Create a Higher Ed Workplace Culture Where Faculty and Staff Want to Stay
3 climate drivers of attrition that are key to addressing higher ed’s employee retention crisis
Higher education is facing an employee retention crisis. After two years of focused efforts in hiring, higher education staffing has now returned from an 11% dip in late 2020 to just below pre-pandemic levels.
However, these hiring efforts will only pay off if the new faculty and staff stay in their jobs. Otherwise, higher education risks entering a never-ending cycle of hiring and attrition.
Unfortunately, early signs suggest the industry is doing just that. 57% of higher education employees plan to job hunt this year, according to survey data from CUPA-HR. And because turnover challenges are hitting mission-critical areas of institutions like admissions the hardest, universities will struggle to advance their mission and goals unless they address this crisis now.
While the retention crisis has not fully reached the faculty yet, early signs suggest a growing trend of faculty burnout and disengagement could lead to turnover in the near future, with 18% of faculty currently considering leaving their jobs.
To tackle this emerging crisis, higher ed cabinet leaders must include institutional climate in their retention strategy
Cross-industry data tells us that inclusion matters for retention. Employees who feel included stay at their jobs 3x longer and are 43% more committed to their organizations.
It also tells us that employees want more from their organizations when it comes to climate. According to sentiment analysis of Glassdoor and Indeed reviews, 61% of employees are dissatisfied with their experience of inclusion. Within higher education, faculty told COACHE that culture was the #1 thing they would prioritize to change about their institutions.
With a rapidly changing workforce, climate and culture will only become more important. Not only do 86% of Gen Z job seekers say that their employer’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is important in choosing where to work; retaining the workforce of tomorrow also means retaining a workforce that is more diverse than ever before.
Climate surveys are only the first step in understanding and prioritizing your campus’s needs
Too often, efforts to foster a more inclusive climate stall out because of “analysis paralysis.” Leaders want to be sure they have exactly the right data to measure and understand the climate at their institution. Year after year, leaders launch climate surveys to measure faculty and staff’s perception of climate.
These surveys—many of which are performed by national organizations, like COACHE and UCLA-HERI—allow leaders to benchmark their own institution against peers. However, most climate surveys only measure perceptions of climate at a high level, rather than identifying specific policies, processes, and behaviors that lead to experiences of exclusion.
They also usually do not identify action steps that will create a more inclusive climate. Over time, as faculty and staff continue to use surveys to give feedback on climate without seeing leaders take any action as a result, they will be increasingly less likely to participate, an effect known as survey fatigue.
None of these challenges mean that leaders should stop conducting climate surveys. Instead, climate surveys should be the first step in addressing institutional climate—not the only step.
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Without a shared understanding of inclusion, most climate efforts at colleges and universities are too broad and too shallow to create real change
To overcome analysis paralysis and to drive efforts down into the organization, leaders need to understand the full picture of how climate leads to attrition. Many institutions have focused on high-level efforts that signal their commitment to inclusion: launching employee resource groups, hosting events to celebrate cultural holidays and history months, and providing training on topics like implicit bias. A rising number of institutions have also hired a chief diversity officer in a VP-level role and created DEIJ strategic plans with sections on inclusion or belonging.
Now, faculty and staff expect to see their employers translate these statements and commitments into actions that have impacts at all levels of the organization.
3 drivers of exclusion leaders should address
EAB has identified three key drivers of exclusion that lead to faculty and staff attrition. To improve retention, institutions must address all three through policy and process.
1. Exclusionary behavior
These are behaviors from colleagues that makes employees feel unwelcome and prevents them from finding a sense of belonging and being able to bring their whole selves to work.
Employment law provides remedies for the most egregious behaviors like overt discrimination, harassment, threats, and violence. But many acts of exclusion are much more subtle, and their effects (namely, burnout and job dissatisfaction) accumulate over time if left unchecked.
To address exclusive behaviors, institutional leaders must create policies that identify specific examples of exclusive and inclusive behaviors and outline the responsibilities of individuals, managers, and leaders in fostering a climate of respect and dignity.
2. Exclusionary decision-making
Exclusionary decision-making means that faculty and staff don’t trust university leadership and that institutional strategy doesn’t reflect the perspectives of some of the most vulnerable faculty and staff. According to UCLA-HERI, 68% of staff feel respected by senior leaders—which seems high on first glance but, compared to the 94% of staff who feel respected by students, suggests higher ed could be doing more to build trust.
Many leaders already feel that decision-making in higher education already has too many inputs and is too time-consuming. And it’s true that there is always a tradeoff between input-gathering and time. As long as cabinet leaders communicate their decisions thoroughly at every step of the process, they can avoid harming faculty and staff in that tradeoff.
To address exclusionary decision-making, leaders should use communication planning tools to ensure they are reaching a wide range of faculty and staff and creating opportunities to gather feedback and revisit decisions. And to build upon high-level climate surveys, leaders should use inclusive listening tools to identify additional opportunities to identify the root causes of exclusive climate and generate specific, measurable action plans.
3. Exclusionary evaluation
For faculty, exclusionary evaluation in the promotion and tenure process leads to overwork and burnout, as faculty never know which unspoken expectations they will be held to by senior colleagues.
Promotion and tenure requirements are not overly rigorous. But they are overly rigid, and often they are muddled by tacit requirements that are applied unequally. For example, a growing body of research suggests that women and BIPOC faculty are less likely to receive credit for the same work as white and male peers. They are also pressured by leaders and colleagues to spend more time on tasks like mentoring students and developing institutional policy that current tenure and promotion processes don’t measure or recognize.
To address exclusionary evaluation practices, provosts—working together with the faculty senate—should redesign promotion and tenure requirements to clearly define expectations. They should also offer faculty a broader range of methods to demonstrate excellence that still meet the same bar for rigor as traditional measures like journal impact factor.
How EAB can help your institution foster a climate where faculty and staff want to stay
In our conversations with over 35 institutional leaders, EAB’s research team learned that many leaders know what they need to do to foster a more inclusive climate: be transparent, foster a respectful culture, set clear expectations. But they often struggled to translate nebulous concepts like “transparency” and “respect” into specific actions.
The four resources below help leadership teams do just that: break down campuses’ lofty goals into specific tools, templates, and process steps to make progress on fostering a climate where more faculty and staff feel included.
10 Tools to Communicate Decisions Transparently
Some of the most important “make-or-break” moments for trust in campus leadership center around change: when leaders announce new initiatives, decisions, or policies. Too often, leaders fail to communicate via channels and venues that reach a diverse range of faculty and staff. When they do communicate, they leave out important details on exactly what decisions they made and why.
The tools in this resource break the communication process down into 10 concrete steps and provide exemplars from higher education institutions that demonstrate transparent communication from leaders.
Climate Feedback Gathering and Action Planning Toolkit
Climate surveys are a necessary first step in understanding what leaders must do to improve the climate for faculty and staff at their institutions. But leaders often fail to follow up on climate surveys by identifying the unique root causes of exclusionary climate at their own institutions—and worse, many fail to take action on these causes.
The tools in this resource will help you identify channels for gathering more-detailed climate feedback, then translating that feedback into clear action steps and accountability.
Respectful Workplace Policy Builder
Employment law addresses overt acts of discrimination and workplace harassment, but when it comes to addressing subtle acts of exclusion, most university leaders only go as far as offering training and educational resources on bias. Respectful Workplace policies (sometimes called civility policies or dignity policies) identify specific actions and behaviors that contribute (or don’t) to an inclusive workplace.
In this resource, EAB identifies six elements critical to a Respectful Workplace policy and provides examples from peer institutions.
Compendium of Inclusive Tenure and Promotion Policy
A growing number of institutions are redesigning promotion and tenure policy to make faculty evaluation more inclusive. To better understand how, EAB researchers reviewed policies from 20+ institutions that have recently updated promotion and tenure standards. In this resource, see how policies from eight exemplar institutions codify the unwritten expectations of tenure and create rigorous measures to evaluate “nontraditional” research and service.
Changing the climate at an institution is a challenging process and won’t happen overnight. It requires leaders, managers, and colleagues to make efforts at all levels and in all areas of their institutions. But these changes are worthwhile, even critical, to solve our retention challenges, better support faculty and staff, and prepare for the workforce of tomorrow.
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