Faculty Forward Engagement Survey

Faculty Forward at Stritch School of Medicine

In 2011, the Stritch School of Medicine was among the first medical schools to implement the Faculty Forward Engagement Survey. As a result of the feedback provided, several initiatives were implemented including the SSOM Faculty Ambassadors group and monthly meetings, the creation of the weekly Stritch Savvy e-newsletter and changes to the structure of existing meetings, such as consolidating key dean's meetings to one standard day per month.

‌What is Faculty Forward?

In recognition of the key roles faculty play in academic health center performance–including delivering excellent healthcare, conducting ground-breaking research, and teaching the next generation of doctors–the Association of American Medical College (AAMC) created an initiative called Faculty Forward to support medical schools in their efforts to attract and retain the best and brightest academic scientists, educators, and clinicians. Faculty Forward is a collaborative partnership between the AAMC, member medical schools, and teaching hospitals around the country that is focused on measuring and enhancing faculty engagement.

Faculty Forward is the largest national faculty workplace survey designed to address the issues unique to faculty engagement in academic medicine. Organizations participate in Faculty Forward to identify strengths and development areas enterprise-wide, for each department, and to benchmark with other organizations to share innovative and effective engagement practices.

What is faculty engagement and why does it matter?

Engagement is a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that a faculty member has for his/her role, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/her to apply additional discretionary effort at work (Gibbons, Conference Board, 2007). Research on engagement indicates that the alignment of engagement and contribution has more robust links with retention and performance outcomes due to personal investment in the success of an organization. Engaged individuals:

• give more than is expected of them in their workplace and are happy to do so
• have a sense of mission and passion that motivate them to give exceptional effort to their work
• need the resources, support, and tools from the organization to act on, or drive, their sense of mission and passion

When action is taken to improve the practices and policies that support the recruitment and retention of faculty, faculty will thrive. Physicians who are engaged with their jobs provide better quality patient care and also foster greater patient satisfaction. More engaged faculty are more likely to remain with the institution.

Who participated in the survey?

All full time and part time Stritch School of Medicine faculty members were invited to take part in the Faculty Forward Engagement Survey.

Confidentiality

The AAMC takes a number of steps to ensure confidentiality and protect respondents. Faculty participation is voluntary. Respondents may skip any particular question or discontinue the survey at any time. Individual responses to survey questions will be kept confidential by the AAMC. Results will be reported to Stritch only in aggregate form. Responses are only reported in cases where the “n” is 5 or greater. All qualitative information is redacted for identifying words/phrases and not broken down by department. Reports will only  analyze one variable at a time. Therefore, for example, one could not make a comparison of responses by gender within a specific department (or passively identify individuals). The AAMC will maintain faculty privacy in all published and written data resulting from the study.

How will the survey results be used?

Faculty Forward provided a comprehensive statistical report of our institution’s faculty environments strengths and development areas as perceived by full-time and part time faculty. This data can be used to identify institution-wide or department-specific issues, which will allow us to develop a plan to rectify these issues. This data will be used as a diagnostic tool to inform workplace strategy and goals. Faculty Forward will also provide a detailed comparison of results to a self-selected group of peer institutions, as well as to the national cohort of institutions, allowing us to see where we stand amongst our peers, what common issues may be in our work structure, and how we can better ourselves.