Across sectors of the U.S. economy, employees report record low job satisfaction, in what Gallup calls the Great Detachment. Workers increasingly feel stuck with their dissatisfaction within the context of a cooling job market and economy. In higher education, the workforce is also struggling with uncertainty on multiple fronts: decreasing enrollments due to demographic shifts, declining public confidence in our work, and transformation of the federal government from a reliable partner to an active detractor. Faculty and staff are increasingly demoralized and report difficulty in their daily focus and work.
This article was originally published by Inside Higher Ed. Permission to reprint has been granted.
These challenging times for universities and colleges require care and discipline in how we support our employees. Shared governance is the key for how we navigate these difficulties together, but shared governance cannot happen without the infrastructure of effective relationships between faculty, staff, and administrators. The most helpful thing we can do to navigate our sector’s present difficulties is the most basic – discipline and hygiene in our workplace interactions to ensure open communications, clear expectations and consistent connection of jobs and actions to mission. In higher education, I believe we minimize the value of workplace best practices – perhaps understandable given the academy’s detachment from the realities of everyday life, but nonetheless at employees’ peril.
I believe that three conditions are necessary to engage employees and to find our way together in shared governance: (1) supervisors who know how to supervise, (2) meetings that are meaningful, and (3) social capital that supports shared work. I’ll describe each and provide examples from a private university at which I served as president for 21 years.
Supervisors who know how to supervise. Perhaps the most heard, yet least addressed, critique of the higher education workplace is that we don’t prepare our employees to be supervisors. We promote talented teachers, researchers, or staff into these roles, and perhaps because we tend to devalue administration and even the concept of “supervisors” in our sector, we neither have clear expectations about supervision nor provide support for success. This becomes a cycle perpetuated on campuses, because when an employee with a poor supervisor is promoted into a supervisory role, there is no model from which to draw on or imagine what good supervision can be. For new presidents there are boot camps and coaches, but there are few similar aids for most other new supervisors, especially for those deeper in the organizational charts of our institutions.
This is a problem for our employees, because research has consistently found that the quality of the relationship with our supervisors determines our satisfaction at work. Importantly, this is also a problem for the mission of our universities, because the largest and most complex surveys of alumni outcomes have found that the quality of manager-employee relationships on campuses is an important determinant of the success of our alumni.
I believe the good news here is that almost any professional development program for supervisors can yield results on campuses. There is a dearth of research on the efficacy of supervisor programs in higher education, and I find canned leadership programs to be superficial and unsatisfying compared to customized programs crafted by stakeholders. Programs that are more resourced and more broadly implemented seem most likely to be impactful, but I believe even modest programs may improve how we take care of employees.
At the university at which I served as president, I noticed, amidst growing enrollments and steady hiring of new faculty and staff, signs of poor supervision. Supervisors often did not know their supervisees as people, and employees did not report a “home base” relationship with their managers. Our supervisors were smart and engaged employees, but as an institution, we were failing to be clear about the value of supervision and administration. In other words, this failure was on me and our university, not on supervisors and employees.
After consultation with employees and supervisors, we launched a supervisor program. I began by inviting all 60+ supervisors across the university, in small groups, to my home for dinners that I cooked. I hoped these evening gatherings would communicate that supervisors and supervision were important to me and to the university. The small groups – with cross-sectional membership bringing together administrators across faculty and staff, departments, offices and campuses – then read a book about supervision (the earliest edition of First, Break All the Rules, but the particular book mattered less to me than our collective attention) and met a handful of times across the academic year to discuss the book and issues in supervision.
For the second year of the program, a small steering committee, working from feedback from first-year participants, created a syllabus with readings, topics, and space for members to share challenges in supervision within the small groups. After the second year of the program, in a survey of employees across the university, the item on employee satisfaction that measured the quality of supervision showed a 33-point increase, from 41 percent satisfaction to 74 percent satisfaction. Qualitative reports from employees were consistent with this increase.
I don’t believe anything about our program was magic; I do believe the lesson I’m sharing from this example is that any attention to supervision quality can produce positive results.
Meetings that are meaningful. Another oft-heard complaint about our workplaces is our meetings. We love to hate meetings, and yet we do little to actually rework them. Meetings are the context for most of our interactions and efforts to move our institutions forward, and even though the research is clear about how to set the table for satisfying and nutritious meetings, we continue to lay tables for our employees without menus, utensils, or even chairs to be seated.
The good news again is that any attention to improvement in meeting agendas, roles, and rules will likely lead to improvement in employees’ experiences of the workplace.
At the university I led, we developed discipline about meeting practices and hygiene over many years. One practice we adopted initially was that all meetings – from cabinet meetings to weekly one-to-one supervisor meetings – only happened if there was an agenda sent the day prior, with desired outcomes of the meeting documented. We reasoned that, if a meeting is not important enough to specify outcomes ahead of time, even for regularly occurring meetings, then it should be canceled. Many meetings were assigned a rotating role of gatekeeper, to back up the meeting facilitator by monitoring time, nudging participants who were keeping quiet, or offering other observations. We decided that every meeting would begin and end with appreciation. For example, at the end of every meeting, every participant was asked to answer the question, “What is one thing you learned or appreciated from our time together today?”, a practice adopted from the Appreciative Inquiry process. Meetings also concluded with a review of decisions, outcomes, next steps and communications to follow from the meeting. We streamlined meeting minutes to only memorialize outcomes and next steps, rather than who said what.
We disseminated agenda templates and meeting guidelines across the university. Did all meetings follow the format we developed? No, some meetings retained the rituals of the academy that are less than outcome-oriented. I will say the biggest change in our culture around meetings occurred when the cabinet decided to publish its meeting minutes to all university employees, noting meeting practices such as gatekeeping and appreciations. The cabinet’s example in practice was more influential than any rule we published, and many employees reported benefits of more disciplined meetings.
Social capital that supports shared work. Coming out of the pandemic, it’s easier than ever for faculty and staff to feel lonely on campus. Universities and colleges have always been somewhat decentralized workplaces, but even as we increasingly return to in-person schedules, our workforces remain distributed across different settings and schedules, and relationships with co-workers are difficult to build and maintain. This is a problem for the success of our institutions, because social capital or bonds between colleagues are not nice to have, but rather are the bedrock of workplace culture. We often forget that we need to know each other to work together. When employees feel a strong sense of camaraderie, they collaborate more effectively, innovate more enthusiastically, and are more likely to be retained and to attract new talent.
At the university at which I served, we realized social fabric doesn’t knit itself. We noticed we were better at creating opportunities for students to come together than we were for our faculty and staff.
Following this insight, we planned what became a signature event for the university: annual retreats convening students, faculty and staff for one day without classes or office work. We designed experiences both to help people see and know each other and to better define and engage our specific educational approach. Our format was different across more than a dozen years of annual gatherings: in one year, groups crafted and presented art projects (such as paintings, videos, quilts, live performances) that illustrated the university’s broad learning outcomes; in another year, listening sessions informed curricular revision; in other years, the retreats resembled more traditional one-day conferences with plenaries and panels. The popularity of this annual event led to the development of additional similar occasions peppered across the academic year.
In our in-person and virtual employee gatherings, we worked to build a culture of appreciation. For example, within town hall meetings for all employees every semester, I began and ended with appreciations we solicited regarding individuals, teams, and their achievements. We established awards to recognize teamwork, leadership, service to students, teaching and other achievements. I believe the applause, cheers, and shared smiles and laughter at award presentations were more important than the actual awards.
Beyond these large community gatherings, we encouraged teams and offices to regularly retreat to build relationships, outside of routine meetings and away from campus, providing support for these efforts through funding for external facilitators and venues. Today, I notice the distance between team members when any team falls off a hygienic schedule of retreating at least once and preferably twice each year.
Overall, I believe our university’s practices in supervision, meetings, and social capital are less exemplars and more illustrations of discipline on the continuing journey to become an engaged and productive workplace.
It’s easier to criticize our workplaces than to address their shortcomings—and in higher education, we’re certainly great at the former and wanting for the latter. Good supervision, meetings, and social capital require disciplined attention and practice. Such workplace hygiene is necessary for faculty and staff to join in shared governance as engaged participants. These may not be new observations, but they are unfortunately often forgotten at our institutions and easily neglected during these challenging times.
