FAQs

The study is targeted to full-time, non-academic staff at UC Berkeley. Other staff members, faculty, and students will not have an opportunity to participate in this study. In addition, a set of individuals who have been identified by Campus Privacy, Berkeley IT, or People & Culture leaders as being engaged in sensitive or legal communications will not be eligible to participate. Finally, staff who do not have an @berkeley.edu email account will not be able to participate given that the study involves an analysis of email communication networks.

Eligible staff (as indicated above) will have two opportunities to indicate how they wish to be involved in the study. First, they will have the option to opt out of the first phase of the study, which involves an analysis of the aggregate staff communication network at UC Berkeley. Only the eligible staff who do not opt out of this first phase will later be asked if they wish to opt into the professional development experience associated with this study. Participation in the research study associated with this professional development experience is voluntary.

The study is limited to those with @berkeley.edu email access, which allows the researchers to study social networks as reflected in internal email communications. Thus, staff members who do not have such email access will not be able to participate. The researchers are hopeful that learnings from this study will yield insights that might still be applied to staff who do not have @berkeley.edu email accounts; however, it is currently unclear what those insights might be.

The study is being led by Jennifer Chatman and Sameer Srivastava, professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who co-founded and co-direct the Berkeley Culture Center. They are working in close coordination with campus officials including the campus Privacy Officer, Berkeley IT, the Office for the Protection of Human Subjects, and People & Culture.

Overall, the total time commitment for staff who participate in the study will be a little over two hours over the course of two to three weeks. In return, we believe staff will get access to a meaningful learning and development experience with their peers. Staff who decide to participate will be asked to:

• Spend ~30 minutes over the course of a week to review and summarize a learning and development content module from the Harvard ManageMentor learning and development platform;
• Attend the following week a ~90 minute facilitated “peer learning circle,” which will be conducted via Zoom, about the different content modules; and
• Take a ~5 minute survey approximately 3 months after their participation in the learning circle.

Staff who decide to participate in the study can benefit in at least three concrete ways.

• Two Months of Free Access to Harvard ManageMentor – Participants will have the option to opt-in to access this online learning and development platform that covers such topics as effective project management, having difficult conversations with colleagues, time management, and long-term career planning. Participants will need to create an account with ManageMentor to access this content. The research team will not have access to any information about participants’ activity on the platform.
• Peer Engagement – Participants will have an opportunity to engage in a facilitated interaction with peers designed to help them cement their understanding of these content areas.
• Build Campus Network – Through this experience, participants will have an opportunity to connect and build substantive relationships with colleagues they do not already know in the organization. We hope that this experience will, in turn, help participants become better integrated into the organization and support their career development objectives.

The impact and benefit to campus is that we hope findings from the research study will help UC Berkeley identify specific, evidence-based practices that will help all employees feel more included, appreciated, and valued in the organization.

Yes, you will first have an opportunity to opt out of Phase 1 of the study, which involves collecting and analyzing de-identified email metadata (described in further detail below) of staff-to-staff communications. If you do not opt out of Phase 1 and are eligible for the study (per the criteria noted above), your de-identified email metadata will be included in the study. Those individuals will also have an opportunity to opt into Phase 2 of the study, which involves participating in a professional development experience with campus peers. If you are a staff member who wants to opt out of participating in the study, please fill out this form by Oct. 6, 2023.

Because this study involves understanding social networks, UC Berkeley has agreed to share with the research team four months of “de-identified” email metadata (i.e., records without names or email addresses of who sent a message to whom and when) and some data about our staff composition (e.g., campus department and demographic information such as race/gender) for eligible staff (see criteria above) who do not opt out of Phase 1.

The “de-identified” email metadata will include messages sent to and from all full-time, non-academic staff on campus over the four-month period leading up to the professional development experience that is a core component of this study. Email addresses will be hashed (transformed into an unrecognizable code), and only hashed to and from email addresses, and the message timestamp will be shared with the researchers. Any other message data such as subject line, the content of the email, and any attachments will not be accessed by anyone and will not be part of the metadata at any time. Following the professional development experience, the same data set for a new time period will be shared with the research team for the four-month period following the professional development experience. This will enable researchers to understand how participation in the professional development experience might have influenced participants’ social networks.

The figure below illustrates how Berkeley IT will provide hashed email metadata, anonymized before sharing with the research team for further analysis. As you will see in the figure below, researchers will not have access to any message content, email addresses, or identifying information about campus staff. Neither the researchers nor Berkeley IT staff will have access to staff members’ actual email messages as part of this procedure.A similar process will be followed by People & Culture staff to de-identify the HR data that will be used for this study: demographic information such as gender and race, as well as department affiliation. To ensure that these data are not inadvertently identifiable given that some departments are small and have only a few people in a given demographic category, the department affiliation field will be removed for any department in which there are fewer than 10 individuals in a demographic “cell.” For example, if there are fewer than 10 Asian females in a department, no department information will be provided for these individuals.

The main alternative to using de-identified email metadata would be to implement a network survey using a so-called “roster method.” In such a survey, staff are presented with a roster of all other staff in the university and are then asked to indicate from whom they have obtained information, advice, mentorship, and so on. Given the number of staff at UC Berkeley, such a survey would take a very long time (up to an hour or longer) to complete. To yield reliable network measures, such surveys also need to have very high response rates. To avoid placing an undue burden on staff and encourage participation from as wide a range of staff as possible, we therefore opted to use an unobtrusive method (i.e., de-identified email metadata) to assess the workplace communication network.

We want to ensure you are fully informed about the privacy considerations, the great promise of the survey, and your opportunity to opt out. As noted above, eligible staff will have the opportunity to opt out of Phase 1 of the study and will separately have to choose to opt into Phase 2, which involves a learning and development opportunity. Across all phases, safeguards will be in place at all times to protect employee privacy and university confidentiality.

• The study’s procedures and interventions are rigorously reviewed and approved by Institutional Review Boards (e.g., the UC Berkeley Office for the Protection of Human Subjects), which protects the rights of participants and participating organizations.
• Any and all data collected will be:
  • De-identified at the employee- and organization-level;
  • Stored on secure servers.
• Any and all data reported will be in aggregate from across all employees and organizations recruited.
• Departmental affiliation data will be removed if there are fewer than 10 employees in a given demographic “cell” (e.g., if there are fewer than 10 Asian females in a department, no department information will be provided for these individuals).
• UC Berkeley will be provided with a report of study findings. Findings will be presented in the aggregate, and it will not be possible to determine which staff did or did not participate.

Any staff members who would prefer not to have their data included in the study, can opt out by Oct. 6, 2023.

The figure below illustrates how Berkeley IT will provide hashed email metadata, anonymized before sharing with the research team for further analysis. As you will see in the figure below, researchers will not have access to any message content, email addresses, or identifying information about campus staff. Neither the researchers nor Berkeley IT staff will have access to staff members’ actual email messages as part of this procedure.

As noted above, individuals engaged in sensitive communications or legal matters are not eligible to participate. Thus, communications involving, for example, the Office of Legal Affairs and the PATH to Care Center will be excluded from the analyses.

This study will begin in October 2023 and continue through spring 2024. Here is the estimated timeline and process for the study (subject to change):

• Sept. 21, 2023: Staff informed about the research study and given an opportunity to opt out or opt in.
• Oct. 6, 2023: Deadline for staff to indicate whether they want to opt out.
• October-November 2023: Data gathering following Office for the Protection of Human Subjects (OPHS) and Chief Privacy Officer approved methodology. Professional development experience through Harvard ManageMentor for staff who choose to participate in the study.
• January-March 2024: Brief survey sent to staff who participate in study.
• November 2023-March 2024: Network analysis of de-identified email metadata for staff who do not opt out of the study.
• Summer-Early Fall 2024: Share results of findings with campus community.