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Project Overview

Our commitment to ensuring equitable and accessible faculty workload guidelines is an essential factor in supporting faculty success. The University of North Texas Academic Workload Initiative is a commitment to cultivating an academic environment that champions fairness, transparency, and inclusivity in distributing faculty workload responsibilities.

Our purpose is to develop sustainable and equitable procedures that empower faculty and academic leaders to balance contributions across teaching, scholarship/creative activity, and service through fostering a culture of excellence and collaboration.

Project Goals

We accomplished ambitious goals to ensure faculty workloads were fair and accessible. These included:

  • Assess faculty and administrators' perception of workload transparency and fairness.
  • Provide support, resources, and guidance to department chairs, deans, and faculty workload committees to enhance workload transparency and clarity for all faculty members.
  • Inform workload policy and guideline changes to reflect transparency, equity, and fairness.
  • Support units in complying with academic workload policy changes through training and dialogue opportunities to share best workload practices from peer institutions and UNT exemplars.

Workload Initiative Journey

Our Workload Initiative journey was multi-faceted, guided by a commitment to engage our faculty and leverage the best work of faculty workload practices nationwide.

Origins: Unit leaders updated their workload guidelines in 2019, but more work was needed to specify workload expectations for each faculty rank, clarify how service was counted and rewarded, and ensure that all faculty and administrators knew where to locate workload documents.

Faculty workload initiative workgroupFaculty Data and Engagement: We examined faculty data (COACHE, UNT survey of workload clarity and transparency, exit data). We also hosted Dr. KerryAnn O’Meara, who facilitated workshops based on her work with the NSF-funded Faculty Workload and Rewards Project (FWRP) and supported a yearlong UNT Workload Community of Practice involving 12 chairs across six colleges to implement the workload practices in their departments. 

Policy Changes: The Workload Community of Practice provided feedback to the UNT Faculty Policy Oversight Committee as they updated UNT Policy 6.027. The feedback helped ensure faculty workloads were transparent, clear, accountable, credit-based, and aligned with faculty rank work expectations.

Faculty workload initiative workgroup engaging in discussion

Administrator Input: Deans and chairs provided feedback on workload policy, procedural changes, learning resources, and timelines to ensure this work was meaningful and realistic.

Policy Updates: The UNT Faculty Policy Oversight Committee solicited feedback from the Workload Initiative CoP to inform their updates to UNT Policy 6.027. The policy updates increased workload transparency, credit, clarity, accessibility, and accountability.

Training and Dialogue Session: Faculty Success created a two-part workload training on Bridge to help unit leaders understand and implement effective unit workload practices. Faculty Success will also hold faculty dialogue sessions to answer faculty and unit leader questions and host guest speakers and UNT exemplars.

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