The Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey, administered by the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a rigorous and research-based survey designed to help universities meet the needs of their faculty and improve faculty life. The Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey has been administered at hundreds of universities, and the results include benchmarking against peer institutions. The survey provides key insights about faculty experiences in the academic workplace, perceptions of their working conditions, and opportunities for improvement. VCU's implementation of the COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey is guided by a diverse committee of VCU stakeholders who will ensure the process and resulting recommendations are meaningful for all VCU faculty.

All full-time VCU faculty who have completed at least one year at VCU are eligible to participate. This includes tenured, tenure-eligible, and term faculty on both the Monroe Park and MCV campuses.

All responses are confidential. VCU will never have access to any identifiable information. COACHE will redact any small sample sizes (groups less than five) from final reports they share with VCU. Additionally, COACHE will redact any potentially identifiable data shared in open-ended responses. Faculty will receive individualized links to participate, which COACHE uses to send automated reminders to those who have not participated. Your name, email, or other identifying details are never associated with your responses, and no identifying information is ever shared with VCU.

Eligible faculty will receive an email invitation to participate in mid-February. Each link is unique to a faculty member and cannot be shared. The survey remains open until early April. You will receive multiple reminder emails during the survey period.

The length of time it takes to complete the survey varies from person to person, but is generally about twenty minutes.

The Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey is critically important in providing VCU with data on which to base improvements in policy, practices, and working conditions for faculty. Your response is vital. VCU needs to hear from as many faculty as possible to have the best possible data-driven approaches to improving the faculty experience and supporting faculty success. The higher the response rate, greater the possibility of robust analysis.

The results will enable VCU to identify areas for improvements such as policies, practices, working environments; and overall to better support faculty well-being and success. We anticipate receiving the results late in the summer (around August). We will then determine next steps to engage the faculty. More information about the insights and actions generated from the COACHE data will be shared with faculty during the 2025-2026 academic year. More details about that process will be shared in the Fall semester of 2025, after the reports become available.

The survey covers a wide array of topics. These include demographic questions, questions about the nature of faculty members’ appointments, the nature of their work and how their workload is distributed, teaching work, research work, service work, engagement with interdisciplinary work, opportunities for collaboration, mentoring structures, knowledge of and satisfaction with tenure and promotion processes, university governance and leadership, engagement, work-life balance, climate, opportunities for recognition, retention factors, and overall satisfaction. The instrument is thorough in evaluating faculty experiences and satisfaction across the various domains of faculty work.

The summary reports from Harvard will include areas of concern identified by Harvard and COACHE. Seeking insights from the Steering Committee, the plan is to create faculty working groups. Faculty who participate in working groups in the 2025-2026 academic year will have access to the summary reports provided by Harvard. Deans will also have access to Dean's reports produced by Harvard. VCU will strive for providing transparency for all faculty about the results and how those are driving future actions, while balancing the need to ensure the reports are used appropriately and responsibly. We hope that faculty with interest in having deeper involvement in reviewing reports, requesting analyses, and recommending actions will volunteer for these working groups, when they are formed next year.

VCU has participated in the COACHE Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey in the past, including in 2015 and again in 2019. Since then, there have been many leadership changes and the context of faculty work has also shifted. VCU plans to treat this year’s data as a fresh start, looking forward to how we can improve faculty life and success as we move ahead rather than comparing to past VCU reports.

All full-time VCU faculty are eligible to participate - tenured, tenure-eligible, and term faculty, provided that they have been employed by VCU for at least one full year. Faculty in their first year at VCU are not eligible to participate. Also ineligible to participate are faculty with administrative appointments above the level of Department Chair (i.e., Assistant/Associate Deans and higher).

The Faculty Steering Committee is providing input on the selection of peer institutions. Those decisions have not yet been made. However, the steering committee has requested to prioritize factors such as institution type, institutions with health sciences, institutions with comparable demographic profiles and distributions of faculty type, and institutions with similar designations as VCU (e.g., R-1, Carnegie community engagement designation, urban campuses, minority serving institutions). Ultimately, VCU will select five peer institutions who are also participating in the survey or who have recently participated at the institutional level. Schools and colleges will also receive Dean's reports with comparisons to peer schools/colleges (which might not be the same peers as the institution-level peer comparisons).