This year, the Working at Iowa Survey includes nine new questions that will give campus a powerful tool for improving work environments. The new questions measure an elusive, high-impact component of the employee experience: engagement.

“Employee engagement is a huge topic because when employees are engaged, organizations perform better overall,” says Cheryl Reardon, UI chief human resources officer. “The challenge has been identifying what cultivates and drives engagement.”

The biennial Working at Iowa Survey asks all regular, 50-percent-time or greater University of Iowa faculty and staff to give feedback on their work experience. Reardon says the survey remains the same except for the new questions, which will measure engagement as well as inform an analysis aimed at identifying what aspects of the workplace are most strongly correlated with engagement for individual colleges and divisions.

“The new survey will give us more tools for focusing on areas that matter the most to our employees,” says Reardon.

Eean Crawford, associate professor and director of graduate studies in management and organizations at the Tippie College of Business, has studied engagement for about a decade. He says that people often mistake engagement for a positive job attitude, or commitment and passion for their work.

“People believe that engagement is a euphoric experience at work where everything is rosy and enjoyable—it’s not that at all,” says Crawford. “When people are engaged, they make greater investments of their physical, emotional, and mental energy. It can be exhausting. Unless you have time to detach and recharge, engagement can quickly turn into burnout.”

Crawford became involved with the Working at Iowa Survey after University Human Resources invited him to offer feedback in 2014. Those discussions led to the addition of an engagement index as part of a pilot for the 2016 Working at Iowa Survey. The pilot included the Division of Student Life and the College of Engineering.

“The Working at Iowa questions address people’s perceptions of their working environment such as whether individuals understand how their job fits into the overall mission of the University of Iowa, whether their work unit provides a supportive environment to retain individuals from different backgrounds, or whether they are encouraged to participate in professional development,” says Crawford. “By including a measure of engagement, colleges and divisions will for the first time be able to quantify how strongly these perceptions are linked to engagement.”

Crawford says that feedback on the pilot was overwhelmingly positive. He says that the participating units could see for the first time the level of engagement in their unit, as well as which of the Working at Iowa questions and the perceptions they address were most strongly related to engagement.

“We were pleased to be a part of last year’s pilot of the engagement index within the Working at Iowa Survey,” says Sarah Hansen, associate vice president for the Division of Student Life. “Learning which questions on the survey were the biggest drivers of engagement for Division of Student Life employees was very helpful in guiding our efforts toward change that will make a difference for our staff members.”

Later this fall, when the survey results have been tabulated, individual colleges and divisions will receive both a summary of results for the regular Working at Iowa Survey questions and a new two-page report on engagement. The two-page report will compare the unit’s engagement index with that of the overall university and will provide information about what survey questions corresponded with high engagement in that unit.

Crawford encourages campus to participate in the Working at Iowa Survey and respond honestly to questions. Individual responses will be kept confidential and will not be used to evaluate an employee in any way. The results, reported in aggregate for each college and division, will instead be an important foundation for the conversations that follow, when all units on campus will make choices about what changes to make in their workplaces.

“It’s important to understand that the survey itself isn’t going to make the difference,” says Crawford. “It’s the choices people make and the actions they emphasize after interpreting the results of the survey that will make the difference.”