The Cultural North Star is a framework that unites all of DGSOM – faculty, staff and trainees – in our shared mission. It sets high standards and clear expectations for our actions and interactions. We have chosen to call it North Star because it articulates our aspiration and guides us in the decisions we make, the goals we set and the work we do.
Cultural North Star programs will drive our goals of creating an inclusive culture that supports diversity in all forms, energizes our community around the work we do, enhances our reputation as a place to work and focuses our energy on the positive.
The best thing you can do to help support this process is to promote and practice the Cultural North Star in your workplace.
Do you have ideas about how the Cultural North Star can be utilized to improve our workplace?
Please tell us about them!
Some simple ways to get started are:
DGSOM will launch the Cultural North Star in early 2019 with a coordinated internal marketing and communications effort.
The marketing campaign will include giveaways, video, emails, signs, events and a quarterly pulse survey.
Training courses are being developed through the UCLA Center for Organizational Readiness and Education.
The courses will teach leaders to use the Cultural North Star to enhance culture and performance.
The Cultural North Star also will be integrated into our hiring practices, ensuring that new hires understand and exhibit our core values.
You will also see the Cultural North Star throughout orientation programs.
Finally, we are creating new recognition programs to celebrate those in our community who exemplify the Cultural North Star.
The Cultural North Star eventually will be incorporated into performance evaluations.
The overarching goals of the Cultural North Star are very broad and relate to each pillar of the DGSOM’s mission. Over the long term, success will be reflected in increased employee engagement, decreased turnover and an increase in collaboration and collegiality across the board (e.g., receiving more extramural team science grants).
In the near term, Cultural North Star awareness and engagement will be measured quarterly through a pulse survey.
Full adoption of the Cultural North Star will take time. We don’t expect full adoption right away, but we do hope that through the support of leadership and ongoing communications to faculty, staff and trainees, that the entire DGSOM community will be familiar with the Cultural North Star by the end of 2019.
Over the course of a year, from October 2017 to November 2018, leadership of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA engaged in a thoughtful process of discovery and exploration to understand the culture of the DGSOM in both its current and aspirational states. Through a DGSOM-wide survey, focus groups, leadership summit and individual in-depth interviews, we listened to more than 1,000 voices from our community and analyzed the data for key themes.
The Cultural North Star emerged from these key themes and was designed with the intention of distinguishing us from our peers.
