If you work in the education sector, it’s easy to concentrate too much on students without putting emphasis on your faculty and staff needs.
Faculty satisfaction surveys help your institution understand the wants, needs, and satisfaction levels of your faculty.
Listening to their feedback can often lead to major improvements to the student experience, operations, curriculum, marketing, and strategy employed by your school or college.
What is a Faculty Survey?
A faculty satisfaction survey addresses drivers to loyalty, improvement areas, and provides educational institutions with the data and insights they need to understand the pulse of their staff. They can assist with overall institutional effectiveness.
Importance of Measuring Faculty Satisfaction
Measuring the satisfaction level of your faculty is crucial to improving loyalty and retention and ensuring your engagement and culture are strong.
Not listening to the needs of your faculty can have major negative consequences on retention and trickle down to poor student experiences and engagement as well. They can also assist with resource allocation, strategic planning, staff development, improving communication, and reducing teacher turnover.
A major piece of this process is assessing these metrics through a third party such as an education market research company.
Running this survey in-house will create lower response rates and biased results, as faculty will not be as truthful and forthcoming with feedback if they know results are going directly to their institution.
A third-party higher education market research firm layer is critical.
Beyond satisfaction, it’s crucial to assess what is most important to faculty as well.
This allows the market research firm to create a quadrant chart to help prioritize improvement areas for your institution (e.g., highlighting the areas that have high importance scores but low satisfaction).
These metrics can also identify critical differentiators and areas your team can use in recruiting (e.g., highlighting the scores that have both high importance and high satisfaction).
Steps to Conducting Faculty Surveys
Drive Research employs an organized and systematic approach to our faculty surveys. Our custom market research proposal includes the following steps.
- Send our team a request with objectives, timeline, needs, and budget
- Our team develops a custom proposal outlining our process and investment
- You are assigned a dedicated research team to manage your study
- Kickoff meeting to review core objectives and answer any questions
- Project workplan outlining core deliverables and deadlines to keep the project on track
- Survey draft design addressing primary and secondary objectives
- Sign off on the survey with any edits
- Programming of the survey into our PC/mobile/tablet-friendly platform
- Pre-notice from the institution explaining the survey and hiring of our team
- Invites from our third-party team with a link to the survey
- Reminders to non-responders to increase response rates
- Potential phone calls or texts to non-responders to boost response rates
- Close fieldwork and provide portals with question-by-question tabulations
- Data quality review and preparation of draft report with key findings and recommendations
- Debrief with Q&A to walk your team through the critical insights
Example Faculty Satisfaction Survey Questions
When creating a faculty survey, it's important to include a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions to gather both numerical data and detailed comments.
Additionally, open-ended questions can provide faculty members with the opportunity to express their thoughts in their own words, offering richer insights into their experiences.
Here are some questions to consider for your faculty survey:
- How likely are you to recommend this school/college as a place to work? (Net Promoter Score or NPS)
- How would you rate your satisfaction with the following?
- Compensation
- Benefits
- Work-Life Balance
- Schedule
- Curriculum
- Supervisor(s)
- Communication
- Opportunities for growth
- Training
- Workload
- Time Management
- Administrative Support
- Resources
- Rate your agreement with each of the following?
- Inspiration to work
- Excitement of work
- Dedication to DEI
- Culture is positive
- Job security
- What is most important to you?
- What is the biggest improvement that can be made?
- What is the biggest challenge you face in your role?
- How would you rate the communication at our institution?
- How does this institution compare to others you have worked for?
- What word or phrase comes to mind when you think of our school/college?
Contact Our Faculty Satisfaction Survey Company
Are you interested in exploring a faculty satisfaction survey with Drive Research? We can help. Contact our team via the form, email, or by calling to discuss your project.
We can walk you through the steps, ask a few questions to help with the quote and develop a custom proposal to match your needs.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
George Kuhn
George is the Owner & President of Drive Research. He has consulted for hundreds of regional, national, and global organizations over the past 15 years. He is a CX-certified VoC professional with a focus on innovation and new product management.
Learn more about George, here.
