Faculty and Staff Experience Survey

Support faculty and staff success, personally and professionally 

Understand, create space for, and engage in initiatives aimed at helping faculty and staff to thrive, grow, and connect at George Mason, both personally and professionally. 

Create dialogue, not just data 

Reports provide a snapshot in time of the team's engagement level and how employees are feeling about their workplace. Your responses spark conversations with your manager about what matters to you. 

Your feedback drives action and creates actionable change 

When you share honest feedback, you're not speaking into a void—you're providing the data that shapes priorities, resource allocation, and workplace improvements. Survey results help leadership stay focused on engagement, workplace experience, and well-being, respond to your team's changing needs, and identify areas that might need attention.  Following the 2024 survey, faculty and staff data demonstrated need for several essential focus areas. Because you took the 2024 survey, we’ve thoughtfully implemented the following actionable change: compensation Study, well-being initiatives, reward/recognition and professional development enhancements, revamped performance culture 

Student success 

Engaged faculty and staff are emotionally and psychologically committed to their work, creating more opportunities for student success. A relationship between faculty engagement and the quality of the student experience as measured by students' likelihood to recommend their program to others. 

Identify areas to celebrate 

To understand employee engagement and workplace experience, identifying areas of success is just as important as identifying areas of growth. 

The Faculty and Staff Experience Survey will be open from April 1 - April 21, 2026.

Every employee will receive an email invitation from Gallup with a unique link to the survey. Be on the lookout for this email invitation and reminders! 

All of Mason's employees are invited to participate in the survey. This includes I/R faculty, adjunct faculty, classified staff, A/P faculty, wage employees, and student and graduate student employees.

In partnership with Faculty Senate, the Faculty Evaluation of Administrators (FEA) will be launched with the FSE survey. After completing the FSE questions, I/R faculty will advance to the FEA portion of the assessment.

Mason has contracted with Gallup to serve as our third-party survey vendor. 

Gallup’s employee engagement science and history researching the topic are unmatched. They have been studying employee engagement (including the best way to measure it) and performance for over 75 years. Gallup is an industry leader in terms of understanding what employees want and need to thrive in their workplace. They have studied over 2.7 million employees across 100,000+ teams. 

Gallup has more than 1,000 clients measuring engagement each year, including over 120,000 responses from higher ed faculty and staff within their employee engagement database. 

In partnering with Gallup, Mason will have access to their robust library of action planning materials to address each of our areas of concern. Additionally, we will be able to benchmark Mason against other institutions of higher ed and local industries. 

The design of the survey took several factors and goals of the university into consideration along with the wealth of research and experience that Gallup has in survey design and administration. The foundation of the survey is Gallup’s Q12, a research-based set of questions designed to measure employee engagement. In collaboration with Gallup, Mason’s team added questions aligned with the university’s goals, priority, and culture.   

The 2022 Faculty and Staff Experience Survey was developed, in coordination with Gallup, by the Faculty and Staff Experience committee which included representatives from across Mason’s community.  Gallup stakeholder interviews provided the committee with insight on goals and objectives of the survey. 

The 2024 iteration of the survey closely parallels the 2022 version, with slight adjustments based on the President’s goals and Mason’s 2023 Strategic Direction.  

Core Implementation Team 

The Faculty & Staff Experience Committee identified a smaller team of individuals within their membership to serve as the Core Implementation Team for the Faculty & Staff Experience Survey. This team has been meeting bi-weekly throughout fall 2021 and spring 2022 to ensure the timely administration of this initiative. In these regular meetings with Gallup representatives, the team identified key stakeholders, developed the survey items and communication plans, and handled the logistics for the survey administration. 

Mason has collaborated with Gallup to design a survey that will measure a variety of faculty and staff experiences. 

Engagement (Gallup's  Q12)

Gallup’s 12 key engagement questions will help Mason measure engagement in your work life. 

Well-Being 

Mason is dedicated to creating an environment where you can thrive.

Culture of Belonging

The Culture of Inclusion questions will measure your experience with Mason as a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. 

Flexible and Remote Work 

With the shift to a hybrid work environment, the survey will help us to better understand how the transition has impacted your work life and connection to university culture.

Mason will use this data to: 

• Identify and celebrate areas of success across Mason and among workgroups/divisions 
• Identify areas of opportunity across Mason and among workgroups/divisions 
• Provide guidance on areas of growth

Leaders will have access to Gallup's Action Planning tools that provide: 

• Questions that help managers/leaders focus on areas of action 
• Learning opportunities for each survey construct 
• Tips and tricks to help you follow through with your workgroup/division 

Learn more about the Action Planning phase at Mason. 

Gallup will send an email directly to you with a unique link to complete the survey.