UCT Staff inclusivity survey

Dear colleagues

The University of Cape Town (UCT) is at an important juncture. Your input can help steer us forward.

One of my goals when I took office as vice-chancellor last July was to broaden inclusivity within the UCT community. We all need to feel included, respected and valued in our workplace. This is one of the strategic goals we have agreed to as an institution. Long before the Institutional Reconciliation and Transformation Commission (IRTC) issued its report, UCT leadership began looking into ways to build a sense of community across the institution.

The hard reality is that this does not happen spontaneously, especially in an environment that brings together people representing so many different backgrounds, cultures, sexual identities, languages and experiences. It is also easy to feel isolated under stressful conditions such as we have experienced since 2015. The many discussions about racism across South Africa and within UCT help to bring into focus the kinds of questions and issues that have been raised by the IRTC report – questions that I think may be in everybody’s mind, whether we discuss them openly or not. These public discussions also emphasise the need for us, as UCT leaders, to bring about active change to help everyone to feel included, respected and valued.

Building community takes thoughtful care and work and involves all of us. One of the most important tasks is to listen to the experiences of others. For this reason, we as the executive have agreed to ask each of you, as important members of the UCT community, to take part in a completely anonymous InclusionIndex Staff Inclusivity Survey.

We selected the InclusionIndex survey because it has a strong track record in academic institutions. It has been deployed to more than 50 000 people globally over the past 15 years. It has been validated by the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Its validity and reliability have been verified by significant testing and retesting. The survey consists of 73 items and can be completed in about 20–30 minutes. As well as generating an overall organisational picture, the survey can run specific reports across various demographic groups. 

To guarantee 100% confidentiality, we are partnering with the external service provider Aephoria to administer the survey. We selected Aephoria because of the wide range of clients that have been served by this company, as well as the individual expertise and background each team member provides. The Aephoria team are working under the supervision of UCT’s Office for Inclusivity and Change and a UCT working group chaired by Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Transformation Professor Loretta Feris.

The questions you answer will help to identify what makes relationships difficult in the UCT workplace, so that we can develop specific interventions to help improve those relationships. No individual staff members will be targeted by any intervention. Instead, we will use your responses to the Staff Inclusivity Survey to identify the kinds of interactions and communication habits that might make you feel uncomfortable or excluded. The interventions that we then initiate will address those kinds of behaviour. We believe that over time, with your participation in the survey and in the interventions that result from your responses, we can strengthen the sense of community at UCT by helping one another to build stronger working relationships.

To do this, we need as many of you as possible to participate in the survey. This will allow us to collect academically rigorous data about your experiences at UCT, so that we can then develop interventions to help you improve your workplace relationships. In this way, you will be helping to shape the future of UCT.

The anonymous survey will run from 20 May to 14 June 2019. You can answer online or on paper, in English, Afrikaans or isiXhosa.

Every one of you contributes to UCT’s excellence and every one of you has something important to say to us about how we can be a more inclusive community. So I am asking all of you to please participate.

Here are some important facts about the InclusionIndex Staff Inclusivity Survey and how it will work at UCT:

• It is completely anonymous. It is designed to hide your identity and to allow you to be totally honest. Because Aephoria is administrating the survey, your responses will not be seen by anyone at UCT and they will never be linked to your name.
• On or around 20 May 2019, you will receive an invitation in one of two ways. If you are online, you will receive an email invitation from inclusion@aephoria.co.za to take the survey electronically. Otherwise you will receive a paper survey pack with a pre-addressed return envelope. The survey is voluntary and nobody will know if you are participating or not.
• It takes about 20–30 minutes to complete, whether you do it online or on paper.
• Once our partners at Aephoria have analysed the survey data, they will organise interviews and focus groups in August and September to explore in more depth UCT’s most important challenges around inclusivity. You might be asked to participate in an interview with other colleagues. This is completely voluntary, but I do hope you will take part because your input is important!
• Our commitment as the UCT leadership is to act on what you tell us, by running appropriate interventions after the survey, to improve levels of inclusivity at UCT. The survey will provide a benchmark for how you and your colleagues feel about working at UCT. Interventions that arise out of the survey will take place until 2023, when we will run the survey again to measure how far we have come.
• You can read the most frequently asked questions about the survey in English, Afrikaans and isiXhosa.
• We have created a web page for the UCT Staff Inclusivity Survey to help keep you updated and informed. It will include links to all our communications to you about the survey.

Your feedback is extremely important to us. By taking part in the survey, you will make a meaningful difference to us all as a community. Thank you for your participation and support.

Sincerely

Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng
Vice-Chancellor

Read previous communications:

• From the UCT Executive
• Campus Announcements