Results Overview

Spring 2022

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You and your lab members recently completed a survey of perceptions of your lab environment before your lab participated in the Labs That Work for Everyone (LTW) program and as part of HHMI’s overall DEI goals focusing on building “a diverse scientific workforce through recruitment, professional development, community, and healthy work environments.” The survey instrument provides a snapshot, at one particular time, of your lab’s working climate including perceptions of lab leadership as a strong influencer of the quality of the environment. Its goal is to provide you with data supporting a process of understanding and strengthening your lab’s working climate, as well as to contribute to the evaluation of the LTW and other HHMI programs focusing on scientific culture and leadership.

As you review your lab’s data, we encourage you to:

• Celebrate the positive. Find and appreciate all the areas in which your lab reports positive perceptions and experiences. Understanding what and where your lab is already strong establishes an important foundation for being strategic in considering the areas you might wish to build upon. Do not let the human impulse to focus on the negative undermine the strengths present in your lab.

• Use the data as a tool. The data do not have the answers about why one measure is lower than another. The point is to start a deliberate conversation on why members of your lab have a perception, if that perception is that something can stand to be improved, and how that can be approached through intentional development. The data can be used to pivot towards growth through conscious reflection and meaningful dialogue.

• The goal is data to support growth. We hope these data support you in sustaining a culture of excellence in which every member of your group is able to work at their highest levels of productivity and creativity. While it can be tempting to compare your lab to others, these results are primarily information for you to consider and support building on the positives your lab already demonstrates.

• Reflect on opportunities for improvement. If this snapshot shows a score below your aspirations on one or more scales, we encourage you to reflect before seeking to explain away the results.

• Seek shared community standards. Approach conversations about changing group behavior as you would with building shared community standards.

Understanding the Results

The primary goal of this report is to demonstrate aspects of interpersonal working climate in which your lab excels, and to reveal areas that might benefit from thoughtful attention. Organizational climate and lab leadership skills do not change overnight--change requires active engagement from both the lab leader and lab members. We will present resources available that can support such engagement. Please see the "about" tab to learn more about how to read and interpret the results.