 I would now like to turn the conference over to Shanika Morris, Statistics Editorial Assistance Association of Research Libraries. Please go ahead. Thank you so much. I would just like to take a moment to welcome everyone to our webinar, the Introduction to Climate Qual Light. Thank you so much for joining us today. As mentioned, everyone is going to be muted to cut down on background noise, and of course, we welcome your questions. Just don't forget to type them in, and ARL staff will stand ready to answer them. And if time permits, we'll have a question and answer session at the end of the presentation. So just a brief agenda for our call today. I'm going to provide a brief introduction to Climate Qual, and then Dr. Paul Hanges is going to briefly discuss the theory and background of Climate Qual before sharing the findings of his analysis on the psychometric properties of Climate Qual Light. And in closing, I'll discuss the survey administration protocol and how we share the results of the survey with survey participants. So let's get started. So the Climate Qual assessment measures staff perceptions concerning the library's commitment to the principles of diversity. We share, it studies staff perceptions concerning organizational policies and procedures, and it also looks at staff attitudes. The goals of the Climate Qual project are to develop a tool that assesses the health of a library. With Climate Qual, we at ARL wanted to look at whether the policies and procedures and practices of the library are supporting the library's mission and facilitating meeting current and future customer needs. And so Climate Qual takes a snapshot of the library's internal climate at a specific point in time to get a sense of the health of the library's climate. And libraries, by participating in Climate Qual, can place their results in context by comparing their results to the anonymized normative data. And we also engage the Climate Qual community of current and past participants to create a forum where libraries can share experiences and intervention. Another aspect of Climate Qual that's enumerated in these goals is our desire to track changes in libraries over time. And so doing the Climate Qual data are therefore longitudinal so that we can analyze the effectiveness of the interventions over time. And at the end of the day, Climate Qual helps libraries empirically validate the library's climate for diversity and the resulting data allow libraries to validate the healthy organization theory. And so here's a screenshot of the Climate Qual website. And you can go to that website to find out a lot of information about the survey. And our FAQs are quite extensive because we know that people have a lot of questions before they decide to administer the survey. We do have a lot of information on the website. However, the survey itself is not publicly available and the survey is not distributed in advance of the survey administration. And this is done to guard against response bias as knowing the questions in advance will affect participants' answers at the time of surveying. However, if you do want to see a little preview of some of the questions that are included in each scale, we do have two sample questions per scale on the website, and we also provide in-depth descriptions of each of the scales of the survey. Now I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Paul Hanges, who will be discussing a little bit about the theory and background of Climate Qual and then also discuss some of the statistical properties of Climate Qual Light. Go ahead, Paul. Thank you, Shanika. Well, good afternoon, everybody. I'm Paul Hanges. I am a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Maryland in College Park. I am part of the group in the psychology department known as SDOS, or Social Decision and Organizational Sciences. And I've been working with ARL for a while now as we're developing and improving the Climate Qual survey. Unlike other diversity surveys that are out there, the Climate Qual is actually based upon a theory that we developed trying to explain how some organizations are healthy and how other organizations have certain problems. I'll define what I mean by healthy in a little bit, but the main idea with regard to Climate Qual is it measures various climates of organizations trying to determine if they have the right atmosphere, if you will, to facilitate the organization meeting the needs, the current needs, as well as the future needs of its customers. Now, on the slide ahead, we have a definition of what organizational climate is. It's an interpretive framework shared by employees regarding the priorities of their organizations, and it helps them understand what behavior of the employees will be rewarded, what behavior is supported by the organization, and what behavior is expected in the organization. This particular definition of organizational climate was made by Ben Schneider, and I cite his 1990 chapter where he talks about what organizational climate is. And the reason why it's important is, as you see in the definition, organizational climate, when it's clear and sends a strong message, tells people what they need to be doing, and if they do that behavior, the organization will be behind them and reward them for their efforts. And what we found is that, sure enough, when an organization has a clear and consistent message, as emphasized by organizational climate, the organization can be shown to outperform its competitors. So organizations that actually have a climate for productivity actually produce more and are more competitive than their other organizations producing the same product that have a lower climate for productivity. In hospitals, hospitals that have a climate for safety actually have fewer patient accidents and a lower patient death rate than hospitals that do not have a climate for safety. In our particular case, we identified various climates that organizations need in order to be maximum on satisfying customers in terms of what the customers need in terms of library resources, the kinds of methodology they want to use to access these resources, both in terms of their current needs and anticipating what their needs will be in the future. Now, we get information about organizational climate from actual employees. And so the question comes about is, like, where do these employees derive their organizational perceptions? And it turns out that we get these perceptions because, well, first of all, we're human and we always are trying to make sense of our environments. And it's a natural tendency of humans to talk to each other and try to understand their environment. Well, in organizations, one of the big factors that determine environments are in organizations policies, practices, and procedures. And so employees talk to each other to try to understand what are the messages being sent in terms of a particular policy, a particular practice, and a particular procedure that's endorsed and actually enforced in an organization. It's from this sense-making that employees then understand if they do a certain behavior, then the organization will reward them, support them, and indeed that behavior is expected by the organization. ClimateQual collects information about important organizational climates. It also collects information about organizational attitudes because these attitudes reflect the various states of the workforce in terms of its morale. So we're not just looking at, does the organization have the right climate to be in tune with its customers, but we're also looking to see what is the current health of the organization in terms of the workforce morale. So we actually get at information in two kinds of sources. One is from climate information, which tells us about do we have the right things to help customers, but also in terms of workforce morale to understand is this a healthy organization that can persist in producing customer satisfaction. All right, now I've been talking about health of organizations and organizational climate. The question comes like, what is a healthy organization? What do we mean by that? Well, that's a theory that we developed basically back in 2004-2005 where we took some of the work dealing with the life cycle of organizations, and organizations actually do have a life cycle. They have a childhood where they're growing and developing. They have an adulthood where the organization meets its demands and continues to operate in a functional manner. And then some organizations experience the death cycle, in which case they are losing employees, losing resources, and can't meet the new demands of their customers. And like companies such as GM, who was saved by the federal government, but otherwise would have died, organizations can indeed be eliminated, and we no longer see them. A healthy organization is one that actually maintains its part in the adult cycle. And how does an organization maintain its experience as an adult cycle? It remains responsive to its environment. So a healthy organization is one that's responsive to its environment. It picks up what its customers want, customers in terms of faculty, undergraduate or graduate students, what kind of resources, what kind of content areas they want, how they want to gain this information, either in physical buildings and having hard copies or through electronic sources, as well as trying to anticipate the future needs of the customers so that the organization can start building certain content over the time. This cycle that we have shown here in this figure is what's called the Attraction Selection Nutrition Cycle, also known as the ASA cycle, and it explains how organizational climate comes about. You see, we have the general population over to the left of the figure, and that indicates that in general, individuals that are part of the population are widely diverse. They're diverse in terms of their skills and abilities, they're diverse in terms of their interests and values and in their beliefs. Now, we have the organization who actually has a particular need for new employees to come into the organization. And what we see is that from the grand population, only certain types of people are attracted to work in the library. So there's actually what's called a non-random sampling of people from the population. Those people who apply for jobs in libraries actually have a reduced diversity in terms of skills and abilities. Clearly, they trained to be effective workers in libraries. They have a reduced set of values. It's restricted in terms of diversity. It's restricted in terms of interests. That's a natural consequence. And basically the non-random selection occurs because the individuals applying for the job are interested in the content of the job as well as the personality or climate of the organization. The organization doesn't take everyone who applies to it. It actually does a selection process, trying to identify those individuals that appropriately fit into the library. Consequence of this, of course, is a further reduction in the diversity of values, beliefs, personality, et cetera. And finally, over time, certain individuals leave the organization. Either they aren't working out and so they involuntarily leave, or they discover that they want to go elsewhere and try new organizations. So what we're left with as a result of the attrition process is that we have employees working at the library who are increasingly similar over time as we go on to attraction, selection, and attrition. Now, there's a positive aspect of this cycle in that it actually creates and reinforces organizational climate, which is what we talked about before. Organizational climate affects productivity, and it affects and enables people to know how to behave in organizations and when they'll be rewarded for behaving a certain way. The downside is that the attraction, selection, and attrition cycle increasingly reduces diversity over time. And what happens is if the organization reduces diversity too much, then we have found it no longer pays attention to its environment. It starts to just listen to the internal voices about how the library should perform and disconnects from what the faculty or the students are saying, its customer base. And it's this disconnection that we find is when organizations move into the death spiral. So the key here with climate quality is to measure particular climates which slow down the attraction, selection, and attrition cycle so that we don't go into the period where the organization is no longer responsive. And here's a set of climate dimensions that are needed in order to slow down ASA. And this is indeed what is measured in climate quality in the long-form version. There are nine climate scales. First, we have climate for deep diversity, as well as, second to the last one, climate for demographic diversity. What these do is they basically tell individuals who are applying for the job and who are selected in the job that diversity is an important value in this organization and it has been shown to increase a diverse workforce and effective at attracting diverse workforce, which is very important to slow down the ASA cycle. Now, another particular climate that's important that's measured in climate call is the climate for justice. This is important because once people are in the organization, people from diverse backgrounds, the climate for justice enables the individuals to want to stay in the organization. It's not enough to just attract them, we have to keep them in the organization. Climate for psychological safety, the second one, is important because when people feel relatively psychologically safe, they take risks. And we have the individual who is willing to speak up in a meeting and to share an uncommon point of view. And so the climate for psychological diversity increases the likelihood that the organization will hear diverse points of view. Finally, while we also have the climate for innovation and the climate for continual learning, which determines the extent to which the organization can capitalize on learning about these diverse points of view and actually take action and change. In addition to this, we assess climate for leadership, which is extremely important for creating these kinds of climates, and climate for teamwork as well. We finally, in the long form of climate call, collect information about climate for customer service because that's a direct measure of the extent to which the organization is trying to pay attention to what customers want. So those are the climate scales that are collected in the long form. In addition, the long form of climate call actually also collects the employee morale information or what's called attitude surveys. How engaged are people at the library? How committed are they? Do they exhibit organizational citizenship behaviors? In other words, this is the team playing aspect. Are they willing to help out their fellow coworkers when their coworkers are overwhelmed but they have their jobs in hand? So do they pitch in? We also look at organizational withdrawal tendencies. Are people thinking about leaving the organization? We collect job satisfaction, team empowerment in the workplace, and work-unit conflict. All these attitudes basically look at the overall morale or health from the employee's perspective. Now we have had climate call the long form since 2007 and have applied it in lots of libraries since that time. We are now rolling out a short version of climate call called Climate Call Light. And this version basically focuses on the key components of the theory. It says, okay, we want to get a quick assessment of how well the organization is doing in terms of being responsive to its employees. So one of the key things about climate call light is it decreases completion time, the time required for your employees to complete it. We've actually run this in a couple of libraries now in our pilot work with several libraries and we found that the median response time taken to complete climate call light is 13 minutes. In addition, the time saving produced by climate call light does not hurt the quality of the data that we collect. It's still as reliable. You can still use the actual normative base that we have created over time using the full version of climate call. But yet with climate call light, you have access to all this information that has been built up over the time, this excellent normative information, while also reducing time to completion. Climate call light allows institutions, if they use it, to still get a good understanding of how the library is doing with regard to the major components of this healthy organization theory. Now in terms of the statistical properties of climate call and looking at what is the quality of the scales that we've developed, first of all these are, like I said, these are based on theory and so it's not just a collection of random items or scales that have been used by other individuals. We are basing it on a theory and have identified measures that actually test these factors. We have assessed the quality of the scales and we actually have administered climate call full version as well as climate call light through a total of 53 libraries. The majority came from the United States but we also started looking at cross-cultural work where we actually had four libraries coming from England and two from Canada. First thing we wanted to do is see whether the questions that are being used in climate call do they actually hang together so that when we say, well, we have a climate for diversity, is that meaningful? Are the questions that were designed to assess diversity do they basically give information so that you can be confident about the information? The answer, by the way, is yes. Through procedure known as factor analysis we have evidence from the 53 libraries that our scales really do give information about these themes. We also looked at the reliability of this information and we used a technique known as crumbox alpha and the reliability are extremely high. Finally, we used the statistic known as an interclass correlation coefficient, what's called an ICC. The purpose of this is to really determine the extent to which we're assessing organizational climate. If we are, these perceptions should be shared by people in organizations and the ICC is a statistic that determines how shared are the perceptions within a library. If everyone has different perceptions then we're not really measuring a climate. So we need the ICC to be greater than zero. Here are some of the properties that we found from climate quality. First of all, in terms of factor analysis you'll see that all the scales substantially exceeded the required cutoff of 0.40 that's basically looking at how each item is related to the overall theme. Basically, our scales are working. Our questions give us meaningful information about our measures. The internal consistency reliability, are we accurate with coming up with this information? The answer is yes. And in terms of scientific standards our reliability's are very nice, extremely better than the minimum professional level. In terms of aggregatability, the extent to which do people in libraries share this meaning, share their understanding. You see with regards to the ICCs the average in the field is 0.08. We do exceptionally better. Our average acceptable aggregation is at the 22 level. It's above what's traditionally found in the literature. Therefore, we have evidence that the climate quality light measures are providing the correct information in terms of the themes. They are reliable and accurate information with regard to the themes and indeed evidence that we are measuring climate. On the next slide, we have the conclusions. Climate quality light has desirable psychometric properties. It measures organizational climate and not individual perceptions. These conclusions apply to both versions, the light version and the full version. Here's a slide which actually shows the differences in terms of what's measured in the full version versus the climate quality light version. What I showed you before were all the climates that were measured in the full version. Here, what's bolded are what's measured in the light version. You see these are the central components that are part of the organizational health theory. Notice we are including what I was referring to before is we are looking at both deep diversity and surface, so what's called demographic diversity. The attraction selection attrition model is really concerned about both these types of diversities. On the next page, we look at the attitude measure, and here you really see the difference in terms of climate quality light. It's not designed to measure the employee morale, except for job satisfaction, which is one of the major variables in organizational psychology, and that particular variable is very substantial and really tells it's a good quick summary of organizational morale. Overall though, you have the information that's needed to know how well your organization is doing with regard to the service quality. In order to get further sample questions about climate quality, you can go to the website that's shown on the screen, and you'll see some of the various sample questions. By the way, before I go, I just want to say that we have completed our analyses of the climate quality light in the test of the theory of the healthy organization. We have had substantial support for the model, and we have just recently submitted a paper to the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology Conference, and I'm going to make that available to ClimateQual on its website later today. Wonderful. Thanks so much, Paul. That'll be really great to have that in our publications database on the website. Thank you so much for sharing these wonderful properties of climate quality light. I'll just take about a minute or two to discuss how we administer the survey and how we share the results with participants. This is Shanika again. Really quickly, this slide just summarizes the difference between the long form and the light form of ClimateQual, and the take-home message is that basically, ClimateQual light contains approximately 50% fewer questions, and our data at this point show that the response time, the medium response time, is cut almost in half when you administer ClimateQual light. This is without compromising the integrity of the data that you receive, which is pretty great. If you decide to administer ClimateQual, whether it's the long form or the light form, the survey looks at the library as a whole, and it also asks questions about respondents' individual team and work unit. The light form has the comment box at the end of the survey where respondents can write comments about the library's climate that's present in the long and the light form, and libraries need to be large enough to run the study and preserve the confidentiality of the respondents, and so we ask that participants survey at least 50 part-time or full-time employees, possibly including student workers, so that means that your library needs to have at least 50 part-time or full-time employees, possibly including student workers to run ClimateQual so that the confidentiality of your respondents of your staff is preserved when running the survey. The survey is web-based and is administered within the STATSQAL platform, which was developed by ARL, and you should allow staff 10 to 20 minutes to complete the survey. As Paul mentioned, our approximate survey response time is 13 minutes, and the survey typically lasts for three weeks. As I mentioned a little while ago, respondent confidentiality is of paramount concern given the sensitive nature of the questions and responses on the survey, and so while we don't provide institutions with access to the raw data, we do provide an overview report that analyzes the mean scores on each scale by demographic group, but data are not reported for groups that have too few responses, and the report contains comments from the participants. We do share those comments verbatim, but at the beginning of the survey, we let participants know upfront that we will be sharing their comments and we encourage them not to self-identify when they write their comments. So we disclose that upfront, and we have a number of ways that allow participating libraries to put their results in context. First, participating institutions can compare their results to the normative data, which have been updated through 2013, and participating institutions also are invited to a results review phone call with ARL staff. So that we can go over the report with you, and we also have a series of quarterly ClimateQual calls, which are a closed forum, so current and past participants only, and this forum is where libraries can share their experiences and the interventions that they've implemented in order to improve the library's climate. So we ask that you join us for ClimateQual. We're currently enrolling institutions for the remainder of 2014 and 2015, and if you're interested in running the survey, please email us at climatequal.org. We'd love to have you as a part of the ClimateQual family, and if you still have questions about the survey, the next two slides show resources for ClimateQual, and I'll just click through those quickly. We have our informational video that features the wonderfully engaging Dr. Paul Hanses, who spoke with you a little bit earlier in the call. We have our publications database, which is publicly available. You can go on and search and read publications about ClimateQual, and we'll put Paul's paper that he submitted to the conference in the publications database, and then if you do become a participant in the survey, you will have access to our shared workspace login, which has even more resources for survey participants. Next slide has a few more resources, and for those of you who've run LiveQual at your institutions, please take a look at Stephen Town's presentation in the database that looks at ClimateQual and LiveQual at his library. So thank you all so much for joining us for this presentation about ClimateQual Lite. We have about eight minutes before one o'clock, and so we'd love to take some of your questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to register for a question, please press the 1 followed by the 4 on your telephone. You will hear a 3. Don't prompt to acknowledge your request. If your question has been answered and you'd like to try your registration, please press the 1 followed by the 3. You may also submit a question using the chat feature located in the lower left corner of your screen. One moment for the first question. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you'd like to register a question over the phone, please press the 1 followed by the 4. We have no phone questions at this time. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much. I wanted to just double check and see if there are any final comments before we bring the webcast to a close. Okay. Well, thank you all so much for joining us today. Again, if you have more questions about ClimateQual Lite or the long version of the survey, you can email us at climatequalatarl.org. We look forward to hearing from you. And thank you so much for joining us. Everyone have a great day. Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude the webinar for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your lines.