Ethics Survey Results 2017

UCCS 2017 Short Survey™ Report of Findings

Through the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) Ethics Committee, UCCS conducted a Cultural Survey for faculty and staff in April-May 2017, in an effort to better understand perceptions of the University’s core values and culture. The Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI), America’s oldest nonprofit advancing high ethical standards and practices in public and private institutions, was contracted by UCCS to support the project. The survey was a census survey of all 1,804 UCCS employees (faculty and staff only). Employees were invited to take the survey online. Of those who responded, there were 372 useable responses, yielding a response rate of 20.6 percent. Therefore, the UCCS data have a confidence interval of +/- 4.5 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. In other words, we are 95 percent certain that ‘X’ percent of employees report a certain way, plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

Such cultural surveys are common among large, for-profit organizations, and the results will help UCCS benchmark with other institutions of higher education across the nation. These results will further help an organization’s leaders to identify priorities for enhancing an ethical culture and to develop the resources and support systems to help all university stakeholders recognize and respond to ethics and compliance issues when they arise. The findings also provide a unique glimpse into the means by which a university can better understand the shared values that guide its community members’ decisions and behavior on a daily basis.

The UCCS Ethics Committee intends to use our campus survey results to develop training and resources specific to our campus.