Provide an update on the employee engagement survey that we launched early this fall

About The NES™

This report of The National Employee Survey™ (The NES™) for the City of Cambridge presents the opinions of employees regarding their job satisfaction, engagement and key characteristics of their work environment. The survey was developed by the experts from National Research Center at Polco.

A periodic sounding of employee opinion on critical workplace issues offers management, staff and elected officials an opportunity to identify challenges, plan for and evaluate improvements and sustain organizational effectiveness for long-term success. The NES report is about the work environment of the City of Cambridge. A quality work environment is a workplace that is not simply acceptable, but that is desirable. It is not only where people do work, but where the..

Great workplaces are partnerships of employees, management and the residents they serve.

The NES captures employees’ opinions within the aspects of organizational climate as well as community quality and city governance as well as ratings of City internal support services (such as human resources and finance), community quality, and City governance: - Quality of Community - Quality of Governance - Employee Engagement - Workplace essentials - Organizational Climate - Employee Development - Equity and Inclusion - Internal Support Services A total of 945 completed surveys were obtained, providing an overall response rate of 38%.

Because the survey was intended to be taken by all employees, no traditional margin of error was calculated. However, because not all employees responded, NRC recommends using plus or minus five percentage points as the “range of uncertainty” around any given percent reported for the organization as a whole. The full description of methods used to garner these opinions can be found in the Methods tab.

How the results are reported For the most part, the percentages presented in the following tabs represent the “percent positive.” The percent positive is the combination of the top two most positive response options (i.e., “excellent” and “good,” “strongly agree” and “somewhat agree,” etc.).

On many of the questions in the survey respondents may answer “don’t know.” The proportion of respondents giving this reply is shown in the full set of responses included in the tab “Complete data.” However, these responses have been removed from the analyses presented in most of the tabs. In other words, the tables and graphs display the responses from respondents who had an opinion about a specific item.

When a table for a question that only permitted a single response does not total to exactly 100%, it is due to the customary practice of rounding percentages to the nearest whole number. Comparisons to the benchmarks This is Cambridge's first administration of The National Employee Survey. The survey was administered during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time of challenge for many local governments.

While we provide comparisons to national benchmarks, it is important to note that much of the benchmark data was collected prior to the pandemic, so the comparisons may not be entirely comparable for all of the data points. NRC’s database of comparative employee opinion comprises the perspectives of more than 25,000 employees or gather ganizat ed fr ion om in em which ployee they sur wor veys k f and rom gave local their gover opinion nments about acr

oss job t sat he isf U. act S. T ion, hose super em visor ployees relat evaluat ionships ed t and he other 2 gathered from employee surveys from local governments across the U.S. Those employees evaluated the organization in which they work and gave their opinion about job satisfaction, supervisor relationships and other aspects of the employee experience. The City of Cambridge was compared to the entire database.

A benchmark comparison (the average percent positive from all the comparison organizations where a question was asked, excluding Cambridge's) has been provided when there were at least five organizations in which the question was asked. The percent positive response was created by combining the most favorable response options (i.e., “strong.. Where comparisons are available, two columns are provided in the table. The first column is Cambridge's percent positive.

The second shows the comparison of Cambridge's rating to the benchmark, where Cambridge's results are noted as being “higher” than the benchmark, “lower” than the benchmark or “similar” to the benchmark.

These labels come from a statistical comparison of Cambridge'srating to the benchmark where a rating is considered “similar” if it is within the margin of error (five percentage points or less) and “higher” or “lower” if the difference between Cambridge's rating and the benchmark is greater the margin of error (greater than five percentage points). 3 Methods

Survey Background

The City of Cambridge partnered with National Research Center (NRC) at Polco to conduct a City-wide employee survey. Employees were asked questions about their job satisfaction, work environment, compensation, supervisory relationships, organizational climate and communication. This was the first survey of Cambridge employees. The results can be used by the City to better understand employee experiences, address employee concerns and monitor perspectives over time.

The survey consisted of thematically similar statements grouped into question sets and all were asked on a four-point scale (e.g., strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, strongly disagree or excellent, good, fair, poor).

Selecting Survey Recipients

All City of Cambridge employees were eligible to complete the survey. The City provided NRC with a list of email addresses for all employees with City emails. The City also communicated with all employees about the survey so that employees without City emails were informed about and could participate in the survey.

Survey Administration and Response

The survey was administered on the Polco platform. Beginning September 23rd, 2024, employees were mailed a postcard to their homes with a link inviting them to complete the web-based survey on Polco. About a week later, City of Cambridge employees with email addresses received five email messages several days apart with a URL link to the survey. The survey was available in English only. Data collection continued through October 28th, 2024.

Of the 2,487 employees receiving an invitation to complete the survey, a total of 945 employees returned completed surveys, providing a response rate of 38%. The response rate was calculated using the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) response rate #2 for Internet surveys of named persons.¹ Because the survey was intended to be taken by all employees, no traditional margin of error was calculated.