COACHE: Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey

Your input matters!

Faculty members are the hallmark of our institution, and identifying ways to support faculty is important to our institution's mission. We want to be intentional in learning what is working well for faculty and improve our efforts to welcome, recruit, and retain faculty. Hearing from faculty is vital to the success of that mission.

ISU partnered with the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) based in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Through their Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey administration, COACHE helps institutions study the work lives of faculty, assess the academic workplace broadly, and provide data that can support decision-making related to faculty members' professional lives and performance. Studies are conducted in partnership with college and university leaders (both faculty and administrative) using the data collected to improve the academic workplace. This partnership will help inform the programs and practices we develop to support faculty.

The survey will be administered for the first time in Spring 2022, and we hope faculty will participate.

Following the survey completion, teams will work to identify areas where we need to focus and determine how we can take steps to address these areas. We will keep faculty informed as our action plan progresses. Please look for more communication to come directly to your inbox and check this page for updates.

FAQ

 

Why is Illinois State University participating in the COACHE Survey?
ISU seeks to create a community in which all members are valued, supported, and respected. Faculty feedback is important to us to make improvements to faculty work-life, and we are committed to recruit and retain outstanding scholars and teachers. The survey is only the first step in a multi-year process designed to make data-informed changes to policies, procedures, and practices affecting faculty.

Why should I participate?
The survey provides us with a unique opportunity to hear directly from faculty and center faculty voices as we develop a plan for the future. This is the first major faculty satisfaction survey of its kind conducted on this campus. Led by an independent research team at Harvard Graduate School of Education, the COACHE survey instrument gives us benchmarking capabilities, lending important context to the data. Your responses will provide evidence of things that we do well and things that we need to improve. Ultimately, your participation will help guide priority-setting and planning for the future.

How long will the survey take to complete?
The survey will take 25 minutes to complete.

Who takes the survey?
The survey is sent by COACHE to all full-time tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty at ISU.

Is the survey confidential?
Yes. In a process approved by Harvard’s IRB board, COACHE will provide our campus with their summary analysis, as well as the confidential unit-record database, stripped of names and e-mail addresses. Strictly for the purpose of the survey, please note that COACH will have access to certain identifiable variables on all faculty members.  The 28 variables include name, department, rank and tenure status, gender, race, citizenship, and funding status. While only limited information will be disclosed to ISU, COACH will be linking this information to your responses and retaining it. The data provided to ISU will be received and kept on a secure server by Angela Engel, Director Planning, Research, and Policy Analysis (PRPA). No other administrator, staff, or faculty member outside PRPA will have access to the unit-record data. The PRPA staff will explore and analyze broad patterns in the data to assist with planning and developing improved academic policies and practices across campus. To protect the confidentiality and guarantee that the results of this survey cannot influence personnel decisions about individual faculty members, staff will disseminate survey results only with data aggregated in cells of five respondents or more, so that individual faculty and individual departments cannot be identified. Learn more

What if I don’t get the email from COACHE with the link to my survey?
The Office of the Provost has worked with IT to ensure that COACHE emails with the survey do not get caught up in spam filters. If you believe you should have received a survey link from COACHE, but you haven’t yet received it, please contact Harvard’s COACHE administration team at coachefaculty@abtassoc.com.

Which universities across the country participate in the survey?
The survey has a national scope and ISU joins more than 300 colleges and universities from different parts of the country that have partnered in the survey. You may view the colleges and universities that have participated in the COACHE survey here.

More FAQ from COACHE

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