Employee Assembly Meeting
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
12:15 - 2 pm
G08 Uris Hall
MINUTES

I. Call to Order

T. Grove called the meeting to order at 12:21 p.m.

II. Call for Late Additions to the Agenda

There was one late addition to the minutes. B. McKinney added discussion on the EA & EET election ballot.

III. Approval of Minutes from last meeting

L. Morris made a motion to approve the minutes. L. Meyerhoff seconded the motion. The EA members voted to approve the minutes from December 7, 2011.

IV. Business of the Day

a) Retreat or not?

T. Grove said there will be many absences for the retreat on Jan. 4th - and wanted to ask if they should go ahead or reschedule? It was agreed the retreat would go ahead as scheduled.

b) Q & A w/ President Skorton and VP Opperman

D. Skorton told the group about having three days to prepare for the NYC Tech campus announcement. He explained costs are taken care of (capital & operating) with the 350 million dollar gift.

T. Grove asked the President if he thought there were any surprises on the employee engagement survey and also his thoughts on the results. D. Skorton said he was glad it was done and commented that it was the best response rate ever and added that staff, on the whole, feel good about working here.

M. Opperman said M. Clarkberg is preparing the statistical data and the comments now for each dean plus doing comparison to the whole survey. The results will have all specific information removed. The idea is to build in areas that do not have high satisfaction levels as well as learn from those that do. She added the issues that came up were expected; work load, lack of pay raises, and increasing costs for insurance, parking, etc. are making staff feel as though they are going backward. There were many positives, some negatives-some comments were even personal and mean. M. Opperman noted the timeline to have this ready is February. They will then have a leadership meeting so everyone gets the same message. L. Meyerhoff said she is glad to hear the Deans and Directors are eager to get their info.

M. Opperman then said it was important to note that happiness is not tied to satisfaction, but to whether or not someone would recommend working at CU to others. C. Ferguson asked if there were any notable racial differences. M. Opperman said the minority and gender info has not been extracted yet.

President Skorton said the results will be taken seriously due to the very high response rate. M. Opperman said there was only one unit that had a response rate of less than 50%. They will be comparing unit to unit, but there are around 500 units of 10 people or more. C. Ferguson thanked the President and Vice President for their work and encouraged them to conduct the survey again in five years to compare the results. They agreed that would be the ideal.

B. McKinney thanked D. Skorton and M. Opperman for their efforts and for reading the comments despite some of them being difficult. D. Brooks asked whether the unit with low response rate was a unit with an access issue? It wasn’t. L. Morris wondered how we compare to other universities with our results. M. Opperman said the staff and faculty results were virtually the same, but compared with outside Cornell, the results were way better than in the corporate sector. Not many universities do staff surveys, and even fewer are willing to share the results of their surveys. D. Skorton said it was good to have M. Opperman and M. Clarkberg working on the results due to the fact they each bring a different skill set to the table.

T. Grove then asked what the follow up communication would be. Tommy Bruce is working on it, but the steps to communicate results are still undetermined. T. Grove said even being able to communicate that it is being thought about and worked on is a good answer. J. Boodley Buchanan said we wouldn’t want staff to think it has been lost or dropped due to all the attention being paid to the NYC Tech campus project.

D. Brooks said it says a lot about Cornell to do the survey, it could boost morale just by itself knowing the university cares enough to ask. He then asked what the next steps would be for the NYC Tech campus. D. Skorton said M. Opperman will be talking and advising the groups who are most affected. They are planning a Town Hall meeting in the spring. The hospital was planning to close and move before this project was planned, but there will still be some logistics involved. There will also be more communication around campus about the project. They are presently trying to figure out how to reduce a 500-page document to a reasonably brief summary. D. Skorton said if anyone is interested in learning more, the mayor’s press release has very good information. Their first and biggest challenge will be enrolling students to begin studying there one year from now in the fall of 2013. It will be grad students only, and likely a leased space and not on Roosevelt Island. D. Skorton noted that Charles Feeney had given $620 million previous to this most recent gift of $350 million for the Tech campus. He has also invested heavily in Ireland and many believe he has saved Ireland’s economy.

In other news, the President co-chairs the Southern Tier Regional Economic Development Council and they have been awarded $49.4 million from Governor Cuomo. This is amazing since we are the third smallest region, so this is really an amount to be proud of. Much of the funding will benefit Cornell. M. Opperman said they were careful not to comment on fracking since Cornell doesn’t own much land in the Marcellus shale, but more in the Utica shale.

V. Old Business

There were no New Business items discussed.

VI. New Business

L. Morris said the employee representatives on the TNC have met to discuss this years’ election. They would like to coordinate and have the Employee Assembly election and the Employee Elected Trustee on the same ballot. L. Morris moved to do so. B. Cristelli seconded. The members voted approval. The only question remaining was whether or not to do paper ballots. There were 500 paper ballots handed in for the staff survey, so should we plan to do the same for our elections? There was a brief discussion on how to do paper ballots and who should receive them. T. Grove suggested, and it was agreed by the members, they discuss further at the retreat.

VII. Open Forum

There was no Open Forum.

VIII. Adjournment

B. Schaffner made a motion to adjourn. C. Ferguson seconded and the EA adjourned at 1:32 p.m.