Dartmouth College
The Challenge: Dartmouth Campus Services (CS) along with DMC conducted a series of events to review a newly developed Employee Expectations Guide for employees to follow.
Their vision: Many cultures, one community. At Dartmouth, differences are embraced and ideas are challenged. Their diverse community of students, faculty, and staff come together to share perspectives, learn, and grow.
Toward Equity: Aligning Action and Accountability is a three-year strategic plan intended to unify Dartmouth’s institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
The Method: DMC facilitated 12 events where CS employees reviewed the guidelines and then discussed how they were created, why they now exist, and the expectations around how they should be followed. The entire division of approximately 500 employees attended the events in total, which also included an end of session survey to assess quality of the training and perspectives on the new guide. DMC provided Dartmouth leadership an additional survey to assess their comfort with leading this work and assessing their needs in its future implementation.
The Results: The CS wide survey had over 300 reposenses and was primarily a positive reflection on both the training and the employee expectations overall. Over 90% of agreement was seen around understanding the expectations, belief that they will have a positive impact, and having the tools to meet those expectations.
Similar to the CS wide survey, leadership perceptions on the employee expectations guide, the guide's potential for positive impact, and understanding of team readiness to meet these expectations is nearly universally agreed upon (90%+ all questions).
Using data from both surveys portrays a dynamic where as a whole, everyone agrees the employee expectations are a good thing. However, CS as a whole is cautious about this effort working because of a belief that those who violate the work will not be held accountable by managers who have a lack of follow through. Managers' data provides more context where they believe in the work as well, but they desire exceptionally clear expectations on what consists of negative behavior that requires follow through.
After reviewing the data, both CS as a whole and leadership as a separate unit understood the employee expectations, the 7 principles, and received what they needed out of the training. This is reiterated in the quantitative results (see chart 1).
The Action: Annual Employee Expectations Trainings hosted by both DMC and leadership at Dartmouth Campus Services.