Newly released survey results show a slight increase in employee satisfaction on the Northwest College campus between 2016 and earlier this year.

The Personal Assessment of the College Environment (PACE) survey is administered at NWC every other spring since 2012.

Given to colleges around the country, the PACE survey is intended to determine where college employees experience the greatest satisfaction, which areas need improvement and how NWC stacks up compared to similar institutions nationwide. Institutional Researcher Lisa Smith presented the results at last week’s monthy meeting of the NWC Board of Trustees.

The 65-question survey was ranked on a five-point scale, ranging from “1-Very Dissatisfied,” to “5-Very Satisfied.” Employees were asked to indicate their level of satisfaction on items grouped into four “climate factors,” as well as custom items added specifically by NWC. The climate factors included Institutional Structure, Supervisory Relationships, Teamwork and Student Focus.

NWC’s mean score of 3.771 showed a slight increase from the 2016 mean of 3.698. NWC skewed higher among comparison groups in areas like campus diversity, meeting the needs of students and overall education, while areas such as fair pay, employee advancement and the opportunity for professional development and training skewed lower.

Questions showing the highest satisfaction among NWC employees included items such as student success, employee pride, meeting student needs and adequate student preparation for a career.

On the lower satisfaction end of the survey, fair wages, a spirit of cooperation and the fostering of a respectful dialogue when opinions differ are just a few that raised red flags for administration.

“We’ve started to address the compensation issue, that was the area employees were the least satisfied in,” said NWC President Stefani Hicswa. “But some of the communication ones, morale kinds of things concern me. It’s something we need to pay attention to, and figure out ways to address.”

She added that, “it’s important to note that the lower data isn’t necessarily low, it’s still high for the national average.”

“But it’s lower for us, and those are the areas we can do better at,” Hicswa said.

What the president did find encouraging was that from 2016 to 2018, employee satisfaction increased overall.

“That really says a lot for all that we’ve been doing just to address policies and address some of the things that are needed on campus,” Hicswa said. “In that time [between 2016 and 2018] we’ve had budget cuts and layoffs. It’s an open wound in some respects that does cause instability when you don’t know what your budget is. Those kinds of things are unsettling for employees, and understandably so.”

Hicswa said that, among other colleges that have taken the survey across the nation, many are seeing similar concerns as those at NWC.

“Other campus employees are frustrated with the same kinds of things,” she said. “To see that we’re above the average on a lot of those issues is really encouraging. That, in addition to our Higher Learning Commission findings from last year, it really shows we’re on the right track and moving in the right direction.”

The survey was distributed to 290 NWC employees and 179 of them completed it. This 62 percent response rate was slightly higher than the last PACE survey in 2016, in which 61 percent of employees surveyed responded.