Ensuring a Safe, Respectful Workplace Environment at Rutgers

First universitywide workplace climate survey leads to recommendations, actions

A survey of all employees in fall 2022 on workplace behaviors at Rutgers has prompted a series of recommendations and actions to make the university a better, more responsive, and more respectful place to work and learn.

Led by Rutgers Professor Sarah McMahon and her research team at the Center for Research on Ending Violence at the School of Social Work, and sponsored by the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, the Academic and Workplace Behaviors and Environment Survey (AWBES) has resulted in three key goals: to strengthen coordination of university prevention and response to harassment and incivility, increase and enhance resources and services, and promote a culture of respect.

“The report serves as a call to action to improve our response to and prevention of sexual harassment,” President Jonathan Holloway said. “The survey results make clear that although Rutgers has several resources in place, many employees still experience or witness harassment. These behaviors do not align with our vision of a supportive, welcoming community.”

About 17% (4,500) of the 26,200-plus faculty and staff invited to respond to the survey took part in the research. The results of the survey indicate that employees have experienced various forms of workplace incivility (17.3 % of respondents) and sexual harassment (12.6 %) in the year prior to the survey.

“Acts of incivility and harassment impact not only individuals, but the people they work with and the larger campus environment,” said McMahon, who was recently appointed special advisor to the president for sexual misconduct prevention and response. “These are issues that the whole community must address in a coordinated way and with evidence-informed strategies for both response and prevention.”

The final report and recommendations are available on the Your Voice, Our Rutgers website.

The AWBES research and report are among a series of climate surveys at Rutgers to assess the experiences of faculty, staff and students. These surveys are part of a more significant effort to use research-based methods to gather data that will inform efforts to improve the university’s prevention and response to harassment complaints and to create a safe and respectful environment.

Based on the survey results, several steps have been taken, including:

• A universitywide steering committee met during 2023-2024 to develop recommendations for action.
• Work groups within each chancellor-led unit will be convened to work over the next year to execute the recommendations.
• A president’s cabinet subgroup was created to establish guiding principles for this work and to review the university’s infrastructure for preventing and responding to sexual misconduct and other forms of interpersonal violence.
• McMahon, a nationally regarded researcher on interpersonal violence, was appointed as special advisor on sexual misconduct prevention and response, reporting directly to President Holloway, to oversee this initiative and other work in this area.

The university’s response also includes a plan to establish an associate vice president position within University Ethics and Compliance to play a key role in fostering a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment for all members of our community. This position will work closely with McMahon and the president’s office to ensure consistency and accountability in implementing the recommendations and meeting the university's responsibilities under Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and gender in any federally funded education program.

Rutgers has a tradition of engaging its expertise as a leading research university to make the world and the university better. In 2014, Rutgers launched its first student sexual violence survey – a pilot conducted for the White House and led by McMahon – which became a national model. The results of that survey helped Rutgers improve its educational, counseling and treatment services for students on every Rutgers campus.

To advance efforts to prevent and effectively respond to sexual harassment, Rutgers announced that the university joined with 39 other institutions and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to form an Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education. During the first year of the action collaborative’s work, Rutgers announced its commitment to administer a universitywide survey on sexual harassment to include all faculty, staff, postdoctoral associates, teaching assistants and graduate assistants at all chancellor-led units and the central administration.

The survey method used in the AWBES research is based on the validated Administrator-Researcher Campus Climate Collaborative (ARC3) Campus Climate Survey Instrument, consistent with recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2018 report on the sexual harassment of women, and on the best available science and validated measures.

“These measures ensured our research team’s ability to gather reliable data from employees in offices and units across Rutgers’ campuses while protecting participants’ identities through deidentified and aggregate data sets,” McMahon said.