How Dallas College is leveraging Qualtrics to lift employees up

Established in 1965, Dallas College is on track to be the largest higher education provider in the United States.

It has been transformed from being simply Dallas Junior College in the 1960s, to having seven different colleges under the banner of Dallas County Community College District in the 1970s.

Then in 2018, there was a move to merge and consolidate those into one mega college, which now has 125,000 students and 7,000 employees.

Key to the successful consolidation of these colleges was getting the employee experience right, and Dallas College leaned on its existing partnership with Qualtrics to support here.

At the experience management giant’s 2025 X4 show in Salt Lake City, UNLEASH sat down with Jasmine Parker, inaugural Senior Director of Employee and Cultural Engagement at Dallas College.

Parker shared that her office was created in the consolidation “to ensure that we are centering the employee voice through the entire transformation”, therefore giving them a “stake and equity” in the future organization.

How Dallas College uses Qualtrics to empower employees

Parker and her office’s responsibility is to ensure that Dallas College “is the highest performing it can be” – to lift employees up so they “can the best they can be for themselves, as well as our students and our community”.

To achieve this, Parker leverages Qualtrics EX products to help collect feedback, and then “drive transformative action”.

For Dallas College, it’s not about “surveying for surveying sake”, instead they survey and then really “funnel down” on the insights, sharing those with functional leader and senior executives, in order to make decisions that truly move the needle on employees experiences.

Parker shares a few examples with UNLEASH.

Dallas College’s 2024 annual survey showed that employees want more appreciation, so, in response, Parker’s team created a strategy called employee ARC (awards, recognition, celebration).

It involves fiscal awards for top performers, recognition for going above and beyond, and celebrating those “who are out on the frontlines, serving our students, serving our community day in, day out”.

Parker is excited to see more of the “appreciation affect” as a result; “what we have seen is that people  will produce more and of higher quality” when they feel seen and appreciated.

Another example from last year’s survey was it asked employees about their wellbeing practices – and some of them mentioned that they volunteered outside of their roles at Dallas College.

Using those findings from the data, Parker developed a strategy to launch external volunteer time for employees.

After getting approval from executives, the volunteer time policy went live in February 2025 – all employees get eight hours a year of paid time off to go and volunteer.

Clearly employee feedback and surveys are helping Dallas College drive better employee experiences, but what makes Qualtrics the right tool to help?

Qualtrics is a standout tool for Parker is its “functionality” – it’s intuitive for everyone – and the security.

The safety and security elements are important as, Parker tells UNLEASH, “we want to ensure that our employees are confident in us, that they are comfortable taking our survey”.

Dallas College has put guardrails in place so that leaders cannot attribute responses to particular employees – for instance, Qualtrics dashboards are only available to leaders who have five or more people in their downline.

It is clear that Dallas College is ahead of the game on employee experience – UNLEASH was keen to find out Parker’s advice to her HR peers who may be struggling with employee engagement.

You can do this; it is not rocket science,” she shares.

The key is not boiling the ocean – instead, focus on the mission and the key priorities of your organization, and then “strategic plan”, that is realistic and measurable.

Parker recommends that EX and HR teams don’t work on employee engagement alone – most importantly, they need to leverage and advocate for champions both in the C-Suite and among ordinary employees.

In every organization there are “people who are influential, regardless of positionality”, so they can get other people on board with your initiatives.

The future of EX at Dallas College

As well as being on a mission to be the largest higher education provider in the US, Dallas College also wants to be recognized as it’s a Great Place to Work.

To drive this, Parker has studied what leads to the certification – Great Place to Work’s model has three tenets: trust, camaraderie and pride.

She is using Qualtrics heat map functionality to mirror these elements, and ensure Dallas College is benchmarking its progress in these areas year on year.

“We’re doing all that work to triangulate, see where are our strengths and opportunities”, shares Parker.

AI is also top of mind for Parker and Dallas College.

In partnership with Phenom, the college has implemented a recruitment AI chatbot to match external candidates to roles – the next phase is to role this out to support with internal mobility.

The reason for this new, future focus is that Dallas College has a 94% retention rate, and 2% of the attrition comes from those who been at the organization for seven to ten years.

These long tenured employees are often Gen Xers, and using people analytics through Qualtrics, Parker’s team discovered they are keen to be upskilled and have access to stretch projects.

While Dallas College is happy with Phenom and Qualtrics to curate employee experiences, the next buying priorities will be in the wellbeing and benefits space.

“What we need is a comprehensive wellbeing structure and total rewards packages” that meets employees wherever they are at. To this, Parker is already taking meetings with consultants to support on choose the right technology for Dallas College and its people.