12 - Emotional Intelligence and the IRB

Due to the regulatory nature of the Institutional Review Board (IRB), organizations and research investigators may have misperceptions about IRB offices. When organizations and researchers feel resentment toward the IRB, this can impact IRB staff morale and lead to larger problems such as high staff turnover rates in IRB offices.
In our aim to shift the perception of the IRB towards a positive direction, the Baystate Health IRB launched an unofficial office-wide emotional intelligence campaign. The message: “We love research and we are here to help!” Building the office with all new staff, everyone was trained with the attitude that we are here to help, not hinder research. This included training staff to:
1) Be available for PI consults on IRB submission processes as a priority using Emotional Intelligence techniques,
2) Help researchers with explaining the study design in such a way that IRB reviewers were clear about intent and purpose,
3) Revise key submission documents for user ease and readability, and
4) Lead a team united by positive teamwork and collaboration instead of competition.
Our office deployed a research community questionnaire to evaluate our efforts. The responses included comments from PIs and research staff about improved perceptions of the IRB. We continue to receive survey results, and will continue to analyze throughout the year, as initial response rate has only been 27 participants. However, office metrics showed a decrease in turnaround times for reviews, and an increase in new study submissions, when compared with fiscal year 2022-2023.
Additionally, since inception of this initiative there has been minimal staff turnover. While internally staff generally agree that we are a cohesive and cooperative team, we recognize that further research is needed to look at the ways in which we support one another. This positive attitude within the office is supported by data received from the institutional Press Gainey survey deployed to our office last year. Unfortunately, we only have one year of this data because the office was not sufficiently staffed in prior years to report data anonymously.
It is important to note that we view this as a pilot evaluation and recognize the need for a more robust data set from external and internal sources. We plan to use this initial data as a starting point from which to continue outreach initiatives and evaluations. However, we believe that techniques used in the program can still be applied to other IRBs.
The need for solutions on how to deal with difficult PIs, institutional aggression toward IRB offices, heavy workloads, and high turnover rates is paramount in this industry. Though the focus of the Baystate IRB is on biomedical research via the health center and UMass Chan medical school, our use of emotional intelligence principles can be helpful to other institutions experiencing similar issues.