WHITE PAPER SERIES

Challenges in the Faculty Information

Lifecycle

January 2019

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Background
Service is a pillar of academia; it creates the structure
and governance for foundational activities, like teaching
and research. And, just like teaching and research, it
takes time—more time than we might think. A recent
study conducted at a partner institution found that
faculty spent approximately 17% of their workweek day
collaboratively in meetings and 13% of the day on email
– that’s 30% of faculty time not spent on pursuits like
teaching, classroom prep, and research.
Seen through another lens, however, the amount of time faculty spends in meetings and on
committees is unsurprising. Every major decision that drives higher ed comes from the
professional service of faculty members, from hiring to annual performance and promotion
reviews, as well as accreditation and quality related work groups. So, it makes sense that
committee and service activities demand careful deliberation given the complexity and impact
of the decisions being made.
Yet, when time is a precious commodity, even important committee and governance related
activities can become unanticipated barriers to a balanced work life.
The remainder of this paper takes a closer look at some common pitfalls and challenges
experienced in faculty work and better ways to organize and validate scholarly work.

Improving Committee Logistics

Common Pitfalls of Committee Service
• Our campus partners report that committee work is a significant logistical and time burden
for faculty.
• Many of our partner institutions report that the faculty workweek can be consumed by as
much as 25% to 30% effort spent on emails and meetings. How does this correspond to
what you know about your own campus?
• Another source found that the time burden of service obligations is linked to a failure to
meet research expectations, especially from an overburdened associate professor
population.
• Recent studies in our partner community found that this increased service load is linked
with lower job satisfaction and lower overall satisfaction with the institution.
Organized, Efficient Collaboration
• Our most successful partners implement modern tools to help faculty members, staff, and
administrators who work on shared governance to manage time-consuming logistics.
• Committee work is enabled with digital tools collective collaboration and review.
• Materials for committed based work like candidate hires, annual performance reviews,
promotion cases, and contract renewals, e.g., are organized into searchable packets.
• The entire workflow—including communication, confidential external evaluations, and
voting—is managed in one central platform.

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Navigating Institutional Job Vacancies
• Based on our recent survey of several thousand academic applicants, nearly 40% of
scholars applying for job opportunities must allocate 5-10 hours per week just to complete
applications while they’re on the job market. Some spend even more time than this. How
does this reflect on the reputation of an institution trying to fill critical faculty vacancies?
• What can institutions do to make the job application the first indicator of a modern and
efficient employer and a faculty friendly place to pursue a career?
Organize the chaos (including confidential letters)
• Our best partner institutions offer job applicants lifelong access to an electronic dossier
that serves as a lifetime organizational and preparation platform for curating career work
products. It lets you request and receive confidential letters, store digital versions of your
own academic materials, organize your materials into collections for different purposes
(whether for jobs, mentoring, or bio-sketches).
Apply on time and in the right format
• The use of application focused electronic dossier allows an academic applicant to deliver
the materials stored in their dossier—including confidential letters of recommendation—
complete and on time, no matter where in the world or on what device they happen to be,
or what format the application requires.
It’s not easy out there, but help is available
• Sending in your applications is only half the battle. Missing or corrupted files, errors in the
email address, out-of-date information on the department web page, and simple mistakes
can prevent successful submissions. A scholar’s life is busy enough without struggling to
get a certain person on the phone to deal with a breakdown in the application process.
• Our best institutional partners outsource such activities away from the “fill-in the online
form” or disorganized file upload ethos deployed by most human resources departments.
In doing so they ensure the availability of help by phone or email (or social media) to answer
logistical and technical questions, so that all applicants and candidate details are all
received without fail.

How to Get Hiring Right

• The matter of who a university hires or even promotes is crucial to get right. Why? Because
faculty define the campus. They drive the academic prestige of your institution with their
research contributions. They shape a generation of alumni through teaching. And they
create the intellectual community on campus.
Supporting Your Greatest Investment
• A single faculty hire also constitutes a major financial investment. Over a 30-year career, a
tenure-line faculty member can cost substantial sums (when including benefits, retirement,
and other resources). This very worthwhile investment is likely funded by student tuition,
federal and government resources as well as private grants, and donations.
• And yet, institutions provide few tools for existing or prospective faculty. In a survey of job
applicants in 2016, over 75% reported that the excessive difficulty of the application

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 process deterred them from applying to positions or programs they might have pursued.
• With such a valuable investment at stake, what technology has your institution provided to
make sure you stay competitive in the way you hire, develop, and promote faculty?
Super-charge Recruitment and Promotion
• Our partner institutions implement practices and solutions to assists with the hiring,
promotion, and development of faculty performance with tools that:
• Organize, sort, and label long lists of job candidates to make sure you’re not letting
information overload get in the way of seeing all applicants or annual review cases;
• Present a frictionless and easy experience to all job applicants and promotion candidates;
• Mirror and support every nuance of the faculty performance review and promotion
process, from packet compilation to external evaluations and letters of recommendation;
• Support diversity initiatives with simple, compliant tools for collecting and analyzing faculty
biographic and demographic data against major faculty milestones, like hiring and
promotion. Thereby giving institutions powerful tools to assure diversity and advancement
of the faculty contribution to their teaching and service mission.

Achieving Equity and Transparency

• Many institutions find themselves unequipped to promote equitable hiring and promotion
practices because they lack transparency and standardization around committee work on
campus. Often, decentralization means that it’s hard to even observe what various
departments are doing—preventing institutions from acting to ensure fair academic
decisions.
• So how can institutions make hiring and promotion more equitable and fairer?
Familiar Questions about Equity
We’ve found that campus partners have similar questions when it comes to equity blind spots
at their institutions. For instance:
• Are all hiring and promotion candidates given fair consideration at your institution?
• Are all committee members contributing equally to academic decision making?
• Are standard criteria being set to assure fairness in every applicant, annual performance
review, or promotion deliberation?
• Are job posts being written to different standards in different departments?
Standardize Campus, Customize Departments
• Our partner institutions utilize solutions that provide the ability to create standards across
campus, but without sacrificing the customization needed at the departmental level.
• They standardize job posting language and keep track of when and how jobs get posted.
• Create standard annual review, promotion, and contract renewal criteria for committee
collaboration.
• They monitor each stage of deliberation and voting to ensure fairness and consistency.

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Managing Confidential Letters
• Recommendation letters critically inform many academic evaluation scenarios,
including admissions, funding, hiring, promotion, and contract renewals, or tenure where
available. But challenges arise around the request and management of letters of
recommendation, which are traditionally kept confidential from their subjects.
• The contemporary academic job market is notoriously crowded, and many scholars
are applying for dozens of positions. How can a letter writer provide support in a way that
doesn’t consume all their time and energy?
• How can professors and mentors provide strong support for students’ and
colleagues’ careers without having to struggle with the existing challenges around volume,
transmission, and confidentiality?
Simplify Letter Submission, Easily Access Past Letters
• Purpose built electronic dossiers allow confidential letter writers to submit each letter once
and the subject student or academic can be empowered to direct where it is sent. Both a
record of the request and the letter itself is stored in such dossiers that then serve as the
“warehouse” and the “post office” whilst ensuring security and unauthorized disclosure.
• Letter writers can access a record of their past requested and submitted letters, download
copies of letters that have been submitted, and replace them with updated versions for the
same person.
Maintain Confidentiality
• Committees filling academic positions usually ask for confidential evaluations—which
historically has meant the letter writer must submit letters directly to the institution.
• In purpose built academic dossiers the confidentiality of that letter is always
maintained. The person who requested it can see certain details about the request or
document but cannot open or view the contents of the file itself.
• A critical function of an electronic confidential letter of recommendation is that will verify
all destination addresses of all letters to ensure that it is appropriate to send confidential
materials about that person to that destination. Indeed, the requestee can confirm the
writer’s compliance with confidentiality terms before any information is shared or
exchanged in the process.
Departments and Career Centres Seeking Logistical Assistance
• On the larger scale, storing and sending out confidential letters is a task that
many institutions handle for their students (especially graduating doctoral students) who
are about to go on the job market. It’s a logistical challenge for which academic
organizations may not have the best resources or infrastructure.
• A department or career center can relieve itself of the increasingly busy burden of
collecting, verifying, and transferring confidential letters for students, faculty, and others
by using an electronic dossier services for managing the exchange of confidential letters.

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Faculty Activity Reporting
The contributions that college and university faculty make in teaching, research, and service
are central to the institution’s mission—and they reflect a substantial investment of
institutional resources. Yet faculty activity reporting challenges are numerous, making it
difficult to centralize and record these contributions.
• What would institutions of higher education need in order to freely, accurately study
faculty activity at any time of year? What faculty activity reporting solutions exist to help?
Faculty Participation for Accurate Data
• Solving the challenge of accurate faculty activity reporting only works if it benefits faculty
members in their own careers. The endeavor falls flat if you’re simply translating a mountain
of paperwork into digital format. The best faculty activity reporting approach recognizes
that scholars are busy enough actually doing their job without having to constantly re-enter
data for the benefit of many and various institutional consumers.
• When you provide user-friendly tools that enable faculty to continually maintain their
professional dossiers, including current publications and external citation databases, well
in advance of formal reviews, you serve the individual’s needs and the institution’s needs
at once.
Usability for Administration
• Unfortunately, streamlining data collection in faculty activity reporting at many universities
and colleges typically involves sending staff on a mission around the institution to ask
different offices for disparate information. It takes up staff time, and the distance of
leadership from the source of the data itself limits how helpful the exercise is.
• We recommend that universities and colleges implement a faculty activity reporting
platform that offers administrators a self-service interface to pull simple, clear reports for
themselves throughout the year—containing data that has been personally validated by
the faculty whose work it reflects.

Faculty Technology Across the Life Cycle

Where is the full picture of faculty’s contribution at your institution?
• We believe that an institution’s best and most valuable resource is its faculty. When you
invest in faculty and their ability to succeed, you invest in the institution. Despite this, there
are very few—if any—technologies built for faculty, and none that take into consideration
the entire lifecycle of a faculty career, from first job search through tenure or retirement.
Research on the need for a full faculty platform
• Through research efforts with over 100 institutions, we’ve learned that colleges and
universities are seeking a set of tools that:
• Support faculty advancement, networking, and grant seeking;
• Increase transparency and equity in institutional processes around faculty (like their
performance review, contract renewal, or promotion opportunities);
• Streamline the accreditation process, especially as it relates to faculty related outcomes;
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• Deliver on institutional goals around faculty diversity (especially since we know that an
increasingly diverse student body value this);
• Make strategic and effective use of faculty time;
• Increase the quality of data around academic decisions like curriculum improvements and
workload.
• Decrease the financial strain and inefficiencies that currently exist around data collection,
committee work, institutional review and more;
• Finally, all the above should be available in a single platform that’s easy for faculty and
administrators to use;
• The ideal faculty technology system, then, would fill the critical gap that exists today
between the abundant, multifaceted work that scholars do and the strategic decisions that
institutions must make.

Receiving Faculty Buy-In

• In North America alone an estimated $20-$25 billion is spent by higher education on
technology, few to none of the purchases went to support the work that faculty do on
committees, like hiring, promotion, or tenure.
• No wonder faculty have “software fatigue.” Unless it makes their life easier, why support
yet another technology purchase?
Faculty Drive Higher Ed, But Need Better Tools
• We believe that all stakeholders at an institution benefit when faculty are put at the center
of a technological choice. Faculty are the most important facet of the campus mission. They
deserve tools that make the logistics of their work easier so they can focus on teaching,
research, and leadership.
• Most solutions to this problem don’t understand a faculty member’s daily work. If a task
seems extraneous to the real work of higher education there is little chance of broad
compliance and “buy-in”.
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Putting Faculty First for Institution-wide Results
The Interfolio® Faculty Information System, available from Cyanea, maps directly onto the work
faculty do like filling faculty vacancies, managing annual performance, or serving on curriculum
review or other governance committees. Interfolio offers institutions a single source of
validated information about faculty activity —and a single experience for faculty members
when performing career-related work. This includes the automated collection of data from
external sources like research publication and citation databases, as well as, external
evaluations or confidential letters and recommendations.
Interfolio is developed and maintained based on the feedback of faculty member users who
tell us precisely what they need to make their job easier and effective. This means that
Interfolio solutions are uniquely intuitive and easy-to-use. That’s because designers and end-
user researchers are employed to make sure all interactions are tested with real scholars.

Interfolio supports faculty work, data, and decisions at more than 275 institutions world-
wide.

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