Supporting Statement

OMB Control #0693-0033

Expiration Date: 09/30/2025

INSERT THE TITLE OF YOUR COLLECTION

Communications Technology Laboratory Employee Feedback Survey

FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

The Communication Technology Laboratory (CTL) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) intends to provide a survey to all of the CTL staff for their input and feedback to laboratory leadership. Currently there are a total of 305 staff members in CTL which encompass both federal and non-federal employees. This PRA submission is seeking approval for the survey of non-federal employees (n=171).

Last fiscal year the NIST Communications Technology Laboratory (CTL) underwent a major reorganization merging 4 different technical groups within NIST into a new CTL organization. CTL leadership followed best practices for the planning and implementation of the reorganization including a SWOT analysis, engaging staff at all levels and continual communication. The purpose of this survey is to continue best practices and provide CTL staff an opportunity to provide leadership with feedback and input on the performance and effectiveness of the management of the new laboratory over the past year. The input and feedback will assist leadership as they re-examine and develop strategic goals and initiatives for the future.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties, pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

The survey questions were developed and refined based on a review of the literature on engaging employees after reorganizations as well as discussions with survey methodologists. The survey was reviewed by 3 staff members and 2 survey experts to ensure the language and questions were technically accurate and tailored for the study population. Questions were further refined based on a cognitive walk-through with two staff members and pilots with 2 staff members.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

All CTL staff will receive an email invitation with a link to the survey instrument and a request to participate. The link will be active for four weeks. After two weeks a follow up reminder email will be sent. Supplementary documents (the invitation email and the reminder email) have been provided. The expected response rate is 30% or approximately 100 responses.

All of the data is both collected and stored without identifiers. Although, the survey instrument does include limited demographic information, all data is automatically assigned a reference code by the survey software and anonymized and no identifiers are stored. Although demographic information is collected, data will not be stored in a System of Records which retrieves by a personal identifier. Therefore, Privacy Act is not triggered

171 respondents * 15 minutes / 60 = 43 burden hours.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.

Data analysis will be conducted by NIST researchers. Descriptive statistics will be computed for each survey item.

All demographic data will be aggregated to prevent identification of respondents. Any demographic category with fewer than 5 respondents will not be included in the analysis.

For the open-ended items, we intend to use the qualitative data analysis technique of grounded theory to conduct data coding and analysis to create a list of participant’s comments, perceptions, and concerns about the organization.

The intent is not to generalize to the entire population, but rather to inform CTL leadership on current perceptions of practices as they prepare for the future.