External Affairs (EA) at Weill Cornell Medicine serves as the pivotal fundraising and communications department for the medical school. With over 100 employees, EA’s mission-critical role requires a continuous focus on culture and enhancing employee engagement. Since 2018, EA has worked closely with OPG to measure and advance its engagement efforts.

OPG & EA: Collaborating to evaluate and enhance engagement

In 2018, EA approached OPG with a desire to better understand and then improve is work culture and employee experience. At the time, the department had just undergone a leadership transition and was launching a significant fundraising campaign that would require commitment from all of EA’s talents and resources. The team’s engagement was critical.

In response, OPG developed a customized engagement survey and culture-building process for EA that included:

• Entry meetings with all staff to introduce the project and OPG, and to gather early input into the process
• Interviews and focus groups with staff to inform the survey design
• Multiple reviews of the draft survey by senior management
• Survey beta testing by randomly selected staff
• Survey administration
• Data analysis and presentation development
• Data presentations to leadership and all staff
• Facilitated sessions with all staff to “unpack” or make sense of the data
• An all-staff retreat to create a shared vision for EA’s culture and develop initiatives in support of that vision

EA went on to successfully launch Project Engage, a staff-led and leadership-supported effort to coordinate and implement the initiatives developed at the retreat.

While OPG typically recommends re-administering engagement surveys every two years, COVID disrupted that cycle. Instead, EA partnered with OPG again in 2021 to administer a 10-question pulse survey designed to assess the culture’s current condition. OPG selected a representative, randomly selected sample of 35 staff to participate. All staff were invited to join facilitated sessions to “unpack” the pulse survey data.

Between surveys, OPG continued working with EA in several ways, including providing management and leadership training and executive coaching.

The results

In 2024, OPG re-administered the full survey to all EA staff. The results were impressive:

• With a 92% response rate, EA’s overall engagement score improved meaningfully since 2018.
• All survey category means (averages) improved since 2018; recognition increased the most.
• Means of 72 of 88 items improved since 2018, with 50 showing a meaningful improvement (by 0.20 or more).

These outcomes resulted from the commitment of leadership and staff to this work. Engagement and culture-building don’t happen overnight. They require consistent attention.

OPG is proud to be EA’s partner in this work. We can’t wait to see how they build on their strong foundation to reach even greater heights.