Dear Colleagues,

The 2017 fall semester is well underway. Across TRU, faculty and staff are busy doing the valuable work of supporting our students, in their learning and in their lives. I want to tell you about a new initiative specifically for the faculty and staff of TRU. On Nov. 6, the university will launch TRU Perspectives, our first-ever Employee Engagement Assessment survey, which is designed to gather employees’ individual perspectives on their work experience at TRU.

TRU Perspectives is a unique opportunity to share your own perspectives on what it’s like to work at TRU. Your responses will give us meaningful feedback on what we’re doing right and need to hang onto, and what we must do better. It will provide insights we can all draw on to make working at TRU a more rewarding, meaningful experience. It can help us pull together more effectively, to put our students first. By acting on what we learn, it will also strengthen our ability to attract and retain great people at TRU.

Please share your perspectives about your work and your workplace by completing the TRU Perspectives online survey. You will receive the link to the online assessment on Monday, Nov. 6. It will take about 20 to 30 minutes to fill out and can be completed in one visit or many—it’s up to you—but please be sure to submit your completed assessment by midnight on Friday, Nov. 24.

We have made every effort to ensure this assessment is objective and unbiased. For instance, your responses will be strictly confidential and scrubbed of identifiable features, and results aggregated for all groups of five or more. TRU will not design or administer the assessment or tabulate the results, nor will TRU have access to individual results. These tasks will be completed by a highly experienced third-party research consultant named TalentMap, based in Ottawa. TalentMap will securely store the data on their servers within Canada, and produce a comprehensive report benchmarking our results with other Canadian post-secondary institutions.

Our focus will simply be to listen, and to learn from the perspectives of our valued faculty and staff. We will pay attention to the insights that result, engage employees in developing plans on how to strengthen what’s working and improve what needs to work better—for the organization, for department leaders, and for individual employees—and regularly report back on how we are progressing.

You will receive the online link to the assessment on Monday, Nov. 6. When it arrives, I urge you to participate in TRU Perspectives. Share your voice. Make a difference.

Sincerely,

Alan Shaver
President and Vice-Chancellor