Faculty Engagement: Passive Versus Active Questions

As faculty retention and wellness become more and more important, school leaders are increasingly trying to ascertain the level of faculty engagement. Assessing this can come from a variety of sources, but two common ones are surveys and from one on ones. Understanding how employees experience their work environment is important. Schools can and should focus on continuous improvement.

Yet, faculty engagement is not solely a product of the work environment. So it’s important to balance the ratio of what Marshall Goldsmith calls passive to active questions.

Imagine a pairing of survey questions like the following:  “Describe what limits your professional growth?” Followed by: “What could be done to improve the situation?”

You might get back the following responses, “Our professional development budget is too small and not everyone gets to go to the conferences they would like to attend.” In terms of what to do to improve the situation, the answer is likely to be, “The professional development budget should be significantly expanded.”  

Maybe the professional development budget is genuinely too small and that should be addressed, but also be aware that this was a pairing of passive questions and passive questions often beget “environmental” answers. These are reasons attributed to external factors that prevent progress. In this case, the teacher reports that her professional growth was thwarted by a limited PD budget.  

Active questions are the alternative to passive ones. There is a difference between, “Describe what limits your  professional growth?” and “What goals have you set for yourself this year for your professional growth?”

The latter is trying to determine a faculty member’s state of mind while the former is asking them to justify why they may not be making progress.  

A school where all faculty asked themselves the following questions each day might well find faculty engagement improving. (These are based on some of the daily questions that Goldsmith asks himself.)

• Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals today?

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer in The Progress Principle:  Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work show that employees who have a sense of making progress are more engaged than those who don’t.  We don’t just need a target, but we need to feel as though we are nearing the target, not receding from it. (Amabile is a professor at Harvard Business School and the book is based on rigorous field research.)   

•  Did I do my best to find meaning today?

“In Viktor Frankel’s 1946 classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, describes how the struggle to find meaning – the struggle, not the result – can protect us in even the most unimaginable environments.” Meaning cannot be provided by the school. It’s unique for each of us and we need to search for it. 

• Did I do my best to build positive relationships today?

Research by the Gallup organization shows that having a best friend at work plays a large role in employee engagement. No one can give you a best friend. You need to develop a best friend relationship and that takes attention and action.  

Faculty engagement is important and addressing genuine concerns about the work environment is critical, but so is helping people understand that they have more control over whether they feel engaged than they might believe.