 days. ISA will send email reminders to all non-respondents approximately one week after the survey goes live, and another about five days after that (or about two days before the survey closes). All reminder emails will be sent using the name of ISA to reassure members of the population that no one outside of ISA knows who has and has not participated in the survey.

7. Accessing the Survey: Eligible survey population members will initiate access to their survey via the URL provided in the email they receive inviting or reminding them to participate. Faculty, staff, and NC State administrators will be required to go through the university’s authentication process (i.e., enter their Unity ID and password), after which they will be connected to their respective survey via a unique URL generated for each individual in the survey population. External constituents will be provided with a unique ID and password to access their survey.

8. Survey Records: No personally identifying information (e.g., employee ID, Unity ID, name) will be included at any time on the participant’s individual record with his/her responses. Each record of responses will include a randomly generated unique ten-digit ID number. The random ID numbers allow ISA to control access to the survey, and to send reminder notices to non-respondents only. ISA will destroy crosswalk files linking random IDs to information about specific individuals (e.g., name, Unity ID) immediately after the online survey closes.

Survey records may also include tenure status, rank, job classification (i.e., EHRA or SHRA), and/or whether or not the individual is a direct report to the Dean. The inclusion of such demographic information, however, will be limited to avoid the possibility of identifying any specific individual by combining various demographic pieces of information about him/her.

9. ISA Data Analysis and Reports: ISA is responsible for all data analysis and for preparing reports for the CLSC and the Provost. Reports will consist of:

  • Response rates for all surveys, by groups Aggregate level results (means and frequencies) for all closed-ended questions for each survey. The Faculty Survey report will include breakouts by tenure track status, as appropriate for the number of respondents (e.g., pre-tenured, tenured, professional). The Staff Survey report will include breakouts for EHRA and for SHRA employees, again as the number of respondents allows. Direct reports will be included within their appropriate category, unless there is a large enough group to permit reporting their results as a separate category.
  • Verbatim responses to the open-end comments for each separate survey. Similar to the above, comments will be identified by faculty tenure status or staff job classification as appropriate, based on the number of respondents. (Note: If responses to open-ended questions include self-identifying references or references to people other than the Dean which it might be inappropriate to share with the CLSC, ISA will inform the chair of the CLSC, who will be responsible for reviewing the comment(s) and deciding whether to have ISA edit the response to remove personally identifying information.)
  • A summary report, provided only to the Provost, including an overview of the research methods, highlights from each survey, and an overview of major themes emerging in the responses to the open-end questions.
  • Note: There must be at least five (5) respondents in a sub-group (e.g., professional faculty, EHRA) for results to be reported separately for the sub-group.
  • Note that ISA cannot perform any analyses or prepare any reports than those described above.

ISA will meet with the CLSC approximately two weeks after the surveys close to provide them with one printed copy of the response rate information, aggregate-level results, and verbatim comments for each survey. During that meeting ISA will explain the contents of the report, offer suggestions for how to go about reviewing and interpreting the data, and remind the CLSC about the confidential nature of the data, including the need to shred the paper documents after they have completed their review of them.

ISA will provide the Provost with a printed and electronic copy of all reports approximately four weeks after the online surveys close.

10. CLSC Report: At their discretion, the CLSC may prepare their own summary report for the Provost. The summary report could, e.g., provide information to put results in historical context, relate findings to specific issues facing the college, offer feedback on the overall process, or any other information the CLSC deems important for the Provost to have in using the results of the survey in his evaluation of the Dean’s performance. The CLSC report is due to the Provost approximately four weeks after the online surveys close.