Council discusses results of employee benefits survey

Faculty addressed possibilities for MU's low engagement score.

By Mary Novokhovsky

Published April 23, 2010

Thursday's Faculty Council meeting addressed several topics brought up at the UM system Board of Curators meeting last Thursday and Friday.

The majority of the council's discussion revolved around the results of a benefits survey taken by 7,000 faculty and staff within the UM system.

The survey's results showed MU had a low engagement score in relation to other UM campuses. The engagement score is an assessment of faculty and staff responses to questions about their working environment.

"We scored really low when it came to saying 'MU encourages me to do my best work,' " Faculty Council Chairwoman Rubin said.

Several Faculty Council members offered their own explanations for the low engagement score.

Economics professor Xiaoguang Ni said one reason for the possible negative feedback surrounding staff and faculty motivation was the lack of incentives. Ni said the administration is not bringing forward ideas for incentives, and instead faculty and staff are predominantly faced with the prospect of cuts.

"The university should help us to help the university," Ni said. "From my standpoint, I have personally experienced that not all is done to encourage people to bring more resources to the university."

Journalism professor Clyde Bentley said another possible factor in the low score could be the minimal faculty input when it comes to the creation of curriculum.

"One of the places we were supposed to have a strong input on is curriculum," Bentley said. "It has not been easy to modify curriculum."

Another complaint revolving around the survey and administration in general was the lack of representation among minority communities. Black Studies Program Assistant Director April Langley said issues of race have been continually sidestepped. Although the survey demographics were separated into the category of male or female, the data was not analyzed to account for race or ethnicity.

"How are you going to be motivated when cotton balls are getting strewn all over the place?" Langley said.

Despite the many complaints about the survey, specifically regarding its true ability to represent the population because some chose not to respond, agronomy professor Bill Wiebold said at the very least it gave a snapshot of the current environment.

Wiebold acknowledged poor minority representation, two years without raises and a lack of participation were going to play a role in making the survey an imperfect source, but he said it still had its merit.

"A picture is better than a guess," Wiebold said.

The survey results expose problems with the way things are run on the administrative level, mathematics professor Stephen Montgomery-Smith said. He said many staff and faculty are uncomfortable to state how they feel.

"There are a lot of issues on campus where people feel like if they complain they'll just get in more trouble," Montgomery-Smith said.

The benefits survey also asked faculty and staff whether they were in favor of extending benefits to same-sex domestic partners. The UM results were equally split when it came to being strongly opposed or strongly in favor, with 34 percent of the votes going in both directions.

Thirteen percent of the voters were in slight agreement with the benefits extension, and 9 percent were in slight disagreement. Overall, 1,200 faculty and staff members chose not to answer the question.

MU responded to the proposal with 50 percent of faculty and staff strongly agreeing to extend benefits to same-sex domestic partners. Although the MU response yielded a larger percentage of those in favor of the proposal than the overall UM system, Chairwoman Leona Rubin said she was surprised the university didn't have a higher rate of support for the issue.

"Some of this is economics, some of this is social expectations," Rubin said.