Monday, February 6, 2023 - A record 50.5 million Americans quit their jobs in 2022. Most left for offers of higher pay or the ability to work remotely. Higher Ed isn’t immune. Michael and Jeff talk with a former university human resource officer and a professor who studies how colleges manage their talent. This episode is made possible with sponsorship from Course Hero and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Jeff Selingo:
So the phrase the Great Resignation crept into our vocabulary as the pandemic steadily and strongly impacted the global job market. Of course, workers reevaluated their circumstances, and while some left the workforce, others looked for new opportunities. Yet, Michael, even as the markets continue to fear a recession, in many sectors it continues to be a job seeker's market.
Michael Horn:
There's another term that generated buzz this past fall as well, Jeff, which is quiet quitting. We heard stories of employees pushed to their limits by the strain of pandemic working conditions. We know people who have realigned their own personal priorities, and it seems that workers are often drawing firmer boundaries in their work-life balance with personal lives coming out on top. The question for us is, how are colleges and universities dealing with all these dynamics? On this episode of Future U, we dig into how colleges and universities can hire talented staff, retain them, and keep them engaged.
Sponsor:
Have you ever had to say to your students, "It's in the syllabus"? In her new e-book, Dr. Stephanie Speicher shares how you can humanize your syllabus to better connect with and engage your students. Download it today at Course Hero, where faculty share resources to improve student outcomes. Find it at coursehero.com/futureu. That's coursehero.com/future and the letter U.
This episode is brought to you by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success through innovation, data and information, policy and institutional transformation. Subscribe to Future U wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoy the show, share it with your friends so others can discover the conversations we're having about higher education.
Michael Horn:
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo:
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
Michael Horn:
Jeff, it was roughly two and a half years ago that you first raised the idea that colleges were taking their staff members for granted in essence, or even mistreating them. You penned this piece in The Atlantic that I won't forget where you said that all too often colleges treat their faculty as the talent, but almost think of their staff as a commodity. And you asked whether that might come back to haunt their operations.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah, Michael, and that was before the Great Resignation was such a thing. I just kind of wish I had penned that phrase.
Michael Horn:
Well, it makes you prescient either way, Jeff, I think.
Jeff Selingo:
Well, maybe. Either way, we brought up this question of the talent on campuses on a number of episodes of Future U, but on today's podcast, we want to treat this question as the main topic. We've seen the daunting surveys like the one published last summer by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, which found that more than half of higher ed employees are considering leaving their jobs within a year.
Michael Horn:
Jeff, that's a huge number. And of course, we're going to have to actually see what develops, because as my friend and co-author Bob Moesta always likes to say, "Bitchin' ain't switchin'." But either way, I think we can say with confidence that there's a lot of friction right now in the college workplace.
Jeff Selingo:
Indeed, Michael. So to help us unpack several of the questions around the workforce on college campuses, we're joined by two experts in the trenches when it comes to higher ed talent. Mary Opperman was chief human resources officer at Cornell University, and since we recorded this interview with her, she has joined Syracuse University as its senior vice president and university secretary to the Board of Trustees. We're also joined today by Kevin McClure, a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, who studies higher education and has written a lot about how colleges manage their talent.
Mary and Kevin, welcome to Future U.
Mary Opperman:
Great to be here.
Kevin McClure:
Thanks so much.
Jeff Selingo:
So Kevin, let's start with you. Michael and I hosted a dinner for college presidents in the DC area recently after the Future U Campus Tour made a stop at Buoy State, and there was widespread agreement in the room that colleges and universities are really struggling to hire right now. How would you describe the job market right now in higher ed generally?
Kevin McClure:
Well, like a lot of things in higher education, it's fragmented. It depends on where you're situated in the organizational hierarchy. It depends on where you're situated geographically. The way that I've kind of described this moment that we're in is that there's a lot of movement happening. I tend to think of it that way, less in terms of a great resignation and more in terms of a lot of movement. That movement can look like some people, yes, deciding that they no longer want to work in higher education, and so they have literally resigned and are looking at other industries.
There are certain parts of the higher ed world where the skills that people have transfer very easily elsewhere. A great example is if you do something in IT, you do something in marketing. Those are skills that easily translate. You've also got some folks that I think are simply looking for better working conditions, a different set of job responsibilities, better compensation. So they may not be leaving higher ed entirely, but they are looking for a different type of assignment within their own institution or somewhere else.
The other piece of the movement that I factor into this is a certain element of labor movement in the sense that I think you've got more questions being asked, sometimes more conflict arising. People that are elevating their expectations of the higher education workplace, and in that way are trying to, I think, push their leaders in certain directions, and that's its own kind of movement as well.
Jeff Selingo:
So in speaking about pushing their leaders in different ways, then there's also the people that remain on campus. What's the greatest threat right now to higher education in your opinion? Is it the fact that they have these open jobs and they can't necessarily fill them? Or is it about engaging the employees they already have to make sure that they stay and are engaged and contribute to the institution?
Kevin McClure:
I mean, obviously both are challenges, both are real, both are important. If you're going to kind of force my hand to pick which one I would put more effort into, it would be the folks that are here that are staying. Because the truth of the matter is that I actually think by and large, we're not going to see a mass exodus of people outside of higher education. And in fact, if we look at turnover data, retention data, I do think that we're seeing elevated numbers, but my sense is that will probably even out over time and that you'll see it a lot of institutions that are for the most part able to fill the vacancies that they have.
So there's a lot to be said on the recruitment side of things, but what I've really been calling for in higher education I think is a little bit more of an emphasis on the idea of talent management. A big piece of that means thinking about the employee experience. What are we doing to support people in their professional growth and the pathways that we create for them? How are we rewarding and compensating people for the skills that they have, but also new skills that they develop over time? And how are we demonstrating an ethic of care so that people say, "This is a place where I want to invest myself and I want to be engaged"? So if it were up to me, it would be really focusing on the talent that we have and trying to keep that talent and develop it.
Michael Horn:
To that end, Mary, what are some of the tactics and approaches that Cornell historically, when you were overseeing the operation there, has used to engage employees in recent years and from which other institutions could learn and perhaps apply some of those learnings to really make that employee experience all that it could be?
Mary Opperman:
Thanks, Michael. I agree completely with Kevin's points about the importance of the employee experience, and the culture broadly in higher ed really needs a good look. I think we've been focused a lot on the pandemic as the cause of all of this, but this has been building in higher ed for a while. We did learn some good lessons during COVID. One of them is you really have to talk to people, and then you have to give them a chance to tell you what they're thinking. Engagement surveys, those are very one way. You'll get some people who will take the time to give you comments, but nothing is quite like a face-to-face or even an online opportunity for people to engage and talk through in a deep way what's happening for them and what they really need.
We know what some of those issues are. Some of them are predictable about pay and whether they can have a flexible schedule, things like that. Others though are quite different. Universities have so many cultures, and really digging into what those cultures are. Are they inclusive cultures? Do people feel like they belong? And then doing the hard work where you can see a problem to really getting in there and working on it. It's really, really essential to dial down the churn.
Michael Horn:
That's a really important set of points there, Mary. I want to turn to another part of this that has resonated with you, because last February there was this op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which we'll link to in the show notes. It was written by Marcy Walton who had left higher ed after 13 years in various student affairs positions. She talked about why, in her perspective, staff and faculty are leaving higher ed. One of her pieces of advice to colleges and universities I know struck a chord with you, and it was this. The phrase quote was, "Stop engaging in mission-based gaslighting." I'd love you to explain what that means and unpack it for us.
Mary Opperman:
Yeah, absolutely. I agree with her. The other thing that she said that's really important here, and it goes with this issue of gaslighting, is recognizing that the workload increase that is faced by people when you start to get this level of turnover. So the way I heard Marcy's point, and I agree with it, is you're supposed to be so driven by the student experience that it overcomes all of your own personal familial needs. That if you are not, then you're really not committed and you really are missing the point of being in higher ed. That is an unfair choice to ask someone to make. You can be very committed to a student experience with also valuing and prioritizing your own career and the needs of your family.
Jeff Selingo:
So Kevin, I want to circle back to a word that you used, because you used the word talent in higher ed. It seems to me that in the 25 years I've been covering it, covering the industry, that when many campus leaders, especially presidents thought about talent on campus, they were really talking about one specific group. And that, to be honest with you, is their faculty. Everyone else, and these are my words, were essentially cogs in a wheel that could be easily replaced. And then of course the pandemic hit, and it was those frontline workers that became essential to keeping campuses running. I know this wasn't true on every campus, but faculty were largely able to work from home.
So now, as we come out of the pandemic, I'm wondering, Kevin, does higher ed need a new approach to how it views the talent of its workforce? Because as Michael and I are talking to leaders, and Gene Block, the chancellor at UCLA comes to mind here, because he told us a few months ago that it was never difficult to hire anybody who wanted to work for the University of California, especially UCLA, now it is.
Kevin McClure:
Yeah, 100%. I would agree with that characterization that to the extent that we were using the word talent in higher education, it was almost exclusively reserved for faculty. I think that if we are going to be able to achieve some of the goals that we have set for ourselves in higher education ... So I'm talking true organizational goals, being able to move the dial on institutional strategy. We have to pay attention to talent in a much broader way that's inclusive of really the entire organization, because I think everybody plays a role in helping to support students, help them achieve a sense of belonging, help us to deliver on the promise of higher education.
And the fact that we haven't, I think, really prioritized staff in particular as talent has led to a certain level of comfort with just replacing and replenishing workers. If we lose someone, we'll run a search. We'll find somebody else. We probably won't change the job. We may not change much in the way of the salary. We'll just repost that baby and can count on hopefully being able to bring somebody in. Obviously, there are problems with that approach to begin with, but I think it's particularly challenging at a time when there are lots of other job opportunities.
That movement that I was talking about earlier? There is movement like that happening in a lot of industries, which means that there are a lot of places hiring. There are jobs that even at some points in time we may not have thought of as being particularly attractive outside of the higher ed sector are. So we've got lots of ed tech companies that say, "Hey, you understand the student experience. You understand what staff are looking for. You understand what is necessary to run an academic program. Help us sell this product, or help us train our people so that they understand what higher ed is all about." So folks are leaving and getting paid a lot more and experiencing greater flexibility.
So as I've said, for me, a big part of the message that I've been trying to deliver is that we need a talent management strategy. Every institution needs to have its own talent management strategy. You could think of a talent management strategy as not altogether that different from an enrollment management strategy in the sense that you're thinking about the student experience from the moment that they are first contacted all the way through application, to matriculation, to the experience that they have at the institution. Similarly, with employees, we need to be thinking about the moment that we advertise the job, the nature of the application process, how we are vetting employees, how easy is that, and then what their experience is once they arrive at the institution so that we can bring in the best and we can keep the best.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. It's interesting, Mary. Kevin just used that word comfort, because so much of the focus right now is on staff. I think college leaders I talk to often just view the faculty as more permanent. But is that a risky view to have now as a leader these days? How vulnerable do you think faculty are to leaving right now? Especially even at prominent institutions where we think, "Well, once you get a job at Cornell, you're never going to want to leave." Right?
Mary Opperman:
Right. I do think that churn in general is concerning, and it impacts the quality of the student experience. It also impacts the quality of the faculty experience. So increasingly, it is harder on faculty to spend their time doing what they want to do. Working on their scholarship, doing their research, publishing. So I don't think we should skip over the experience of faculty, either. Most importantly, I think we need to break through this issue that there is a hierarchy of importance and that there are the sort of senior faculty, and then there are the junior faculty, and then there are everybody else. That kind of cultural segmentation runs exactly opposite when we talk about belonging and inclusion.
Getting at that issue, to Kevin's point, begins with recognizing that things are changing. So before you ever put up a position, really talking to people about what they still need in that role, and then really being intentional about getting that in the job, and including in those discussions, the faculty that will be impacted by it. But we will do ourselves a great disservice if we just assume these issues are only those issues of essential workers. Culture and climate and a sense of true belonging and being heard and listened to what for what's important to you, that cuts across every population.
Michael Horn:
So let's shift to talking about the future if we've explored sort of what's going on in the present moment and so forth. I'm just curious out of what you both just said, if there's an opportunity to think differently about how campuses are run in ways that don't hurt the faculty, to construct comprehensive talent management strategies that perhaps undo the hierarchy and start to create that more inclusive feeling across the institution. For example, at the dinner that Jeff mentioned earlier, we also heard from a VP of student affairs there that they're beginning to train their own students as employees. Now, this is something that's happened a lot in IT where students have apprenticeships and internships within the institution's IT departments, but they're starting to do this more broadly in lots of different areas. And I think it's probably the case that most people don't go to college thinking that they'll go into higher ed as a career, but I guess I'm curious if that needs to change to really start to change this dynamic.
Kevin, your thoughts first?
Kevin McClure:
Yeah. So as I've been thinking about the future, I have been trying to basically conceptualize what a different approach could look like, what a different type of institutional strategy around employees could look like. And for me, I've kind of landed on a couple of defining features. One of them really hits on a point that you just made around training up students, and that is doing a much, much better job of creating professional pathways and supporting the professional growth of employees. We, I believe, largely outsource professional development in higher education. And that's not to say that there isn't a lot that happens internally or isn't available internally, but I think we could do a lot more when it comes to supporting internally our employees and helping them grow and recognizing them for that growth.
So that's one feature of this new institution that I refer to as the caring university, is that we make sure that people don't feel stuck, that they don't feel like they're in a career cul-de-sac and are despite experience and knowledge, sitting in the same role for 12 years because no one has really stopped to say, "How could we leverage what you know and be able to use that elsewhere?"
Another key feature for me is that we need to do a better job of collecting data on employee experience. So Mary is 100% right that we often will do something like an engagement survey, but it is often limited. It might be episodic. It might not be data that gets acted upon or shared widely. Here's the deal. We are organizations that are full of people that know how to do research. They know how to ask questions. They know how to collect data. They know how to analyze it and would love to be involved, but they're going to ask that it be made transparent and that we do something with it. But I think that given the fact that we are knowledge organizations, that we are full of talent, that we are predicated on the idea of human development, we ought to be investing heavily in the growth of our employees and using data to inform how we construct the employee experience.
The last thing I'll say for me that's kind of a hallmark of this new approach that I've been trying to promote is that it doesn't see investing in student success and investing in employees as being at odds with one another. In some ways, we've viewed investment in employees as kind of a nice add-on. We've got to do all of these things over here for students, and if we've got a little bit left over, maybe we'll put it in a retention fund or maybe we'll hire somebody. Those two things in my mind don't really add up. They can't be reconciled, that more additive approach. So what I'm suggesting is that we take a more integrated approach, which is to say the student experience, our ability to achieve the outcomes that we're seeking as an organization flow directly from the faculty and staff and administrators that we have in place. So an investment in our people is an investment in our organizational outcomes. Those two things come together.
Michael Horn:
Great set of points. I love the last one on the ... heeds the Danny Meyer wisdom of put your employees first, and everything else will lift up if you do so. Mary, what are your thoughts?
Mary Opperman:
Yeah, I agree with all of that. I'll just add a little bit to the underlying concept. The underlying concept is really to have a value proposition for your employees. In order to make that work, especially in larger universities where there are a lot of microcultures, we have to invest in our managers and leaders. We need to give them not only the development and training and time to practice, but we also need to give them time to lead. We can't fill their days with their own set of tasks and then hope that they lead others in their spare time. We need to be thoughtful about that right from the top of the organizations, from the deans and others down to department chairs and managers, and make sure and be very intentional about who we put in those roles, how we train them, and how we evaluate them, because they are the linchpin to a quality experience.
And then one other add to what Kevin was saying, we do need to work on career development. Actually, being able to stay in one place and develop your career is a great part of our value proposition. And we also need to offboard recognizing that if someone leaves us, we want them to want to come back. We spend a lot of time in onboarding. We need to spend as much time in offboarding, creating grateful employee alumni who speak well about where they are and perhaps will return in a different role.
Jeff Selingo:
Yeah. It's amazing to me, Mary, that as Kevin said too, we're these learning organizations, but yet we don't apply that to our employees. We have a couple minutes left. Both of you have given some great advice, I think, to leaders and others who will be listening to this. I just want to ask a final piece of advice that each of you would give. So as we wrap up, Mary, what advice would you give to a chief human resources officer right now?
Mary Opperman:
Yeah, I would say culture is everything. The cultures that understand them. Don't make assumptions, and don't define the culture from your seat. Kevin referred to this in the beginning. At certain levels in an organization you think you know, get out and talk to people and listen without judgment to their experiences. We value greatly diversity and inclusion. In order for that to be real, people need to belong. They need to feel like they can be who they are and thrive. So really prioritize that culture, that employee experience and that culture.
Jeff Selingo:
And Kevin, how about you? What advice would you give to a college president or a university president right now around the human talent piece of the operation?
Kevin McClure:
I was going through my Rolodex of ideas and trying to figure out what's the one thing that I really want to try to underscore here. I think for me, first of all, we have a moral imperative to care for one another and to create communities in which people feel supported. So apart from other reasons to be thinking about this, I really do believe that as leaders, it is partly our responsibility to build those types of communities. It is hard. And many cases, these are complex organizations. So I'm not suggesting that this is an easy thing to do, but it is critically important. But if we are also to think about why else should this be important, I really do think that organizational success is going to depend very heavily on the extent to which we are able to no longer treat working conditions and working cultures as an afterthought. It's got to be central to the strategy.
The other piece of this that I'll say to hopefully make it feel a little less overwhelming for a given college leader is that this doesn't have to be up entirely to the president or the chancellor to take on and single-handedly try to achieve this transformation, nor does it have to be up to the human resources office, which I have heard on many, many occasions are feeling it just as much as every other part of the university. They're understaffed. They have tons of expertise that they're not really able to use in the way that they would like. This has to be a whole campus project.
I'll send one message directly to my faculty colleagues if any are listening, which is that you can't just point the finger at administrators the whole time either. We are involved in building the culture. We are also to blame for some of the problems that we are experiencing and talking about. So every single one of us can look for small wins in small ways to kind of move the dial. Not all of them have to be monumental or incredibly expensive, but can nevertheless make a difference in how we all experience our workplaces.
Jeff Selingo:
Some great advice there for everybody on campus, including faculty members. As you say, you can't just always point the finger as somebody else.
Kevin McClure, Mary Opperman, thank you so much for being here with us today, and we're going to be right back on Future U.
Michael Horn:
This episode is being brought to you by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Today's college students are more than just students. They're workers, parents and caregivers and neighbors, and colleges and universities need to change to meet their changing needs. Learn more about the foundation's efforts to transform institutions to be more student-centered at usprogram.gatesfoundation.org.
Welcome back to Future U. And Jeff, coming out of that segment with Kevin and Mary, I'm reminded of what a UCLA student, Sarah, said to us when we were at UCLA almost a year ago on the Future U Campus Tour.
Sarah Wang:
Finally, I think a happy faculty, a happy staff makes for happy students. And I think that has really shown, especially during the pandemic, that our faculty are humans, too.
Jeff Selingo:
I remember that well, Michael. And this conversation also hearkens back to that piece you mentioned at the top of the show that I wrote for The Atlantic at the height of the pandemic about how universities were paying a lot of attention and have historically paid a lot of attention to their faculty. That's what they think of as their talent, but many have really taken their staff for granted. You just can't do that anymore, especially as Kevin reminded us, in a world in which the skillset of higher ed employees can seamlessly transfer into so many other roles across the economy. What's more, those employees can now make those transitions to virtual workplaces or more flexible settings in many cases, and their skillsets are in really hot demand.
Michael Horn:
And that's why of course, when we forced Kevin's hand, he said most important is to focus on retaining and engaging the employees who are already there. And I'll say, Jeff, from a student perspective, that makes a ton of sense to me. I mean, I remember when I was a student at Yale, the continuity of the staff and how special that was for us as students, it really helped make the student experience.
For me, I'll say it was Regina Starolis and Nina Glickson who worked in President Rick Levin's office, for example. Jeff, get this. Regina not only worked with Rick, but she had also been the executive assistant for Benno Schmidt, Bart Giamatti, and all the way back to Kingman Brewster. Talk about continuity. Or frankly, there was the Yale police officer who helped me move in as a freshman, who had been there generation earlier when my dad was a student. He took me to lunch a few times that first year and would tell me old stories about what the campus was like in the '60s and '70s. Or Peggy in the Pierson Dining Hall who knew all of our names and was a staple of our experience.
But what's interesting I think, is that even Yale, wealthy Yale with its $41 billion endowment or whatever it is right now, it's struggling actually with retaining talent. According to a December article in the Yale Daily News, which we'll link to in the show notes, there are currently 900 open staff positions.
Jeff Selingo:
Wow. Wow.
Michael Horn:
And John Whelan, he's the vice president of HR at Yale. He told the news that staff turnover, it's increased by approximately 3% since pre-pandemic years. Now, what's also interesting about all that is it actually echoes with what Kevin told us on the podcast. Yale administrators said the same thing in the article. Basically, when Kevin said we're not actually seeing a mass exodus of people outside of higher education, instead we're seeing an elevated number, but that it will, quote, probably even out over time, and that you'll see a lot of institutions that are for the most part able to fill the vacancies that they have. That's what the Yale administrators are saying as well, Jeff.
Jeff Selingo:
Michael, this conversation reminds me of one that I had about a decade ago when I was editor of The Chronicle with the managing editor at the time, Scott Smallwood, who's now co-founder of Open Campus. As a sports fan, you might recall the great NFL referee strike of 2012. Scott and I were talking about that at the time, and how the NFL assumed the talent on the field were the players. The refs were an afterthought to ownership. You might remember the referees who were locked out. They were part-time employees. Now, they were well-paid and got good benefits. But instead of making them full-time employees, the NFL believed it could hire replacement reps who could easily step in to the speed and sophistication of the modern game. Now, if you're a football fan, you probably remember how that turned out.
Michael Horn:
Yep.
Jeff Selingo:
It was a disaster. You just could remember there was so many bad calls, including some that changed the outcomes of games, that the NFL ended up having to settle that dispute quickly. So what does this have to do with college campuses? Well, just like the NFL missed on the fact that refs are indeed talent integral to the success of their on-the-field products, so too I think are colleges and universities, especially when it comes to student success and student experience.
Those two terms are tossed around a lot by university leaders these days. They want to become student-centered institutions. Well, remember, students spend most of their time in college outside the classroom. So who is the talent they're coming in contact with? It's the resident directors in the dorms, right? It's the advisors to the clubs, the coaches on the athletic teams or club sports. It's the advisors they might have beyond faculty. And as you mentioned, it's the person in the dining hall who just makes the experience overall better.
There's been a decent amount of scholarly research, and we're going to add some of that to the show notes, about the contributions of non-faculty workers such as custodial staff and secretaries. To quote from the book Involving Colleges, which I read years ago, "These individuals create an environment conducive to student learning and personal development." Indeed, there's even this dissertation by a University of Iowa student who observed custodial staff, for instance, at a big state university and noted how often they were the first line of defense for students in trouble. They noticed things others didn't, things like students not going to class or sleeping in a lounge. They were constantly asking students how they were.
Now, obviously colleges don't have the resources of the NFL, Michael. But just like its owners realized who the talent is, I think it's time for college leaders to walk in the shoes of students for a week or two, see who they interact with most on campuses outside the classroom, and then they need to start to think about how to elevate those roles.
Michael Horn:
I think that's a really profound set of points, Jeff. It prompts just one more question from me, which is we talk a lot about creating pathways in professions and in companies all the time. And I thought it was notable when Kevin and Mary both said that we ought to be doing the same thing for employees or prospective employees in colleges. You said colleges are not doing such a good job on helping their own employees learn, and there's an irony there. So I'm just curious, what would a better system look like in your mind?
Jeff Selingo:
Well, Michael, I'm thinking of things like the Career Choice program at Amazon, or other programs that are deliberate in the corporate world about the continuing education of their employees. The thing is in higher ed, employees usually get tuition benefits that they can use at their own institution, but rarely do they get the guidance and/or the time off to pursue that education.
And then what about training? Because in many cases, they may not want a degree from the university. As a part-timer at Arizona State University, I have access to what the university calls Career Edge, and it provides job related training and ongoing professional development opportunities offered by both ASU as well as LinkedIn Learning. That seems like an easy lift for more colleges and universities to offer.
And then there are professional opportunities for some higher level employees in higher ed. As you know, I help found the ASU Georgetown University Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership, which is a cohort-based intensive face-to-face program. I'm often called by college presidents who want to send deans or associate provosts or other senior leaders to the program, but then when you start discussing it with them, they'll say, "Well, I can't really afford to give this person the time off." Although, by the way, we're really only talking about a dozen days over the course of a year. Or they don't want to lose them to a different job at a different university if you give them more training or more professional development.
So what I think really seems to need to happen in higher ed is that there should be a development program, a plan for every employee by department, by area, so that senior leadership has a sense of who all their employees are and who has done what and who needs what in terms of training, start to fill in the gaps and give them the training and education that they need. But we seem to do training and development in higher education as one-offs. We're afraid of losing a specific employee. Or we're offered an opportunity, like I offer presidents at ASU, and they say, "Okay. Yeah, we have this one person that I would love to send there," but they're not really thinking of it in a holistic way that I think is really necessary right now in higher ed.
So Michael, let me leave my response there, because I want to turn to a question from a listener that is on this very topic. This question is brought to you by one of our sponsors this season on Future U, Course Hero. Course Hero is sponsoring our Q&A segment with listeners and is also helping us source those questions this season. This question is direct from Steve App around the role of pay, so let's listen to him now.
Steve App:
Hey, Jeff and Michael. My name is Steve App. I'm the AVP of marketing and business development at Simpson Scarborough, a full-service agency working with colleges and universities. In our latest research report, we surveyed nearly 900 marketing and communications professionals. At a time when higher ed is facing more questions of its value than ever before, we found that two thirds of marketers were exploring new positions. And more troubling, more than half we're considering leaving the industry altogether. There are many factors impacting this willingness to move on, including higher pay, but also increased flexibility, clear paths of advancement, and a general frustration with workplace culture. However, everything I've seen publicly from campuses to date has focused on pay.
My question to you is, in your conversations with senior leaders, do you get the sense that pay is viewed as a panacea to this problem or as a bandaid while they address the other factors contributing to staff retention issues? Thanks so much.
Michael Horn:
Jeff, I love the question that Steve asked, because the research I think is actually pretty clear around this one. This is how I think about it, anyway. It goes all the way back to 1968 when Frederick Herzberg did this groundbreaking research on satisfaction of employees, and it's been research that's been replicated in education in lots of other settings by lots of other researchers since.
The upshot is basically this, that it's possible, Jeff, to be both satisfied and dissatisfied in your job at the same time. What Frederick Herzberg found was that if you increase pay or improve working conditions and things like that, it can help eliminate dissatisfaction, but it doesn't actually improve satisfaction in the job itself. It doesn't motivate, in other words. To motivate an employee and make you more satisfied, you have to give employees opportunities for advancement, pathways, recognition, responsibility for the work that they're doing, make the work itself more intrinsically interesting, things of that nature. A lot of the things, frankly, that dovetail with the answer that you just gave around creating more development plans around employees.
So I think the upshot is this, which is that boosting pay is probably a bit of a bandaid from the bigger work of what Mary told us on this episode, which is make sure that your employees have a clear value proposition for hiring your university as their place of employment. Because just as you as the university are hiring them, they're actually hiring you, too. Now, that's a topic and a set of research that I've been working deeply in right now for my next book, so stay tuned. I suspect more from me on this. But for now, just a big thanks to Steve for the question. And of course, a thank you to Mary and Kevin for joining us and shedding so much wisdom on this important topic of talent at colleges and universities. And thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Future U. We'll be back next time.
