The purpose of this assessment is to determine to what extent the college is demonstrating the newly adopted Core Values.
Assessing the College’s Core Values is essential to ensuring we are providing the best possible experience for our students and employees. By measuring how well our actions and culture reflect our stated values, we can determine the extent to which we are truly living our mission and aligning daily practices with institutional strategy. This assessment fosters transparency, strengthens decision-making, and builds trust across the College community. Moreover, it reinforces accountability for all stakeholders while modeling a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Through this assessment, the College seeks to:
- Live our Mission – Demonstrate alignment between values and everyday actions.
- Align Culture and Strategy – Ensure that institutional priorities and behaviors reflect shared values.
- Build Trust – Promote transparency and inclusion in how values are understood and practiced.
- Model Learning – Use feedback to improve and evolve as a learning organization.
- Demonstrate Accountability – Provide evidence of integrity and follow-through in upholding our Core Values.
The first method involves administering a campus pulse survey to assess the extent to which the College community believes EMCC is demonstrating its Core Values. The survey will include Likert-scale questions to capture general perceptions, as well as open-ended prompts inviting participants to describe specific examples or evidence that illustrate how the College has embodied each value. Respondents will have the opportunity to provide multiple examples for each Core Value. This method will be administered once during the fall 2025 semester and then readministered during the spring 2026 semester.
The second method, currently in development, is the Roary Values Certificate: Values in Action. This will be an online recognition form that allows individuals to select one or more Core Values and nominate a College employee who has exemplified those values. The nominator will briefly describe how the employee demonstrated the selected value(s). Upon submission, the system will automatically generate and email a personalized certificate to the employee. On the back end, Institutional Effectiveness (IE) will collect both quantitative and qualitative data from submissions to analyze trends and overall engagement with the College’s Core Values.
Survey results indicate that EMCC employees generally see the college as strongly student-centered and learning-focused. Across respondents, roughly 80% rated Agree or Strongly Agree that EMCC keeps students at the forefront of decision-making, provides meaningful learning experiences, and fosters an environment that supports growth. The average ratings for Student-Centered, Learning, and Well-Being fall between Strongly Agree and Agree on the five-point scale, reinforcing the narrative from open-ended comments that EMCC cares deeply about students and the quality of learning experiences.
At the same time, both the quantitative and qualitative data highlight Integrity as the values needing the most improvement of the four. While a majority of respondents still agree that EMCC demonstrates accountability, transparency, and honesty, only about 19% strongly agree, and roughly 15% disagree or strongly disagree. The relatively high proportion of Neutral responses suggests about 1 in 7 employees are unconvinced or uncertain about how transparently decisions are made. This aligns closely with open-ended feedback, which frequently referenced concerns about communication, perceived inequities across employee groups, and the alignment between stated values and actual institutional practices.
Well-being shows a similar pattern of nuance: employees appreciate the events, programming, and messaging around well-being and acknowledge many positive efforts (e.g., flexibility and mental health awareness). However, a meaningful number of respondents and open-end comments signal that workload, staffing, and burnout continue to challenge the reality of well-being on campus.
Taken together, the data suggest that EMCC’s core values are widely embraced in principle, especially around students and learning, and that many faculty and staff actively strive to instill these values in their work day-to-day. The greatest opportunities for improvement lie in making integrity and well-being more visible at the structural and decision-making level: improving transparency and communication around key decisions, addressing perceived inequities, and ensuring that policies, staffing, and workload models reflect the same commitments that are celebrated in communication and events.v
EMCC - OPIE in collaboration with the Shared Gov. Functional Council - POCE will implement a two-part assessment to evaluate how effectively the College is living its Core Values across the campus community. The first component, a Campus Pulse Survey, will measure community perceptions through both quantitative (Likert-scale) and qualitative (open-ended) responses to determine the extent to which the College demonstrates each Core Value. This method will be administered once during the fall 2025 semester and then readministered during the spring 2026 semester.
The second component, the Roary Values Certificate: Values in Action, will provide a recognition-based tool for employees to nominate colleagues who exemplify specific values through observable behaviors.
Together, these methods will generate both perceptual and behavioral data, offering a comprehensive view of how Core Values are experienced, demonstrated, and reinforced across the institution. Results will inform strategic planning, strengthen cultural alignment with the College’s mission, and enhance trust, accountability, and engagement among all stakeholders.