Participation

Who Should Participate?

Medical school leaders should ask several questions to decide if their institution should join Faculty Forward:

• Do institutional leaders (the dean, department chairs, associate dean of faculty affairs, principal business officer, etc.) believe in the value of measuring faculty satisfaction and improving workplace environments?
• Are institutional leaders committed to acting on data and information to increase faculty vitality?
• Can the institution meet the technical requirements of participation?

Value Proposition

The value proposition for medical schools to participate as a founding member in Faculty Forward has several different dimensions. Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., AAMC president and CEO, summed up one aspect of the value in The State of the Faculty (AAMC Reporter, Feb. 2008):

...as an important next step in promoting faculty vitality, we must go beyond our traditional tendency to think of faculty strength in quantitative terms such as overall numbers, grant dollars per investigator, or clinical earnings. It becomes critical to understand the motivations and desires of faculty members as individuals. As a starting point, we must avoid making simple assumptions about what constitutes faculty satisfaction, especially since many traditional motivators may not matter as much as commonly assumed. For example, some may expect that higher salaries are linked to higher satisfaction, yet research indicates that academic physicians and scientists value other factors more. Equally important motivators include relationships with colleagues, students, and patients; institutional commitment to core values; meaningful feedback regarding expectations and performance; and opportunities for mentoring, among others.

The value in participation in this initiative is neither simple nor discrete. In addition to the satisfaction data and benchmarking reports, the structured and supported process is designed to strengthen a participant institution's capacity to identify drivers of faculty vitality, implement changes, and foster a cadre of informed, engaged internal experts to sustain those improvements.

Institutional Commitment

For schools to improve institutional work environment and culture, and thus increase faculty retention, satisfaction, and morale, participants must be fully committed and engaged in the partnership. The Alliance ultimately will not succeed if data sit on shelves and if leaders cannot leverage institutional change. Therefore, in joining Faculty Forward, institutional leaders should ask themselves:

For the medical school dean:

• Am I committed to championing Faculty Forward to chairs and faculty?
• Am I committed to encouraging participation in the faculty satisfaction survey?
• Am I committed to making improvements to faculty workplace environment?
• Will I join my fellow deans at a special COD session to share ideas about how to make academic medical centers great places to work?

For the dean and department chairs:
Are we committed to assembling an internal advisory committee—composed of at least 4 to 5 department chairs and the associate dean of faculty affairs—to build support for survey participation and to advise the administration on ways to use the survey results to make institutional improvements?

For all institutional leaders:
Are we committed to sharing the survey results in a transparent fashion and in multiple venues with faculty and institutional leaders?

For the associate dean of faculty affairs:
Am I committed to partnering with colleagues from other medical schools and the AAMC to share ideas and learn how to make improvements to faculty vitality?

Technical Requirements

Part of participation in the program involves the administration of the web-based AAMC-COACHE Medical Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey, schools must:

1. Implement an institution-specific, multi-faceted communications campaign to engage faculty members using provided tools, templates and processes.

2. Prepare and deliver their database of eligible faculty (instructions provided).

3. Confirm that your IT staff has exempted (or "whitelisted") certain domains, IP addresses, and e-mail addresses on "spam" filters running on your institution's e-mail servers (list provided upon participation). Doing so will ensure that our technology partner can reach your faculty with invitations to participate.

4. Reply to a test e-mail invitation that Faculty Forward will send to the primary campus liaison immediately preceding the survey launch.