FAQ | HR NOW

Stony Brook University is committed to creating and maintaining an environment that attracts and retains world-class faculty and staff. Gathering faculty and staff perspectives on their work experiences helps us to better understand what currently works and what needs to be improved. Improvement occurs when we openly solicit candid and confidential feedback from all critical stakeholders and act upon this feedback.

We need to understand what factors are important to our faculty and staff. This institution is committed to our PEOPLE and our COMMUNITY and needs to hear from our faculty and staff on our direction and our work environment. The survey will also provide a starting point (or baseline) for future input from faculty and staff on institution priorities and needs. The feedback opportunities provided by the survey will be in the form of a continuous process, not a singular event. This survey will help drive our strategic planning process.

ModernThink LLC is a nationally recognized organization specializing in surveys of this kind for higher education. The higher education benchmark data ModernThink will provide will give our institution valuable insight into how we compare to other schools across the nation.

A comprehensive survey committee, under the direction of the interim VP of Human Resources and stakeholders across campus and ModernThink worked in consultation to craft the survey. ModernThink will work with the committee to administer the survey, ensuring confidentiality, and aid in the dissemination of the results.

The survey statements solicit feedback on a broad range of topics focused around the following themes:

Collaboration, Job Satisfaction and Support, Communication, Mission and Pride, Confidence in Senior Leadership, Performance Management, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging, Professional Development, Faculty, and Staff Well-being, Supervisors/Department Chair Effectiveness, Faculty Experience (Faculty only)

The online survey should take approximately 18 - 22 minutes to complete. If you are unable to complete the survey after you begin, you will have the option to save your responses and access them later.

The survey consists of statements that employees/faculty respond to using a five-point agreement scale (Strongly Agree, Agree, Sometimes Agree/Sometimes Disagree, Disagree, Strongly Disagree). Additionally, there is a Not Applicable response option.

The survey instrument also includes item benefits satisfaction component and open-ended questions. There are several demographic questions at the end of the survey. Respondents are encouraged to provide responses; however, you have the option of skipping any of the demographic questions if you have concerns regarding the anonymity of your responses. (See also “Are my survey responses confidential?” below.)

First, as a faculty or staff member of our institution, your voice matters. Second, higher response rates give a more accurate picture of the institution and its individual departments. This is a significant opportunity for you to share your ideas, opinions, and solutions by participating in both the survey and the action planning that will follow.

All full-time, hired on or before the calendar year ending 2024, Stony Brook University State and RF Employees on West Campus, Southampton Campus, and in the Health Sciences Schools, as well as a portion of the School of Medicine are invited and encouraged to participate in the survey. (Those hired in 2025 will be included in our next survey.)

Exceptions:

This survey does not include student employees, part-time employees, or School of Medicine Clinical Faculty and Staff.

The School of Medicine Clinical Faculty and Staff and Stony Brook University Hospital participate in a separate Engagement Survey.

The Survey Peiod has now closed.

However, when it was open, these were the instructions...

Eligible particpants will be invited via email by ModernThink to take the survey hosted on ModernThink’s secure website. The survey is available for two weeks. You will be asked to enter a username and password, which will be provided in an e-mail invitation sent to you directly by ModernThink. You may take the survey at any time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from work or from home. Internet access is required. Employees taking the survey can use the same workstation, as long as each person properly logs into, and out of, the survey.

Your individual survey responses will remain completely confidential. At no point will your manager or any other institution employee have access to your personal answers. Survey results are aggregated and reported only in a grouped format, ensuring that no one in the institution can identify your specific responses.

The purpose of the survey is to get honest feedback.Therefore, this institution is using an external partner (ModernThink) to administer the survey. It is web-based and automated with a secure internet connection.
You will not be asked your name on the survey. Each employee will receive an email invitation from ModernThink to participate in the survey. Once you click on the survey link, you will go directly to ModernThink’s website. Your institution has no access to this website. Your responses will be submitted directly to ModernThink’s database and all processing will be done by ModernThink.
The email invitation will include unique password information for each user. This information is stored on the ModernThink server during the survey period only to ensure that only one survey is completed per employee and will not be linked to your individual survey responses. Emails are purged from ModernThink’ s system once the survey project has been completed.

No.The survey will be completed on ModernThink’s private server. The email address is only used to access the survey and to ensure that only one survey is completed per employee. Emails are purged from ModernThink’ s system once the survey project has been completed.

The demographic information (i.e. Gender, Age, Job Role, School, etc.) will help ModernThink better understand the patterns and themes in the survey data. As the confidentiality of your responses is critical, ModernThink will not report your individual demographic data. Group demographic data will only be reported when there are 5 or more respondents in a particular group. Although the demographics are an optional component of the survey, you are strongly encouraged to provide this information.

Your answers will be stored each time you select the SAVE & the CONTINUE button at the
bottom of a survey page. If you get interrupted you can come back to the survey. You will need to log on to the ModernThink survey site to re-access the survey.

To protect your confidentiality, you will not be able to access the survey after you click the SUBMIT button on the last page of the survey.

While a 100% response rate is not necessary, we like to see as high a response rate as
possible. Average response rates for ModernThink surveys typically range between 40% and 65%. During the two weeks the survey is available we will be sharing our response rate with the community at large. We hope that each of you will use this information and opportunity to encourage your colleagues to participate.

If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions regarding the survey and/or the survey process, please do not hesitate to contact be_heard@stonybrook.edu or ModernThink Senior Project Manager Liz Flood at (888) 684-4658 or lflood@modernthink.com.

Frequently Asked Questions