To complete our research for the calculator, we spent several hundred hours in interviews and usability tests, as well as analyzing faculty handbooks, process documents, and system usage data. We consulted individuals and materials from:
- Baylor University
- Colgate University
- Indiana State University
- Indiana University Bloomington
- Michigan State University
- Montana State University
- North Carolina State University
- Old Dominion University
- Pennsylvania State University
- Purdue University
- St. John’s University
- The Ohio State University
- The University of Tampa
- The University of Texas at El Paso
- The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley
- The University of Texas at San Antonio
- University of Iowa
- University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
- University of Maryland, College Park
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
Calculations for Faculty Reviews
Annual Reviews
Our research shows by using Faculty Success, each faculty member saves an average of 2 hours each year on annual reviews through:
- Capturing activities and accomplishments using suggested activity categories that make it easy to enter comprehensive data
- Using pre-formatted reports that clarify guidelines, organization, and format
- Importing information like teaching and grant details from other systems
- Reminders, clear submission forms, and automatically generated reports that create process clarity and transparency
We’ve also discovered that each department saves approximately 2 hours each year by using:
- Report and submission templates that clearly guide faculty on requirements and structure, reducing the amount of time department heads and staff spend answering questions and clarifying expectations
- Standardized outputs that simplify review for department chairs, deans, and the provost
- Annual activity and review data from a central system, allowing department chairs to run comparative reports from the system instead of manually compiling that information
On top of this savings, we estimate that each department chair, dean, and administrative staff member also saves ~10 minutes per faculty review by using Workflow’s digital system to manage communication, track progress, and engage with annual review content.
Promotion & Tenure
Our research tells us that each promotion and tenure candidate using Faculty Success saves approximately 5.5 hours preparing and submitting their portfolio. This savings comes from:
- Having the bulk of activity and accomplishment information in a centralized system
- Predefined institutional reports that define the content, organization, and format for P&T materials (i.e., the dossier), which reduce questions about format specifications and what content to include
- Clarity and transparency around process guidelines and sequence, delivered through prompts and reminders, clear submission forms, automatic reports, and progress-monitoring features
Forms and standard report templates build a clear and consistent format for all candidates’ content, making it easier to reflect on submissions and find answers. Reviewers can also save time by accessing digital materials from any location.
Department chairs, deans, and provost’s office personnel save roughly 30 minutes per P&T case, while committee members save roughly an hour per P&T case. (Note: Our research shows that most institutions have at least two layers of committee review.)
Because Faculty Success streamlines the articulation of requirements and deadlines, centralizes statuses, sends reminders, and ensures the right participants have access at each step, administrative staff save roughly 4.5 hours per case using Faculty Success versus managing the process through spreadsheets and email.
Calculations for Data on Demand
We’ve found that institutions encounter two common types of reporting needs on an ad-hoc basis:
- Questions about which faculty are doing what types of work on a given topic, in a specific geographic area, etc.
- Reports that require you to pull together aggregations of teaching, research or service activity, such as workload reports, compendia of publications, service activity summaries for departmental annual reports, etc.
Requests like these emerge from different sources 9 or more times a year (roughly once a month during the academic year), requiring users to scramble to surface responses and pull information together. Without a faculty activity reporting system, many users report that the fastest way to get this information requires combing through a digital filing cabinet or asking anyone who might know. Not only is this time-consuming, but it’s hardly comprehensive.
Our research has found that the process is accelerated and the results are more thorough when users can access information in an up-to-date faculty activity reporting system with dynamic reporting capabilities:
- The provost’s office saves 15 minutes per request
- Each dean’s office saves approximately 10 minutes per request
- Each department chair and departmental staff member saves approximately 10 minutes per request
- Each faculty member saves 5 minutes per request
Centralizing information and empowering knowledgeable central authorities (i.e., institutional research, deans’ offices) to locate and extract the relevant information makes it far easier to address these ad hoc requests. Faculty Success eliminates the need to look through prior annual review reports, spend hours urgently merging together siloed data sets, or send mass emails out to deans, department chairs or faculty (and follow up on responses).
Calculations for Getting Data into the System
CV Imports is the fastest method available today for building a comprehensive, trusted foundation of activity and accomplishment information in a faculty activity reporting system. This feature dramatically reduces the time a faculty member or their proxy spends populating their profile with their accomplishments, while pulling data from the source they trust most – their own CV.
Extensive usability testing shows that you can import one page of a CV in roughly 12 minutes using CV Imports versus an hour of manual data entry. The average CV has 8 pages, so with CV Imports, each faculty member or their proxy only spends roughly 1.6 hours entering their full CV into the system and verifying accuracy, compared to 8 hours of manual data entry.
CV Imports also helps you get the most out of your faculty activity reporting system right away. By building a reliable and complete longitudinal record of your faculty’s credentials and accomplishments at the outset, you can feel confident using the data for any purpose: annual reviews, tenure and promotion, web profiles, workload reports, compendia of activities and accomplishments, and specific answers to questions like “Who’s actively working on a project related to potable water supplies?” Faculty members can also easily produce reports for their own personal and professional use, like tailored CVs for grant applications or presentation submissions.
Calculations for Connecting to Web Profiles
Upfront Savings: Setting up the Connection
If you have to connect your web profiles to your faculty activity database using APIs and custom code, building the initial integration alone can take upwards of 3 months or more – that’s 480 hours just to get things connected. Plus, it requires the availability of skilled programmers to write the integration code and keep it up to date. Because IT teams are often overloaded with projects requiring attention and resources, there are often delays in starting the project.
Faculty Success can be connected to your web profiles in a few hours using its Web Profiles module, which offers a self-service interface that helps you quickly configure your preferred structure and format, and code snippets you can place into your content management system (CMS). If we conservatively estimate that it still takes 1 week to make sure everything’s ready to go, that’s still a savings of over 440 hours of IT time.
Annual Savings from Automatic, Real-Time Updates
Web profiles are one of the three most-viewed resources on an institution’s website, so it’s essential that they are current, accurate, and put each faculty member’s best foot forward. Manually managing these profiles often leads to out-of-date information because faculty have to remember to submit a form or email the University Marketing or IT department when they have new information to share. This often requires them to spend time copying and pasting information from one source, like a CV or Word doc, into another – like form fields or an email message – and then follow up to ensure the updates were made. This process is easy, but it still takes at least 15-20 minutes each time an update is needed (and faculty have to remember to follow it).
By connecting web profiles with a faculty activity reporting system so they automatically sync to reflect changes, you can cut out this manual process and save time. Sure, faculty still need to update their accomplishments in the system, but they already need to do this for other reporting purposes like annual review, so it’s a one-time effort with multiple benefits. While faculty will likely need to review and update fields specifically for the purpose of their profiles (such as Biography and Research Interests) and review new activities to ensure they show up in their profiles, they can save at least 10 minutes a year by building on the existing data entry process and use the automatic sync to cascade updates to their profiles.
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