Tenure-line and full-time faculty at George Mason University have the opportunity to participate in a survey measuring their job satisfaction, including their perceptions about policies and performance expectations that are important to their success.
The Faculty Satisfaction Survey will be administered again in 2022 to assess the impact and effectiveness of action plans taken to address issues and concerns identified in the 2019 inquiry and build upon strengths.
“It’s not a survey for the survey’s sake,” said Kim Eby, Mason’s associate provost for faculty affairs and development. “We will be having conversations to generate action plans and find opportunities to put those plans into place, to identify and replicate areas of strength across the institution and address challenges in a comprehensive way so there might be real structural change.”
The confidential survey is being administered by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE), a national research-practice partnership in the Harvard Graduate School of Education that has worked with more than 250 institutions.
Links to the survey, which remains open until early April, are being delivered to faculty via emails from COACHE.
“The COACHE partnership will help us work together toward a comprehensive understanding of the work environment from the faculty perspective and foster meaningful and sustained improvements that drive university policies and operations,” Provost S. David Wu said.
The survey is the first step in a multiyear initiative prompted by challenges reported in the Quality of Work Life survey administered to faculty and staff in the 2017–18 academic year.
Harvard COACHE is expected to provide a summary report and findings to Mason in July. After that, the Mason COACHE leadership team—a group of faculty and administrators from across the university, to include representatives from every college and school—will develop a strategy for engaging the Mason community in reviewing the findings and drafting those action plans.
Critical in that process will be benchmarking the survey data with five “peer” institutions of Mason’s choosing that have taken the COACHE survey during the past three years.
In that way, Mason can evaluate the actions those institutions took in reaction to their survey responses.
“The administration understands there are issues, and they’re trying to figure them out,” said Jaime Lester, a fellow in the Office of Faculty Affairs and Development and a coleader of the Mason COACHE leadership team. “This is the most promising effort to date because it will be comprehensive and go across colleges. I think faculty will be pleasantly surprised by how pertinent it is to their work.”
“This is a commitment to a process,” said Eby, also a coleader of the leadership team. “The survey is a means to give us the best information about the faculty experience right now. We can look across the institution for strengths and build on those strengths, and we can also implement action plans to address the concerns faculty are raising.”