Higher Education: Get Faculty Engaged in Performance Reviews
Engaging college and university faculty in the performance review process is a unique challenge. But that doesn’t mean you have to fail at it. A few best practices targeted at academia can solve the problem and engage college faculty in the performance review process.
First, it’s important to understand why higher education faculty members are less likely than campus staff employees to see the value of performance reviews.
· Faculty may have a professional bias against performance reviews, feeling that the entire concept of job assessments and performance reviews has no place in the world of academia.
· Faculty may believe that end-of-term satisfaction surveys answered by students are a sufficient gauge of their performance.
· Attitudes and beliefs about tenure — and rules that apply to tenured faculty — may prejudice faculty against performance assessments.
· Faculty may believe they are actually over-scrutinized, and unfairly at best, thanks to myriad student media and rating websites (e.g., ratemyprofessors.com,rateyourprof.com, and myedu.com).
· Finally, faculty — not unlike many staff employees — may feel the review process is too much of an interruption to their school year and occurs at no good time.
As Jeffrey L. Buller writes in his book Best Practices in Faculty Evaluation,“It’s not at all uncommon for faculty members to ask, ‘Why do we have to do assessments? We already assess our students in class every time we determine their grades.’ Or, ‘Why do we have to do program review? We already do an assessment.’”
Applying a handful of best practices can go a long way toward getting faculty to appreciate the value of a robust and productive performance review process.
Be specific with your language.“Needs improvement” may be clearly understood by an administrative staffer who has very specific, concrete job requirements. But that assessment is likely to be far too vague to a faculty member who works in the more subjective, less well-defined world of the lecture hall.
Customize goals and competencies. Make performance expectations for faculty members align with the roles they perform as educators. Off-the-shelf goals and competencies are unlikely to create engagement and, at worst, will cause faculty to believe university leadership simply doesn’t understand them.
Get faculty feedback before finalizing goals and competencies. Don’t assume that the competencies and goals you’ve developed for faculty are as specific and appropriately customized as necessary. Asking faculty for feedback during the development process can improve assessments and heighten faculty engagement.
You can learn about these best practices in more detail in our brief “Customizing Performance Reviews for Higher Education.”