Drake HR has received our results from the 2022 Survey of Administrative Services (SAS). We want to start by thanking those who took the time to provide us with feedback. In 2021, 108 people indicated on the survey that they regularly work with Drake HR and completed the HR section of the survey. This year, 234 people provided us with feedback. That is a huge increase and that means the feedback is more reliable and more representative of the thoughts and perspectives of our campus. Thank you.

To the question, “Overall, how satisfied are you with HR,” we saw an increase from 4.29 in 2021 to 4.55 in 2022. While we are thrilled with the improvement, we know we have a lot of work to do.

In 2021, 43 people took time to provide narrative comments. This year, 63 people made time to do this. We are thankful for detailed responses.

Your Comments

Your comments are both relevant and meaningful—even when offering constructive criticism. We want to receive such feedback (yes, we really do) out of this important annual survey. And, you don’ have to wait for the SAS to provide feedback. One of the enhancements we adopted last year was a short “how are we doing” survey that we all have included in our signature blocks. You can access that survey and offer feedback any time.

Based on your feedback, here are the areas that will receive extra attention over the next year:

• Responsiveness: We’ve made strides in our responsiveness but have more work to do here. Our department designed and adopted customer service standards last year. We are going to take a fresh look at them and see if they need to be further revised. We know that to build and sustain trust we simply must be responsive. If you ever find yourself waiting on HR, please contact me (Maureen) directly. I really do want to know if you are experiencing a delay in assistance and can help determine what’s going on.
• Staff Performance Evaluations: We need to spend some time with the staff performance evaluation process. While we offered manager training and updated/expended tools this year (all are posted in the manager toolkit), it’s clear both managers and staff want more out of this process.
• Always Open to Suggestions for BUILD Topics & Wellness Programming: We welcome additional feedback on topics for BUILD and Wellness programing for 2023. We’ll look into providing at least some remote BUILD options and additional ways to make primarily live BUILD sessions available to those who cannot attend in person.
• Student Employment: We made some improvements to supporting student workers, but this was a learning curve year for us—thank you for your patience. We know we have some kinks to work out to assure we are responsive and paying attention to the details. A couple of recent improvements: Over the summer, Marli and I revamped the Bulldogs@Work presentation for new student orientation. Marli spent time in Olmsted during the first few weeks of the semester to make it more convenient for student workers to complete paperwork. Marli and I attended new student worker orientation with Rec Services to help their new student workers complete their employee paperwork  (big thank you to Jerome in ITS who was able to find a desk top scanning solution for us so we can complete I-9s outside of our office!).

To everyone who took time to provide feedback through the SAS, thank you. We review the responses in great detail and will use the quantitative and qualitative feedback to set goals and priorities for the coming year. Your experiences, suggestions, and feedback really does make a difference. Thank you!

— Maureen De Armond (and the whole Drake HR Team)