FAQ
Workplace climate studies give local government leaders an opportunity to listen to their employees. After learning what employees regard as their organization’s strengths and weaknesses, leaders can act on the feedback to create a great workplace where employees want to build their careers. The most effective local governments routinely and systematically solicit employee input on decisions that affect them, on organizational climate, and on workplace improvements.
Research shows that when local government employees are passionate about their workplace and feel like it is a good place to build a career, they are motivated to provide excellent service to residents. When employees are less concerned about workplace issues, they focus their time and energy on providing excellent customer service.
Each project timeline will vary; however, most projects have a timeline of 12-14 weeks, from the point of the initial meeting to the delivery of initial survey results. The workplace survey itself is typically active for 2-3 weeks during that timeframe.
Dr. Leisha Dehart-Davis, a nationally known researcher in workplace climate issues, has been leading the workplace survey efforts at the UNC School of Government since 2012 and has curated a team of highly skilled and knowledgeable individuals who manage LGWI’s workplace climate studies. Our work is a collaborative effort among faculty, staff, and graduate research assistants. View our team.
LGWI has worked with more than 20 local governments throughout North Carolina and beyond. Recent clients have included the City of Concord (NC), Guilford County (NC), City of Hillsboro (OR), and Town of Chapel Hill (NC).
TLGWI is housed within the School of Government at UNC-Chapel Hill, where the initiative director, Dr. Leisha DeHart-Davis, is a full-time faculty member. LGWI aligns well with the School of Government’s work to improve local governments so that they can provide high-quality, efficient service to their constituents.
Email lgwi@unc.edu to schedule a meeting with the LGWI team to discuss your organization’s needs or interests and how we can best collaborate.
LGWI is regulated by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at UNC-Chapel Hill, which ensures that researchers take appropriate measures to protect survey data so that results can never be linked to individual employees. The data is stored on password-protected devices that are also virus-protected. Researchers also only report findings for groups with 10 survey participants or more to protect confidentiality. Additionally, we share only themes within comments to ensure anonymity; we do not share raw qualitative data (i.e., individual comments) with clients.
Each survey is developed using tested and proven organizational research techniques, but the content is customized based on each individual organization and its unique needs.
While Workplace Climate Studies are useful to identify and define issues within an organization, they are also critical for highlighting and honoring the strengths of your organization. Just as you may visit a physician regularly for a checkup, it’s important for organizations to do the same. We have learned that the best organizations routinely and systematically listen to their employees. Engaging in this process and acting on the feedback demonstrates appreciation for employee feedback and builds trust within the workforce, leading to reduced turnover and higher employee satisfaction.
When planning for a workplace climate study, the LGWI team meets with the client to discuss organizational needs and interests. We also provide an overview of the survey topics, decision items, and timeline. Following the initial meeting, we develop the survey in Qualtrics and send a preview to the client for approval. We also require limited employee information, which is used to distribute the survey and for customized follow-up analyses. Each employee receives an email with a unique survey link, which allows employees to complete the survey at their own pace without losing their responses if they need to take a break. While the survey is active, we provide regular updates on employee response rates.
After the survey closes, the LGWI team begins developing the Tableau Dashboard and generating initial results. When this information is complete, we schedule a meeting with the client to share and discuss the initial results. Our process is inductive research, meaning we listen to your questions and goals during the initial results meeting to identify supplemental analyses. After we provide the supplemental analyses, we meet to discuss the results again. The process repeats until there is consensus that the client has a comprehensive understanding of the feedback from their employees.
Prior to survey distribution, we ask the local government to provide each employee’s full name, email address, gender, race or ethnicity, supervisory status, the name of their direct supervisor, length of service, and age. These items are critical to conducting the supplemental analyses.
Collecting information on supervisory status and each individual’s direct supervisor allows the LGWI team to calculate the hierarchical levels in the organization (e.g., department director, frontline manager, middle management). Understanding the hierarchy can help identify where in the organization a challenge is occurring, such as a communication breakdown. We also use these data points to calculate the span of each supervisor, meaning how many direct reports a supervisor is managing. This is helpful to understand the management load and capacity of supervisors in the organization.
In addition to providing the data and analyses to the local government that commissioned the survey, LGWI also uses this data to inform research and to teach local government leaders and Master of Public Administration students at the UNC School of Government. The data are anonymized, meaning that we remove all identifying information. Using the data in this way provides a positive feedback loop in which researchers learn from the data and then in turn create more effective and accurate survey techniques to further local governments’ efforts to improve their workplaces.