During our first department wide meeting on November 15, 2005 staff and faculty members provided ideas of pillar goals that apply specifically to the department. This is a summary of the suggestions collected:
People
Reduce turnover, vacancies, and help to create more stability in the department
Increase employee satisfaction by eliminating the pay increase cap. Evaluate employees on individual basis not department wide status
Treat others as equals, no one person should be held in higher value; as a team we should respect each other’s work load and opinions
Have more interaction with new employees
Make orientation more detailed while showing new employees around, take time to introduce them to everyone. Have a set of key questions to ask of the new employee
Increased communication within department members and more interaction with Cancer Biostatistics Division's faculty and staff
Make sure the department provides tools and equipment needed to complete projects smoothly and efficiently
Being aware of personalities when interacting (handling problems as a team). Encourage each other to identify problems and use suggestions to improve
Develop a system of rewarding employees for good work
Send thank you notes for those who help. Everyone likes to hear Thank you!
E-mail feedback to collaborators
Service
NEVER say no, always be ready to help
Increase publicity of daily clinics, implement follow up procedure after clinics (surveys, emails), and evalate clinic success by attendance and feedback. Actively recruit people to attend clinics.
Make more time for clinics and collaborations during clinics
Learn better time management for projects, track times that projects are taking, better timely response to problems, educate clients why our service takes time and provide a timeline of expected deadlines, and provide client with progress updates
Find ways to measure our work on grants and collaborations, keep good relationship with other departments for collaboration projects, provide examples of abstracts and grant proposals to first time clients
Improve internal education and mentorship as well as outside of our department
Attend more medical journal clubs to provide statistical perspective
Show much appreciation for a job well done
Quality
Provide a positive environment
Make people aware of what will be considered in the evaluation process, create a feedback mechanism for improvement, provide reasonable notice of deadlines, have internal peer reviews, would like to have input on supervisor evaluations to esure full implementation of the "manage up/manage down" approach
Create good means of reproducible research, use modern methods, increase use of productivity enhancing software, increase graphical display
Create instantaneous automatic report of web-page usage with an annual report of activity
Help (service) with a smile (good personality, willingness to help)
Have good open channels of communication to know and learn what other teams do to improve quality, and try to anticipate what a client or supervisor will need even before they realize they need it
Strive for lifetime continuing education
Growth
Grow the data coordinating center
Provide space for future growth
Active recruiting, better contact with recruits, raise salaries of those already here to motivate recruiting process
Have employee relations meeting (know what others are involved in), implement mentoring program for those who've reached the top out to make room to move further up the ladder
Arrange resources in a more efficient way
Get more depts. to buy into collaboration plan by showing them how useful we care (will bring more grants)
Host National Conference here
Hire additional admin staff to improve productivity
Finance
Improve quality of grant applications to increase number of grants and funding rates
Advocate collaboration plans, encourage Co-PI on grants to have more PIs from department
Allow faculty more budget awareness and use of unrestricted funds, emphasize importance of career development funds, striving to become a full funded faculty
Explore comparison of industry vs. academic salaries as a means of improving recruitment
Standardization of supply ordering process (collective ordering)