The following questions were received during the Q&A session with Rose Pascarell, executive vice president and chief of staff, during the October 2026 General Meeting. Due to time constraints, these questions were not answered live, but written responses have been provided by the Chief of Staff’s office.
Now that the university-wide Gallup survey results have been shared, what do you see as the highlights as well as the most pressing issues? How can the Staff Senate support efforts to improve the staff experience?
HR’s approach to working and supporting units based on Experience Survey results has greatly expanded. Since the 2026 Faculty and Staff Experience Survey results were released, HR’s focus has been on helping units turn their results into conversations and action. So far that has meant 382 individual support actions across the university.
To date, 43% of those actions have been one-on-one meetings with supervisors to walk through their team’s results and talk about where to start, and HR has also delivered 29 presentations to units and leadership groups. HR has been focused on supervisors because the results point there. George Mason’s strongest drivers of engagement center on the day-to-day experience with a supervisor: feeling supported, trusted, respected, and developed. Supervisor care is one of the university’s clear strengths, and teams whose managers entered action plans after the last survey saw their engagement grow twice as much as those that didn’t.
Highlights and pressing issues: The overall picture is really encouraging. Forty-four percent of faculty and staff are now engaged, up from 39% in 2024, and George Mason is in the 40th percentile among R1 institutions. Overall satisfaction, connection to the mission, and having someone who encourages your development all improved. And we want to continue to improve. The pressing issues surround the need for all supervisors to access their data, review thoroughly, share with their teams, consult with Human Resources for support, and submit an action plan goal.
How the Staff Senate can help: The most useful thing Senators can do is keep these conversations going at the team level. Encourage colleagues to ask their supervisors to share and discuss their results, and to take part in choosing one or two priorities for the year. Senators can also help spread the word about an important date: supervisors who have team data in Gallup Access are asked to submit their action plans by December 18. Any additional questions or requests for support can be sent to [email protected]. Supervisors can book appointments directly with HR here: https://tinyurl.com/fse2026survey
How do you balance the silos you mention, which foster independence, and the increasing needs to centralize to create simplified and consistent experiences?
Great question – and this is the challenge and opportunity in an organization that is as large as Mason, but we owe it to our students (and our own well-being) to thin the lines between divisions and work even more collaboratively and communicate more effectively so that we are not duplicating services, creating unnecessary steps in our processes, or unintentionally providing different answers to the same questions. One of the things I appreciate about working at Mason is that our bureaucratic structures are not privileged over the necessary need to sometimes interrupt and/or shift our processes in the moments that it’s clear that they are not working in the best interests of our students.
From your experience with UL during the reorganization and realignment, how did you approach situations where positions or responsibilities evolved as part of the changes?
In situations where positions or responsibilities evolved there was conversation between staff, supervisors and other UL senior leaders to discuss rationale, capacity, concerns/questions, and when appropriate, compensation adjustments.
I’m particularly interested in how you made sure unit leads were accountable for communicating those changes clearly and involving staff when there were significant shifts in responsibilities, reporting structures, or the level of a position. Were there processes in place to make sure those changes were handled consistently and thoughtfully?
UL Senior Leadership met regularly with Unit Leaders and one another to communicate reasoning for the re-alignment and associated changes. The expectation was that Unit Leaders would share that information with their staff in a timely and thoughtful manner.
I also held monthly sessions throughout each semester that were open to all staff where I could hear staff questions/concerns/excitement and answer any questions they had about our process and path forward.
I should say this was not perfect. I think we did a good job communicating about the shifts that were taking place (we now have a monthly newsletter with updates), but I’m sure some still had unanswered questions and/or felt that they didn’t know enough. I’m sure there were some staff members who disagreed with the reorganization. But everyone has a responsibility in a reorganization. Staff have the responsibility to share their concerns/questions/excitement, and senior leadership have the responsibility to keep listening/clarifying and/or shifting when necessary.
Related to the org chart you shared earlier in the presentation, can you help explain why the CHRO role is relatively far down the org chart compared to other “Chief” roles? HR is a huge aspect impacting the staff at Mason and its placement somewhat appears to indicate where it falls on President Washington’s priority list.
The org chart is arranged alphabetically. The placement of HR is based on the current VP’s last name. The order of listing has no bearing on priority and should not be interpreted in that way.
