In this interview, Chief Culture Officer Aditi Chakravarty shares a high-level look at findings generated by the recently conducted LBNL Culture Survey. As Berkeley Lab prioritizes building a positive and inclusive work environment to support employees’ well-being and enable the Lab’s scientific mission, these survey results offer valuable insights into the breadth of experiences and perspectives that employees hold about Berkeley Lab’s workplace culture. This interview is a preview of the Labwide Stewardship Town Hall on Oct. 15 where the key takeaways from the survey will be shared and how employees can get involved in the next steps at different levels of the organization. 

 

Q: Can you provide a sneak peek into the key strengths revealed by the survey about our current workplace culture?

Aditi: There are nuances to every story but one resounding message in our culture survey results, echoing previous surveys, is that Berkeley Lab employees are deeply engaged in their work and invested in our mission. This rings true across roles, length of tenure, self-reported social identity, and other demographic differences we examined. When we say “engagement” in this context of assessing culture, we mean measuring how positively employees feel about the Lab as a work environment. It is a measurement of how motivated and aligned they feel to what we do here and how we do it. The overall high engagement score we see in this year’s survey results is reflective of the pride our employees take in contributing to the Lab’s research mission and the personal meaning and satisfaction they receive from these contributions. It is worthwhile to note that these positive sentiments around engagement appear at equal levels across Operations and Scientific professionals. It was also interesting to see that, on average, employees report feeling connected to both the Lab’s mission and their division’s mission equally. One way I interpret this is that employees across the Lab feel they share an institutional identity and have a sense of being part of the Labwide community, even while being very invested in their local teams. This may not have always been true at the Lab, so this was very nice to see. It is also clear from the survey that employees want to further deepen this sense of a shared Lab community.

Another strongly emphasized strength in our survey results is the enthusiasm and gratitude employees feel for their colleagues. Many cite their time at the Lab as one of the richest learning experiences of their careers and specifically credit their peers, team members, and often managers for this. Belonging and psychological safety scores were also high on average, but we clearly see in the results that not all employees are having this same positive experience. Addressing these disparities in employee experience by leveraging our culture survey insights and better understanding key pain points is a top priority for the Lab.

The overall high engagement score we see in this year’s survey results is reflective of the pride our employees take in contributing to the Lab’s research mission and the personal meaning and satisfaction they receive.

–Aditi Chakravarty, Chief Culture Officer

Having implemented many culture surveys in organizations over the past 15 years, I haven’t often seen quantitative results compressed in such a narrow range of the Likert scale as we do here at LBNL: the overwhelming majority of results range from 3 – 4.5 on the 5-point scale. In other words, our average baseline is reasonably high compared to most organizations. Knowing this also helps us set realistic, Lab-specific internal benchmarks and goals rather than relying on external benchmarks that may not be applicable to us. For example, we consider scores below 3.5 out of 5 as an area of opportunity, whereas another organization may need to set a lower bar. 

That said, even while the overall quantitative picture looks rosy, I want to underscore that not everyone’s experience looks like the average employee’s. In fact, employees spent time submitting over 3,000 qualitative comments through the survey and while they surfaced the strengths I’ve already mentioned, they also named some very real pain points. And some subgroups at the Lab are disproportionately impacted by these pain points compared to the average employee. We’ll dive deeper into these insights during our upcoming town hall event and explore how we can leverage the Lab’s strengths to tackle our biggest priority areas.

 

Q: Were there any other surprising or unexpected findings from the survey based on initial hypotheses?

A: Our Lab Director, Mike Witherell, has said throughout this process that the places where we are surprised by the results are where we learn the most because it brings our operating assumptions into sharp focus. One finding that may be surprising and runs counter to prevailing expectations is that fully remote and hybrid workers report high belonging and engagement scores. This indicates a marked change in employee sentiment from the pulse surveys we conducted during the pandemic. This finding also challenges some of our assumptions about the impact of flexible work on employee belonging and engagement. 

One of the big advantages of conducting this culture survey in-house is it has given us the ability to analyze survey feedback by demographic subgroups while enforcing the strictest standards of confidentiality and anonymity. I must acknowledge Adi Greif, the Lab’s Culture Data Scientist, for her tremendous work in designing the survey and making this level of analysis possible. This survey has also given us the ability to integrate both quantitative and qualitative data in a way that just isn’t feasible when working with a third-party survey vendor. Through these deep dives, we discovered some takeaways that surprised us. For instance, higher workloads were linked to higher engagement, which is the opposite of what we commonly see in organizations, even in mission-driven ones. While we may have expected negative feedback on issues such as pay and benefits, manager behaviors, and career growth, which are areas we’re already working on, we were pleasantly surprised to find a spectrum of sentiments with a significant portion of respondents viewing these aspects of their Berkeley Lab experience as key strengths.

…on average, employees report feeling connected to both the Lab’s mission and their division’s mission equally. One way I interpret this is that employees across the Lab feel they share an institutional identity and have a sense of being part of the Labwide community.

Q: How will the feedback from this survey influence future initiatives and decision-making at Berkeley Lab?

A: The culture survey is directly informing the Lab’s people stewardship priorities and will help us refine existing institutional initiatives that are meant to address these priority areas. I never advise organizations to try to boil the ocean, especially when we want to make meaningful progress for our employees. Thankfully, the survey points us towards some key, actionable areas of focus. The Learning & Culture (L&C)IDEA, and HR offices have already met with Lab leadership and have begun meeting with Area and Division leadership and ERG leadership to share survey insights and support local action planning. We are also working together as part of the Lab’s Employee Engagement Working Group (EEWG) to ensure that these findings not only remain accessible to Lab leadership but drive whatever new initiatives we set into motion moving forward. We will run this survey about every two years, which will give us enough time in between each survey to focus our efforts and assess whether we’re moving the needle where we need to be. 

 

Q: What role will employees play in shaping the next steps, and how can they stay engaged in the ongoing culture transformation?

We encourage everyone to attend the Town Hall on Oct. 15 to hear more about the survey results. We will have aggregated results and the final report on the 2024 Results page, along with guidance on the next steps on the Taking Action page. These will be posted immediately after the Town Hall concludes. 

Each of us contributes to our Lab culture, whether we intend to or not, and each of us has a role to play in responding to the survey insights. Therefore, in addition to exploring the data, employees will have several ways to get involved in next steps depending on their bandwidth and level of interest. For instance, the L&C Office will host community action-planning sessions for employees interested in engaging in discussions around the survey results; Adi Greif, Culture Data Scientist on the L&C team, will also be hosting drop-in office hours for the rest of the year to support anyone with questions about the survey. 

In the meantime, please visit culture.lbl.gov to refresh your memory on the nuts and bolts of the survey and see the questions we asked.