UMD's Faculty Workload & Rewards Project

2018 Request for Applications ▪ Do some faculty in your department feel the distribution of service and teaching work is unfair?

▪ Are faculty generally unaware of what other faculty are doing (e.g. average number of advisees, class sizes, committees)?

▪ Are there some faculty who seem to carry the weight of the department workload and others who do less?

If you said yes to any of these questions, your experiences mirror those of many other faculty and department chairs in public colleges and universities.

The Faculty Workload and Rewards Project can help!

We are an NSF-funded, collaborative, action research project. Academic department teams study workload, consider and then adopt policies and practices to ensure equity in how teaching and service is taken up, assigned, and rewarded.

Project Leadership KerryAnn O’Meara PI of Faculty Workload and Rewards Project Professor of Higher Education komeara@umd.edu

Audrey Jaeger North Carolina State Leader Professor of Higher Education ajjaeger@ncsu.edu

Joya Misra Massachusetts State Leader Professor of Sociology and Public Policy misra@soc.umass.edu

Courtney Lennartz Project Research Assistant Doctoral Student clennart@umd.edu

Elizabeth Beise CoPi of Faculty Workload and Rewards Project Professor, Physics & Associate Provost for Academic Planning & Programs

How Does It Work?

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Departments apply by July 1st, 2018 with a 3-5 member team.

Department faculty take a 10 minute survey and receive a report of aggregate findings related to faculty perception of equity in department workload.

The team attends a short face-to-face workshop to become familiar with the latest social science research on workload and discuss initial survey results.

The team is provided financial support ($1,000) to hire a student worker or provide additional compensation to a staff member, in order to create a dashboard of faculty workload.

The team publishes the workload dashboard by October 15, 2018 internally within the department to increase transparency.

The team works with state leader coaches to learn organizational practices that can address disparities and ensure greater equity.

• The team develops a DEAP (department equity action plan), and presents suggested department practices to the department for approval by February 15, 2019.

• Individual faculty in the department are offered the opportunity to participate in free webinars on aligning time and priorities, negotiation of work tasks, management of student demands, and saying yes and no strategically to new work requests.

“We found all the materials to be tremendously useful. Of note, the sample “The dashboard template and the policy policies, templates (as workbook was especially helpful to us and in DEAP form and gave us some ideas for policies we could dashboard) were super implement later down the road.” helpful.”

- Faculty Member - Department Chair

What are some of the benefits of participation?

By participating, departments receive: • •

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Templates and resources for creating a faculty workload activity dashboard A briefing on the latest social science research on strategies to mitigate implicit bias in how faculty work is taken up informally within departments Organizational worksheets and detailed examples of policies and practices to ensure equity Individual professional development opportunities A workbook of over 50 example workload policies

Department teams will leave this nine-month project having: • •

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Published a dashboard for faculty in the department with transparent information on faculty work activities Diagnosed the conditions shaping a lack of equity; and the work conditions they need to put in place to ensure a collective department commitment to fair work practices with examples of workload policy o Examples include policies on minimum standards for teaching and service, benchmarks for expected campus service contributions, credit systems, differentiated workload options, revisions to merit pay and promotion, and tenure criteria to make invisible work visible Prepared faculty members to act to ensure equitable workload Developed a network of colleagues from whom to gain ideas and inspiration Ensured your department members do not shrug their shoulders and say “equity is subjective” but actually take steps to make a positive difference and investment in a better place to work