Faculty + Staff Engagement Survey
The university will be conducting a faculty and staff engagement survey October 1-17, 2025
The University of Alberta is committed to fostering a thriving and supportive environment for all faculty and staff, through a commitment central to Shape, the strategic action plan and the People Strategy. Insights from previous engagement surveys and continuous feedback channels highlight the critical need to enhance faculty and staff experience, ensuring the university community feels valued, heard and empowered.
The overarching goal of the 2025 Faculty and Staff Engagement Survey is to deploy a streamlined feedback channel for the university community, supporting the cultivation of a highly engaged, supportive and thriving work environment for all faculty and staff. This initiative aims to enhance the overall employee experience, directly contributing to the university's success in its core mission of teaching, research and community engagement.
Survey approach
The U of A conducted a university-wide Faculty and Staff Engagement Survey in 2023 to help us understand our engagement levels and to help us determine where we need to focus our improvements. At that time, it was anticipated that follow-up engagement surveys would be conducted every two years.
The 2025 Faculty and Staff Engagement Survey fulfills the commitment made in 2023 to re-survey following a period of action planning and implementation. After this survey, the university plans to move away from a fixed two-year survey cadence, supplementing less frequent full-campus surveys with focused action planning and targeted pulse checks.
Survey benefits
- Provide a broad measure of workplace culture
- Help assess the impact of our department and faculty action plans and the People Strategy actions to-date
- Address feedback regarding the length of the previous survey by being shortened
- Reinforces leadership’s commitment by honouring the promise of a follow-up survey in 2025
- Provide a comparison to results from the previous survey to measure progress.
- Measure the progress that has been made in our action planning based on the results of the previous survey while also seeking to understand what current issues are important to faculty and staff, and develop action plans to address and prioritize identified concerns.
- By participating in the survey you are helping the university understand perceptions to help strengthen our workplace culture in keeping with the evolving People Strategy and our shared Culture of Care.
Survey format
The 2025 Faculty and Staff Engagement Survey will feature fewer priority-aligned questions to allow for clearer focus and actionable follow-up. Based on feedback from the community, this survey is significantly shorter that the previous survey in 2023. It is anticipated that it will only take about 15 minutes to complete.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The survey tool includes an AI "conversation mode" element which will be available for the open-ended questions, to help facilitate the process for respondents to provide detailed feedback while honouring anonymity. This feature is just an option for respondents, and they can feel free to bypass it. AI will also be used to support the results analysis once the survey closes, which will help institutional leadership be able to share the results with the university community quickly. As college and department leaders develop action plans, the survey results tool will offer research-based and industry-informed guidance.
Survey process
Following a vendor assessment process, Innerlogic was selected as the successful vendor to administer the 2025 Faculty and Staff Engagement Survey. Innerlogic is a Canadian-founded company with a mission to bridge the costly gap between workforce feedback and efficient, evidence-based culture transformation.
All U of A faculty and staff will receive an email invitation from Innerlogic (innerlogic@innerlogic.com) with survey access. As the email will come from an external sender, it may contain a phishing warning banner from Gmail, but it is safe to open and take the survey. Please check your spam folder on October 1 if you have not received the survey in your inbox.
Alignment with Culture of Care and Access, Community + Belonging (ACB)
Faculty and staff input is particularly important in shaping a culture of access, community and belonging at the U of A. This shared commitment begins with ensuring all members of our community feel seen, valued and supported. Such a culture can only thrive when we all participate in its co-creation.
The 2025 Faculty and Staff Engagement Survey is a key element of our broader commitment to supporting engagement among our faculty and staff, the evolving People Strategy and our shared Culture of Care.
Survey results
Initial results of the survey will be shared by the end of the year, with more in-depth analysis and specific recommendations to be shared in early 2026.
2023 results
Overall university results from the 2023 survey were shared with the university community. See the results »
Verna Yiu, Provost and Vice-President (Academic) and Todd Gilchrist, Vice-President (University Services, Operations and Finance) shared how the results will be used as building blocks for positive change. Engagement data showed areas for improvement and highlighted areas of strength, as the university continues to strive for improvements.
Executive Sponsors
Verna Yiu
Provost and Vice-president (Academic)
Todd Gilchrist
Vice-president (University Services, Operations & Finance)