Faculty Turnover: It's Preventable

Dean Z meets with department faculty to discuss the appointment of a new chair. She wants to appoint Dr. B, an internal candidate who is a respected senior professor. Dr. B feels that it is his turn to become chair and that an internal candidate is much cheaper than an external one. Some faculty voice opposition but are mollified by the assurance that their concerns (specifically, Dr. B's lack of understanding of the subdiscipline and poor communication skills) will be addressed by the dean. However, within twenty-four months of Dr. B's appointment, six faculty have left the department. The dean is concerned about the reputational and monetary costs, and she requests that Dr. B “stop the bleeding.” Dr. B is not sure what consequences to draw and finally decides to involve the department faculty council to solve the problem of faculty turnover. This will give the rattled faculty time to settle down, and maybe the faculty council will find a solution.

Retention and faculty turnover are perennial themes for academia, and for some departments there are regular cycles of faculty departure and recruitment. The management literature provides evidence that high turnover of employees is negatively correlated with the management skills of their supervisor. The connection in academic settings may be weaker, yet even those faculty who stay will sit out a disconnected or unsupportive administrator. It remains the responsibility of the chair, not the faculty, to create a positive department culture and to address faculty turnover.

Reducing faculty turnover is a solvable problem, yet it is frequently not viewed that way. Often, chairs feel powerless and blame external (pull) factors such as family-driven geographic relocation or offers of unmatchable additional resources (salary, start-up packages) by other institutions. Departing faculty often identify pull factors as the main reason for their moves, so as not to endanger their relationship with their colleagues (“My mom is getting on in years, and I could not resist the fantastic salary.” Who can argue with that?). In reality, high faculty turnover results not only from these external pulls but also from internal push and stay factors: departmental discord, friction, and divisiveness frequently push faculty to seek other opportunities while weak departmental support reduces their reasons to stay.

There are programmatic approaches to departmental leadership that address faculty turnover proactively. We recommend that chairs use the academic leadership framework to scaffold such an approach (Niewiesk and Garrity-Rokous 2022). Instead of treating retention as a case-by-case issue, it should be viewed as part of the faculty life cycle, which is addressed in the second domain (people) of our framework. The life cycle of faculty starts with recruitment and ends with designation and potential involvement as emeritus faculty. Critical stages include new faculty onboarding, promotion and tenure, and professional development (early, mid, and late career). The recruitment narrative forms the foundation of this career life cycle for faculty, as it explains the roles faculty play in the department, why candidates should join, and why current faculty should stay. The recruitment narrative also frames development opportunities for faculty throughout their career, conditions of promotion, and the roles available for emeritus faculty. If taken seriously, the development of a recruitment narrative takes time and effort by the chair (and faculty) and will result in the development of written procedures—guidelines for searches, expectations for promotion and tenure, and a process for awarding emeritus status and its associated expectations. Once written down, these procedures can be revised and adapted as necessary to best support faculty development.

Addressing faculty needs. A structured approach to faculty life ensures that basic needs of faculty are continually addressed. According to Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory, motivation factors and hygiene factors determine faculty satisfaction. Hygiene factors, which include a competent, consistent, transparent, and fair chair; an attractive salary; good professional interpersonal relationships; and effective department/college/university policies and administrative processes, prevent dissatisfaction with the institution. Ensuring that these factors are in place requires work on the management competency of the chair, ongoing review of salary levels, efforts to measure and improve a collegial working climate, and smooth administrative procedures. As the pandemic disruption showed, this last factor is important because continuous disruption or inefficiency of purchasing, IT, or HR processes can create faculty dissatisfaction (push factor).

These hygiene factors do not, however, motivate faculty to stay by improving the connection of faculty to the institution. Such motivation factors include the opportunity for fulfilling work, recognition and performance feedback, support from administration, autonomy, and the opportunity for growth and learning. A chair needs not be expert in all these topics but must be honestly trying to make improvements and to engage with faculty—and to be seen to be doing so. Faculty typically conditionally engage with their institution by waiting to see the commitment by their leadership before they engage, and such engagement is easily destroyed if hygiene and motivation factors are not addressed.

What are the warning signs? The faculty life cycle depends on effective management of department processes. Warning signs that these processes are in decline may not appear to connect to faculty turnover. For example, a dismissive attitude of chairs toward department management and learning about management concepts, as well as disorganized and ineffective meetings, may be perceived by faculty as an absence of commitment to the department, which in turn suggests a department that will decline over time. Likewise, contentious promotion and tenure processes indicate that either the procedures and/or the expectations for promotion and tenure are not clear to everyone and agreed upon.

More subtly (and frequently), in-groups and out-groups form within a department, in which only members of the former receive the chair's frequent attention and participate in department decisions, to the exclusion of out-group members. Whether the chair actively or passively promotes this delineation, out-group formation indicates a major risk factor for faculty retention because out-group members often do not identify with the larger group (and department) and self-exclude. Out-group members are often also very talented individuals who bring a different perspective to department matters and if ignored are most likely to leave. If not addressed, these issues will translate into difficulties with the recruitment of faculty candidates and retention of faculty. Chairs must treat faculty evenly and engage out-group members.

What can be done? Of course, a chair has no control over external pull factors. However, a chair does control the internal push and stay factors described earlier. If a chair becomes aware that faculty have been approached by other institutions or that they have applied somewhere else, they must actively try to prevent faculty from leaving. The chair should engage in a conversation with faculty to determine what it would take for faculty not to pursue a potential outside offer. To wait until faculty receive an outside offer and then to counter it works well for faculty who never wanted to leave but simply sought to increase their salary and resources. That strategy fails for those faculty who are leaving because they are not satisfied with their current position. And should faculty leave, be gracious about it. Actions and words, which could be viewed by the faculty body as retaliatory and petty, will not help to keep remaining faculty.

More generally, chairs seeking to address faculty retention should collect and maintain basic statistics. Is the department able to fill positions when recruiting? What about yield? How many of the final top three candidates accepted an offer? What is the percentage of faculty leaving on an annual basis and from year to year? (If every faculty member were to retire after thirty years of service, the turnover rate would be 3.3 percent of all faculty. If every assistant professor were to depart after six years, this number would be 16.7 percent.) Often an increase in faculty turnover is linked to a lack of success in recruitment. One should analyze whether the faculty who are leaving tend to be those the department would like to keep while those with problematic professional behavior and productivity continue to stay. Qualitatively, obtain information about why faculty are leaving through a structured informal or formal approach for interviews with faculty, both for those who leave and for those who choose to stay.

What about quiet quitting, the Great Resignation, or a crisis? Any crisis, whether a national pandemic or a local scandal of sexual misconduct, may cause faculty to reevaluate their professional allegiances. A chair must evaluate the recruitment narrative and align the approach with the situation at hand: Have the pull factors changed? Are we doing everything we can to minimize push factors and to strengthen stay factors? In addition, we encourage chairs to view themselves not as firefighters but as landscapers. Working on the faculty life cycle and developing a recruitment narrative will also help to develop a good relationship with the dean and to successfully lobby for department resources. By taking a longer-term view and building an effective and resilient department, you will be in a better position to navigate faculty turnover and retention.

Stefan Niewiesk is a professor and Gates Garrity-Rokous is a vice president and chief compliance officer at The Ohio State University. Email: [email protected], [email protected]