The following titles summarize years of research to suggest changes in policy and practice for the improvement of faculty equity.

Nature of Work

Research

If your institution is serious about supporting faculty research and creativity, then be prepared to commit to the essential elements of success:

Leadership on research support comes from the top. C-level leadership in stressing the importance of excellence in research is critical substantively and symbolically. This means that resources directed at supporting faculty work--across the creative lifecycle--are crucial, as is the messaging that goes along with the financial support.

Formal offices and programs energetically support faculty research. Visibly dedicating resources to support faculty work clearly demonstrates how important faculty members are to institutional success. Our studies identified the following areas of focus for full-time college staff:

• Grant support. Many universities offer pre-award support to faculty preparing proposals for outside funding. What is less common, but equally important, is post-award support.
• Internal grants. Faculty are grateful for internal funding, even in small amounts. Well-designed programs can foster interdivisional collaboration, extramural mentoring, and other innovations.
• Research institutes. Such institutes may be a source of internal grant support, but even more, they are places where faculty find collaborators and inspiration.
• Colloquia, workshops, and seminars. All faculty, and especially pre-tenure faculty, appreciate opportunities to present their research at colloquia on campus, receive feedback, and fine-tune their work prior to presenting at a national conference. Workshops and seminars for writing grants, running a lab, getting published, mentoring undergraduates and graduates, getting tenure and "getting to full" are all programs that support fulfilling collaboration and engagement.

Service

Colleges and universities with faculty satisfied with service consistently cited institutional mission and culture in explaining their results. Among these exemplars were land-grant universities committed to fostering a service-oriented culture; religiously-affiliated colleges with an explicit service mission; comprehensive colleges with strong ties with the local community; and former normal schools whose minority-serving mission is inextricable from its faculty's ethic of care. So, institutions struggling with service might do well to explore, engage, and elaborate their mission and historical circumstances--above and beyond the usual website boilerplate--as the foundation of an ethos of service.

College leaders cited other commitments as the basis for ensuring faculty satisfaction with service. Most communicate expectations regarding service through a number of avenues including handbooks, guidelines for mentoring, workshops, orientations, and reviews. It is also common practice to provide course release time for taking on leadership roles and to keep the service commitments of tenure-track faculty few (but not zero), particularly at the college and university level, and to make certain what commitments are required are meaningful.

Key resource:
- The Faculty Workload and Rewards Project

Teaching

Most COACHE institutions with exemplary results on this benchmark had a number of qualities in common. They make expectations for teaching clear from the point of hire. They recruit faculty with a demonstrated devotion to teaching. They ensure that faculty members have a say in which courses they teach and in their content. They offer grants for pedagogical development and innovation, usually through a center for teaching. They also recognize excellence in the classroom through prestigious and substantive awards (e.g., for exemplary teaching informed by creative scholarship, or for outstanding teaching in the humanities) given in public (e.g., at mid-court during a basketball game).

Key resource:
- The Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education

Resources and Support

Analysis of our survey identified partner institutions whose faculty rated these themes exceptionally well. Here’s what we learned from them:

• When it comes to facilities, new is nice but equity is best. Faculty understand that not everyone can have a brand new office or lab because campuses must invest in different areas over time, but everyone should enjoy equity in the distribution of resources and space within a department.
• Hire personnel to staff work-life services. This is important not only to get the job done but also for symbolic reasons. Putting physical resources behind your words signifies meaning beyond the rhetoric. It is unlikely that universities will need fewer personnel in the future to attend to these matters.
• Have written policies. Platitudes that “This is a family-friendly place” or “There’s plenty of work-life balance here” are no longer enough. In addition to assuring pre-tenure faculty that the institution is doing more than just paying lip-service to work-life balance, written policies provide clarity, consistency, and transparency which leads to greater fairness and equity. Written policies concerning dual-career hiring; early promotion and tenure; parental leave; modified duties; part-time tenure options; and stop-the-tenure-clock provision are also indicators of how family-friendly a campus actually is.
• Ensure that written policies are communicated to everyone — pre-tenure and tenured faculty members, chairs, heads, and deans. COACHE research indicates that written policies are particularly important to women and under-represented minorities. Make certain the policies are easily accessible online and provide personnel to assist faculty in choosing the right healthcare option.
• Provide additional accommodations: Childcare, eldercare, lactation rooms, flexibility, and opportunities for social occasions in which kids can be included are all relevant practices that help ensure a viable workplace for the future. Communicating their availability is critical.
• Offer phased retirement for faculty to ease into retirement gradually. At the same time, institutions have the flexibility to fill the void left by retiring faculty more easily. Retiring faculty can continue their contributions to the institution by developing the teachers, scholars, and leaders who follow them.

Cross-boundary Work and Mentors

Interdisciplinary work and collaboration

Leading institutions on these benchmarks openly consider among faculty and administrative leaders the salience and importance of interdisciplinarity to their campuses, including the variety of forms such work can take. These may include:

• cross-fertilization, when individuals make cognitive connections among disciplines;
• team-collaboration, when several individuals spanning different fields work together;
• field creation, when existing research domains are bridged to form new disciplines or sub-disciplines at their intersection; and
• problem orientation, when researchers from multiple disciplines work together to solve a 'real world' problem.

If interdisciplinary work is important on your campus, discuss and potentially remove the barriers to its practice. The common obstacles to interdisciplinary work extend beyond the disciplinary criteria for promotion and tenure to include, also, discipline-based budgets and environmental limitations such as space and facilities.

Likewise, discuss the importance of teaching and research collaborations on your campus and the factors that enhance or inhibit it; then determine ways to remove the barriers.

Key resource:
- The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity

Mentoring

COACHE partners who are high performers on the mentoring benchmark follow some or all of the following guidelines:

• Ensure mentoring for assistant and associate professors.
• Promote the mutual benefits for mentee and mentor alike: mentees learn the ropes, collect champions and confidants, and enjoy a greater sense of "fit" within their departments. Mentors feel a greater sense of purpose, even vitality, through these relationships.
• Mentoring should meet individuals' needs, so make no "silver bullet" assumptions about what type of mentoring faculty will want (or even if they will want it at all). Instead, provide multiple paths to mentors on faculty's own terms.
• Transparency is important, especially to women and faculty of color. Therefore, written, department-sensitive guidelines help both mentors and mentees.
• For underrepresented faculty groups, finding a mentor with a similar background can be vital to success, yet difficult to find in some disciplines. Support mentoring networks beyond the department and division by reaching out to other institutions (e.g., through a consortium or system).
• If possible, reward mentors through stipends, course releases, or other avenues of recognition (examples are available in Benchmark Best Practices: Appreciation & Recognition).
• Evaluate the quality of mentoring. Both mentors and mentees should be part of the evaluative process. COACHE results can be used to frame the conversation.

Key resource:
- Rethinking Mentoring: Integrating Equity-Minded Practice in Promoting Access to and Outcomes of Developmental Relationships
- COACHE Benchmark Best Practices white papers

Tenure and Promotion

We have learned from leading institutions on these benchmarks what practices promote faculty satisfaction. Some findings:

• Be direct with faculty during the interview stage about tenure and promotion expectations, then reinforce relative weights and priorities in a memorandum of understanding, then discuss them again in orientation sessions. These are formative opportunities.
• If collegiality, outreach, and service count in the tenure process, provide definitions, say how they count, and state how they will be measured.
• Provide written information about where to find everything they need to feel comfortable with the tenure process and with their campus. Use intuitively-organized websites with links to relevant policies and people.
• Conduct year-long faculty orientations and workshops to support effective teaching and research throughout their years as assistant and associate professors.
• Host Q&A sessions or provide other venues where pre-tenure faculty can safely ask difficult questions.
• Teach departments chairs to deliver plenty of feedback along the way--annually, and then more thoroughly in a third- or fourth-year review. Written summaries of such conversations are particularly important to women and underrepresented minorities.
• Provide sample dossiers to pre-tenure faculty and sample feedback letters to those responsible for writing them.
• Ensure open doors for early-career faculty to chairs and senior faculty members in the department. The most satisfied pre-tenure faculty have such access for questions about tenure, for feedback, for opportunities to collaborate, and for colleagueship.
• Be cognizant of the workload placed on associate professors. They often find themselves buried suddenly with more service, mentoring, and student advising, as well as more leadership and administrative duties that may get in the way of their trajectory to promotion.
• Provide mentors. COACHE data confirm that just because a faculty member earns tenure does not mean that s/he no longer needs or wants a mentor.

Key resources:
- Success on the Tenure Track: Five Keys to Faculty Job Satisfaction
- Success After Tenure: Lessons in Engaging Mid-career Faculty

Institutional Leadership

COACHE researchers interviewed leaders from member institutions whose faculty rated items in this theme exceptionally well compared to faculty at other participating campuses. We learned that high-performing institutions do some or all of the following:

• Even if the Leadership: Senior marks are low, share them with faculty. Embrace reality, promise change, and be grateful that you have brought to light your faculty's concerns before a vote of no confidence was called.
• Ensure that resources are allocated effectively to support changes in faculty work.
• Be careful not to let faculty get caught unaware, unsuspecting, or unprepared for shifts in priorities. For example, guidelines for tenure and promotion should not be changed midstream; commitments (e.g., in a memorandum of understanding) should be honored.
• Allow senior faculty members grace periods to adjust to new expectations.
• Be transparent: it is almost impossible to over-communicate with faculty about changes to mission, institutional priorities, and resource allocation.
• Consistent messaging is pivotal to strong leadership: work diligently to ensure that senior, divisional, and departmental leaders are hearing and communicating the same message about institutional priorities.
• Priorities must be communicated via multiple channels, media, and venues. A blanket email or a website update does not adequately ensure broad communication of institutional priorities. Develop a communication plan that considers how the faculty everywhere--even the hard-to-reach--get information.
• Provide consistent, well-designed management training and educational sessions for your institutional and departmental leaders. Offer department chairs more than just a one-day tutorial on the job--develop their leadership competencies. When their term as chair concludes, they will return to the faculty as leaders, not merely managers.
• Provide chairs with a "Chair Handbook" and a web portal with "one stop shopping" on mentoring strategy, career mapping tools, and access to advice from peers.
• Create opportunities for chairs to convene--perhaps without a dean or provost present--to discuss best practices, innovations, and shared struggles. Then, invite them to share their take-aways with the deans' council or other senior administrators.

Key resources:
- COACHE Benchmark Best Practices white papers

Shared Governance

Institutions looking to strengthen their governance cultures should consider these approaches for shoring up the five factors COACHE identified:

• Develop and publish clear guidelines for governance that detail decision-making processes and articulate the specific roles and responsibilities of everyone involved. One of the keys to building trust is ensuring that governance practices consistently follow established guidelines and that the roles delegated to faculty and other stakeholder groups are respected.
• Foster a culture of transparency around decision-making. Institutional leaders can set the tone by communicating openly about emerging issues and by honestly sharing the rationales for their decisions.
• Design governance practices that promote interaction across different stakeholder groups. Providing opportunities for them to get to know each other and work together to achieve shared goals can break down perceived boundaries between groups, broaden individuals' perspectives on issues, and encourage collaboration.
• Adopt governance practices that invite broad participation. Monitor the composition of governing bodies to ensure that they adequately represent the diverse interests and perspectives on campus. Create venues - in-person or online - for all interested parties to become directly involved in governance.
• Encourage candid expression of diverse perspectives on institutional issues. Communicate the value of hearing different viewpoints and demonstrate their value by using them to inform decision-making. Ensure that unpopular or controversial views can be freely expressed without fear of reprisal.
• Build internal leadership capacity. Offer professional development to foster skills critical to effective participation in governance, such as active listening, managing disagreements, working in teams, and leading strategic meetings.
• Start a conversation about the effectiveness and efficiency of existing governance practices to identify opportunities for improvement. Ensure that the time invested in governance is well spent.
• Don't forget to celebrate results. Set an agenda for governance by identifying specific goals, mapping out milestones toward each goal, and setting deadlines. Seize opportunities to publicly recognize the progress achieved through governance.

Download the COACHE white paper: Effective academic governance: Five ingredients for CAOs and faculty.

The Department

As arbiters of departmental culture, chairs especially are well-served to pay attention to departmental collegiality. They should keep their doors open so faculty can stop in and chat about departmental issues. Likewise, chairs should drop in to offer help, perhaps to intervene.

• Be especially conscious that those who are in the minority--whether by gender, race/ethnicity, age, subfield, political views or another factor--are not marginalized in the department; what you might think of as respecting autonomy might be perceived by another as isolation. Create forums for faculty to play together: schedule some social activities and ensure everyone knows about important milestones in each other's lives. Celebrate! All institutions in our related Benchmark Best Practices report foster departmental engagement, quality, and collegiality by hosting social gatherings once or twice a month.
• Create forums for faculty to work together: convene to discuss research, methodology, interdisciplinary ideas, pedagogy, and technology.
• Provide chair training for handling performance feedback for tenure-track faculty members (e.g., annual reviews, mid-probationary period reviews), tenured faculty members (e.g., post-tenure review, annual or merit review, informal feedback); and non-tenure-track faculty members.
• Discuss the vitality of the department by using COACHE and other analytical data to keep these matters from becoming overly-personalized.
• Be an advocate for faculty participation in activities in the campuses' center for teaching and learning. Use department meeting agendas not as a list of chores, but as opportunities for generative thinking. Enlist colleagues to discuss new teaching and research methods or to present case studies to problem-solve. Using this structured time to initiate departmental engagement may encourage continued engagement beyond the meetings. As often as possible, ask department colleagues to take ownership of the meeting by co-presenting.

Key resources:
- Benchmark Best Practices white papers

Appreciation and Recognition

Institutions with high marks for appreciating faculty typically understand the following:

• The greatest obstacle is simply not knowing what faculty have done that warrants recognition. What mechanisms are in place to ensure that faculty contributions are being shared with deans, provosts, and with their colleagues? Cultivate a culture of recognition by creating ways for students, faculty, and campus leaders to aggregate and to highlight the accomplishments of your faculty. For example, a physical and a virtual drop box allow others to comment on their good work.
• The chief academic officer should get to know the faculty in a variety of forums, including brownbag lunches, speakers' series, workshops, and seminars that engage faculty members in appealing topics and current issues.
• Likewise, deans and chairs should make opportunities to showcase faculty work, share kind words, and offer a "pat on the back" from time to time.
• Take note of what faculty are doing and celebrate that work in each school or college at some point every year; such occasions do not have to be costly to be meaningful. We know of two universities where the Provost surprises faculty with a "prize patrol" offering an award or other recognition in what would have been a run-of-the-mill department meeting or class.
• Provide department chairs with guidelines to form a nominating committee of two faculty (rotating out annually) responsible for putting forward their colleagues' names for internal and external awards and honors. These might include recognition from a disciplinary association, institutional teaching awards, or prizes from higher ed associations. Such activities foster awareness of and appreciation for all department colleagues' work.

Key resources:
- Benchmark Best Practices white papers

Retention and Negotiation

Your comparative results can inform several recruitment and retention policies on your campus. They might, for example:

• Suggest improvements to chair training and development in the handling of faculty intent to leave;
• Identify more quickly than could a single institution's data any renegotiation patterns or pressures with respect to disciplinary cultures, gender, and URM status;
• Educate deans and chairs about the efficacy of "home field advantage" in preemptive retention actions and counteroffers;
• Provide fundable propositions for interactions with foundations (e.g., Sloan, NSF ADVANCE);
• Create compelling cases to donors in the name of retaining the best and brightest talent, for example, by endowing chairs, funding a school for children of faculty, allowing more teaching on recall, or subsidizing faculty housing.
• Offer poignant anecdotes - backed by sound research - in support of appropriations requests to the legislature or donor priorities to the board.

As the Collaborative's research on actual departures and retentions unfolds, we will be updating partners with information from high-performing institutions. In the meantime, visit the COACHE website for information about the COACHE Faculty Retention & Exit Survey, which explores the causes, costs, and conduct of retention efforts for faculty who have received outside offers.