How to balance Academic Workload and improve Faculty Performance

When the staff and faculty workload is unbalanced, there comes frustration, dissatisfaction, and conflicts, along with productivity issues and missed schedules. In colleges and universities, workload policies are intended to support the strategic goals of the faculty, staff, courses, and organization as a whole. In a university, efficient workload management promotes equity, responsibility, openness, and flexibility.

Institutions must examine how faculty members are spending their time in relation to their mission and vision to determine whether some may be more productive in programs other than their current responsibilities.

These questions can be effectively answered by implementing faculty workload management software which will enable institutions to deal with productivity issues in a time of tight budgets while addressing the need for quality and student success.

What do researchers say about faculty workload?

86% of faculty respondents to the Inside Higher Ed (IHE)/Hanover Research Study replied that they wished they had more time to devote to the things that are important to them. In addition, 78% of respondents said that over the previous three years, their workload had increased.

Another study confirms that faculty are often dissatisfied with their jobs and mostly stay put.

Ways to balance academic workload using technology

If your institution implements or expands faculty management technology, you can provide your faculty with some peace of mind about their careers. For a variety of reasons, a technology designed specifically for the faculty lifecycle is reassuring to faculty.

Replace faculty’s administrative tasks

Faculty workload solutions save time by replacing administrative tasks that faculty must perform with efficient, digital processes.

Unlike home-grown systems, which require faculty to hunt for files across multiple sites or folders, a faculty workload management system provides faculty with a centralized location from which they can view and comment on files. With the time saved by such a system, faculty can concentrate on the things that are most important to their careers, such as research, student support, or creative projects.

While institutions may need to take additional steps to improve faculty work-life balance, preventing wasted time is an important first step.

Promotes transparency

A faculty workload management platform promotes transparency in faculty review, promotion, and tenure. In particular, such a platform makes advancement requirements clear to faculty and their review committees while also documenting each review, creating a record for the future.

When you enable faculty to clearly see the path they need to take for career success, you eliminate some of the stress inherent in these important career milestones. That is, faculty can focus on preparing their work for presentation in the review process, rather than stressing about obtaining files on a shared drive or who to send those files, or even what actual files are needed for a particular review.

Likewise, when faculty know that all reviews are documented, they have the reassurance that there is a strong check in place against inappropriate, unethical, or illegal decisions.

Maximizes efficiency

Automating faculty workload ensures faculties in institutions optimally spend their time and align with the interests of the institution to maximize efficiency and effectiveness in all areas of operations. A faculty workload management system can help administrators to determine how best to divide and rebalance workloads.

Faculty profile to better assess and allocate

With options to create profiles including knowledge, skills, research, awards, achievements, certifications, and work experiences, it gets easy to assess the faculty who is best qualified to handle teaching assignments and map individual objectives to institutional goals.

Well-balanced out workloads

Faculty workload software helps define faculty workload based on Full-Time Equivalents (FTE) and performance calculation for teaching. With integrated scheduling, faculty workload targets can be set based on hours and assigned to teaching roles. This leads to a fair and transparent way of allocating tasks to faculty, boosting productivity levels.

Filtered schedules

Track the current work schedule in real-time to see if regular faculty members are available and whether substitute faculty is to be reported. Create custom groups and manage schedules.

Automatically notify users based on scheduled/rescheduled classes or events using email, SMS alerts, and push notifications.

Faculty dashboards for workload summary

View the workload summary of faculty members across departments, programs, and courses in a single glance. The software also comes with options to generate flexible and reliable reports to manage faculty and staff effectively.

Institutions can even customize reports with graphs and charts to support decision-making.

Rebalance workloads with surveys

Conduct faculty peer reviews and student surveys using a course/faculty evaluation system that would help administrators to rebalance the current workload for teaching, research, and non-teaching activities, and make the program and course run more efficiently.

Create action plans based on evaluation scores to enable faculty members to attend workshops, courses, and conferences that promote the development of skills for both teaching and research.

Tackle faculty workloads with Creatrix Campus

Faculty are not only limited to teaching but also have a lot on their plates, which can be stressful at times. They can, however, find relief from their hectic schedules by streamlining and automating the majority of their work with cutting-edge technologies. A good faculty workload management system like Creatrix Campus will generate realistic teaching schedules for them.

If you are considering integrating a digital platform to improve data efficiency and faculty-related operations, contact the Creatrix team today to request a free demo. We will assist you in understanding its features and will answer all of your questions.