PH WINS 2017: Frequently Asked Questions UPDATED

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1 PH WINS 2017: Frequently Asked Questions UPDATED FAQ TOC General Survey Instrument Participation Implementation of the Survey Survey Results and Reporting Other General What is PH WINS? o The Public Health Workforce Interest and Needs Survey (PH WINS) is an online survey capturing individual perspectives related to their workplace environment, training needs, and trends impacting public health. Currently, PH WINS is the only nationally representative data source of the public health workforce. The findings from the first fielding of PH WINS in 2014 have been used by participating health agencies to better understand and address workforce development, as well as by partners to help inform future investments in public health workforce development. Why should my agency participate? o If your agency participates, ASTHO can provide you reports on the state of your agency s workforce. We can offer you comparisons to other Big Cities Health Coalition members, other health departments in your region, as well as national comparisons. o Many of the agency s that participated in the last PH WINS have shared stories with us about how these reports and data points have directly impacted their workforce development capability and plans. We hope PH WINS 2017 can be as useful for its participants. What does my agency get for participating? o Your agency will get a customized, detailed report that includes sections for each domain of PH WINS. o We will also provide executive summaries of the data that include summary statistics for each aspect of the survey, and will compare your agency to others in your paired HHS region. o Additionally, ASTHO is committed to working with you to make sure PH WINS is as useful as possible in your workforce development planning, and can conduct custom analyses for your agency, if requested. My agency wants to participate. What do I do now? o Contact Meghan McGinty at BCHC. We ll work with your designated staff (a workforce champion, an IT contact and/or an HR contact TBD depending on your agency) to collect the staffing list including the names and addresses of all staff in your agency to facilitate the administration of the survey via .

2 Survey Instrument What is included in the survey? o The survey collects data on the following topics: Workplace environment Job satisfaction Workplace engagement Assessment of training needs Education, salary, job role and program area Demographics Intent to leave Is it possible to get a copy of the survey so we know what questions will be asked in 2017? o We will have the survey instrument ready for cognitive interviews and pilot testing shortly. We will not be distributing the survey widely since we don t want staff to see the questions before they answer them. If you need to see the instrument for planning purposes, please let Meghan know. How much time will the survey take my staff to complete? o The survey should take approximately 20 minutes for staff to complete. The survey may be completed in multiple sittings. Answers will be saved as respondents complete the survey. Participation Who will receive the survey? o All permanent full and part-time staff on your agency s staffing list provided by your agency will receive the survey. Who should be included on the staffing list? o Please include all public health staff that are within the purview of the health official. o Please include administrative/support staff. PH WINS is for all staff, as it includes many questions about worker engagement and job satisfaction, which are relevant to all staff. Additionally, the training needs assessment asks about cross-cutting skills rather than traditional public health skills like epidemiology, etc. o If your agency is a superagency/has other divisions besides public health (e.g., substance abuse, Medicaid, long-term care), please exclude those staff. o We will ask your designee to exclude all contractors, temporary staff, and any other staff employed by a third-party (e.g. federal staff based at the state health agency). Why do you need to survey all of my agency s staff? o Surveying all staff is the best way for us to provide you the highest quality data about your workforce. By surveying all staff, you and your leadership will have the most complete picture about the training needs, skills, and attitudes of your workforce. o By surveying the entire staff you will be better prepared to address workforce issues related to staff retention and satisfaction. o Sending the survey to all staff at your agency reduces the burden on you and your leadership to ensure that sufficient staff participate. We learned during the last survey

3 that we often requested additional staff be contacted to meet a minimum level of response. Is there a minimum number of participants per organization? o PH WINS is surveying all staff at participating agencies. In order to receive a report back summarizing the agency s data, the agency must achieve a sufficient response rate, which is dependent on agency size among other factors. The general target we encourage agencies to aim for at a minimum is a 50% response rate. Implementation of the Survey What format should the staffing list be in? o Ideally, a digital database or spreadsheet, such as an Excel or Access document. When will the survey be sent to my staff? When do you anticipate a more specific launch date for purposes of notifying staff? o The survey will be sent via to your staff in early October o We will follow up with more specific details about dates and what you should do next after we have piloted the survey instrument. How long will my staff have to complete the survey? o The survey will be open for approximately 4 week once it is distributed. o Respondents will receive customized computer-generated reminders from the survey platform at regular intervals within the survey period. Why does the survey have to come from ASTHO? Why can t we send it out ourselves? o ASTHO sends the survey for several reasons. The research team is committed to protecting respondent confidentiality, and we have the capacity to protect respondents privacy and responses by automatically distributing the survey through our survey platform. Additionally, by the ASTHO research team distributing the survey we are able to provide automated reminders for staff who have not completed the survey, and better understand agencies response rates. Lastly, our team is prepared to provide technical assistance to individuals completing the survey who have any questions. We provide the lead point of contact at participating agencies with a communications package to help them encourage individual participation in the survey, which includes sample messaging that the points of contact can use to get their staff to become familiar with PH WINS and respond to the with the survey link. Some of our staff do not have terminals (i.e., they do not have computers). How should we administer the survey to them? o Do these staff have addresses? This is probably a more involved conversation. Please contact Meghan. Can you provide us with response rates by unit/division within our health department? This will allow us to incentivize response through competition o We are exploring options to be able to provide response rates by unit/division. We will be able to provide the workforce champion with the overall department response rate.

4 What happens if employees are no longer with the department by the time the survey is sent? o We understand that there may be some turnover between submitting the staffing list and when the survey launches. We capture the bounce backs and do not factor them in to calculating the agency response rate. Why does the survey have to close at the same time for all departments? Agencies that participate in PH WINS receive a report that includes their agency data, as well as comparisons to all of the other BCHCs. In order to be able to provide those comparisons, the survey has to close at the same time for all agencies participating so that we have a complete BCHC data set in order to start analyzing the data and providing those comparisons in the agency reports. Survey Results and Reporting Are staff responses to the survey anonymous? o All responses to the survey are confidential. o The final dataset and reports will have no contact information from individual staff. o To ensure staff feel comfortable responding to questions on the survey, no individual responses to the survey will be shared back with the agency. o However, ASTHO will work with you and your leadership team to share results to support your workforce planning as appropriate/needed. This would include conducting unique analysis and sharing our aggregate findings. o We will also be sending you a customized PH WINS report in the spring of Will data be shared back with individual employees? o This is a frequent question and we are still working to identify whether this is feasible. We would like to accommodate this kind of reporting, but can t make a commitment at this time. How are the data used? o The data from PH WINS are used in a number of ways. Customized reports for each participating agency National reports By researchers By private funders to inform future workforce development efforts By the federal government to inform programmatic priorities and workforce funding Will you create an individualized slide deck in addition to reports? o This would be more useful for helping us brief internally and externally about our results. We can explore this suggestion, but cannot commit to it at this time. Will you be able to create a report that compares PHWINS results from 2014 and 2017 (for those depts. who have participated in both)? o We are exploring opportunities to compare 2014 results to 2017 for those departments that participated in 2014 in their agency report.

5 Will employee responses be separated by professional vs support staff? Our support staff are hired needing specific technical skills, but no experience in public health is required or expected. I am concerned that include them would skew our data, although the survey itself may be structured to account for that. Should all staff be included? What about administrative staff (those who don t do public health work)? o The majority of the survey is about worker engagement and demographics, and the training needs assessment is tiered to address some of these concerns. Additionally, we may be able provide analyses of select data for non-administrative/support staff. We are currently exploring options for reporting certain data in the agency-report, and will take this feedback into consideration for reporting more of the public health-specific data points. The spreadsheet asks for contract/permanent employees. If we include contract staff, will their data be separated from permanent staff or will all of it rolled up together? o For the agency reports, we will be reporting on all employees included in the staffing list, including contractors. If the agency does not want to include contractors they do not have to, or if they want some analyses that tease out contractors we can do that as well. Will you be able to exclude division/bureaus on the back end (i.e., after survey administration)? o Yes, we can do this after the fact. Other Who should questions from staff be directed towards? o Once the survey launches staff can contact phwins@astho.org. We are also going to set up a dedicated phone line before the survey launches that respondents can call. We will share this number ASAP.