As part of ongoing efforts to assess and improve organizational effectiveness, CTSI recently announced results of its second annual internal staff survey.
“Assessing our progress and getting feedback are important to making improvements at CTSI,” said Fabrice Beretta, MBA, director of CTSI’s Planning, Evaluation and Tracking initiative. “We’re using this information to make adjustments, such as refocusing some communications efforts and simplifying our annual program scorecard review process.”
The survey was intended to inform CTSI’s overall progress, and in particular efforts related to Communications and Planning, Evaluation, and Tracking (PET). At least some of questions were answered by 107 people, and 95 (36%) of the 263 recipients completed the entire survey.
Numbers below reflect Likert scale responses that included “Tend to agree”, “Agree” or “Strongly agree”, as well as percentage change from previous year’s survey. Some highlights are below and the complete results are available here:
Key Communications results:
The CTSI organizational website does a good job of:
- Conveying CTSI's mission: 93% (-4.9% change from previous year)
- Explaining the ways CTSI is accelerating research: 91% (-1.0%)
- Highlighting the people who work at CTSI: 89% (+1.9%)
- Highlighting CTSI's partnerships and collaborators: 88% (-3.8%)
- The CTSI organizational website is valuable and useful to me: 82% (-4.6%)
Conclusion/Action: The Communications team will continue to enhance and improve CTSI organizational website features, including plans for the role out of a dashboarding initiative later in Q2 2013 highlighting program-specific achievements.
Key PET results:
- My role in the planning and review process was clearly defined: 77% (-2.5%)
Conclusion/Action: The PET team will develop comprehensive process documentation focused on Process Based Leadership (PBL), the platform used by CTSI to track its progress, to ensure that individual roles and responsibilities are more clearly defined (Q3 2013).
- The templates I received were effective and efficient to support me in implementing my role in the PET process: 72% (+14.1%)
Conclusion/Action: The PET team will focus on increasing the effectiveness of its tools by performing a detailed assessment of the use of PBL to support the Y07 review processes (Q3 2013).
- The process of deriving my aims, metrics, initiatives to support these aims, and the budget for these initiatives helped me to align my program aims with CTSI’s overall aims: 59% (+0.3%)
Conclusion/Action: alignment continues to be a weak point in the overall scorecard approach. By including programs into the design of CTSI overall scorecards PET has initiated more comprehensive efforts to clearly state CTSI’s strategy and solicit program input for alignment. PET will assess the effectiveness of the after in Q3 of 2013.
- The PET process will make my program more effective: 82% (+12.6%).
Conclusion/Action: PET will engage in dialogue with each program to further identify ways to increase effectiveness (Q4 2013).
Key CTSI organizational results:
- I feel that I am well informed about CTSI's programs, activities, and impact: 79% (+3.6%)
- I feel that I am a member of the CTSI team: 80% (-.4%)
- I feel that I am likely to promote CTSI's mission and work to my colleagues and to the broader research community: 96% (+7.5%)
Conclusion/Action: CTSI will continue to explore opportunities for improving internal communications (i.e. through monthly emails, annual retreat, etc.), and to provide opportunities for employee interaction and team building (i.e. SF Food Bank volunteering events, etc.).