As an organization, we take significant steps to evaluate our work to improve access, culture, and opportunity for all, and we encourage other organizations to use our published data and culture survey questions to benchmark your progress and conduct similar studies at your own workplaces.
We welcome mutual opportunities to benchmark surveys across different organizations in our community and to learn from each others' successes and challenges. If you are interested in talking more about anything related to our culture survey results or other data metrics, please contact OACO.
Our strategies for measuring our progress and our latest data are provided below. Please feel free to explore!
Workforce Demographics
We measure our workforce demographics annually to understand ongoing trends and to evaluate the fairness of our policies and procedures. The data we gather helps us suggest changes that lower barriers to employment and promotion opportunities for people from all backgrounds.
Workplace Culture Survey
UCAR conducts in-depth all-staff anonymous Workplace Culture Surveys every four years, administered and analyzed by an external company. These vendors also provide UCAR with a list of recommendations. The first was conducted in Spring 2017, and the second in Spring 2021. We are preparing for our next Culture Survey, which will take place in 2025.
The goals of these surveys are to better understand the workplace environment and experience for our staff, to get recommendations from expert consultants in ways to create a more welcoming and supportive culture throughout the organization, and to measure the effectiveness of the actions put in place in response to previous years’ recommendations.
These reports do not sit on a shelf: OACO partners with NSF NCAR’s CORE Office and UCP’s ACO Lead to address the recommendations from each Workplace Culture Survey at the institutional level, and we have so far been on track with addressing every single recommendation made to us in the years between surveys. In addition, we work with every Lab, Program, and Office across UCAR, NSF NCAR, and UCP to develop their own Culture Survey goals and Implementation Plans to address challenges and opportunities that surfaced in the survey that are particular to their groups. We assist all of the LPOs in measuring their progress towards their self-determined goals.
For all of the information and results from the Workplace Culture Surveys in 2017 and 2021, please see the links below.
View the 2017 Culture Survey information.
View the 2021 Culture Survey information, including comparisons to 2017.
View progress made toward 2021 Workplace Culture Survey Recommendations.
We are eager to partner with anyone who wishes to benchmark their culture survey results against ours. Our survey instrument is freely available to anyone who wishes to use our questions verbatim, or we can partner with you to identify questions in each of our surveys that are similar enough to do an effective comparison. Please don’t hesitate to contact us at OACO@ucar.edu if you are interested in working on this together!
Pulse Surveys
In addition to the very comprehensive Workplace Culture Surveys that take place every four years. UCAR additionally works with an external vendor to administer anonymous Pulse Surveys every 6 months to get a snapshot of employees’ satisfaction, attitudes, and ideas about organizational culture and current initiatives. A number of the Pulse Survey questions are aligned with the Workplace Culture Survey questions to give us intermediate data throughout the 4-year Workplace Culture Survey cycle.