Global Considerations: In Your Faculty’s Own Words
The final item in our survey is an open-text response to the prompt, "What is the one thing your institution could do to improve the workplace for faculty?" The comments from your faculty were reviewed by our team, redacted of identifying information, and coded according to the survey themes. The five most common themes in your faculty's responses were:
- Facilities and resources for work - 28%
- Leadership: General - 28%
- Compensation and benefits - 23%
- Culture - 20%
- Nature of work: Teaching - 14%
The complete and coded open-text responses in your CAO Report are a tool for prioritizing your results. By adding a dose of humanity to the quantitative results, these comments direct you and your team to be more sensitive to what is in the minds of your faculty. The mean and standard deviation for Tenure Clarity tell you which faculty are unclear about expectations for tenure. An open-text comment describes the impact on faculty's lives—their careers, their health, their families—and may even include helpful ideas on how to fix the problem.
In the complete digital report, you may access these redacted comments all at once, coded thematically, and accompanied by a chart of theme frequencies. In addition, when a comment mentions a topic that is related to a Benchmark, your CAO Report attaches that comment to the appropriate section. With salient, open-text prompts associated with each theme, you will find it easy to incorporate them into your presentations and discussions with faculty. Doing so reinforces that you are listening and trying to understand—the first step toward improving the faculty workplace.
Global Considerations: The Department and Institution as a Place to Work
There are other "big picture" results in your report concerning overall satisfaction, intent to leave, and the likelihood that a faculty member would recommend her/his department as a place to work. For the purposes of this preview, we are sharing respondents' overall satisfaction with their departments and with their institution as a place to work.
Department as a place to work
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- ■ Very dissatisfied
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- ■ Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
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- ■ Very satisfied
Institution as a place to work
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- ■ Very dissatisfied
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- ■ Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
- ■ Satisfied
- ■ Very satisfied