Surface - Going Beyond Rank and Tenure: What Defines the Value of the Academic Nurse Educator – Part 1

This episode of the NLN Nursing EDge Unscripted Surface track is part 1 of 2 featuring guest Kate Jones.

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Transcript

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[Music][Music] Welcome to this episode of the NLN podcast Nursing EDge Unscripted the Surface track and thank you for joining us. This episode is entitled Going Beyond Rank and Tenure: What defines the value of the academic nurse educator. Our conversation today will focus on how we nurse educators work is defined, acknowledged and celebrated. And to help us today we have a very special guest. Dr. Jones is the clinical associate professor and director for the healthcare leadership and executive healthcare leadership programs and also the interim director of nursing informatics. Welcome Kate and thank you for joining us. Oh thank you for having me I'm excited to have this conversation today. That's fantastic and I know Rachel and I are as well. You know we wanted to start really the theme of this conversation is going to be around be around value and the word value originates from Latin and French and means to be strong or to be of work and I think over time we've also added a monetary kind of meaning to the word value so I think it could have a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people. What are your thoughts about how values defined really independent of profession or discipline? How is value defined in the workplace? As I was thinking about this topic, I was thinking about all the ways that we use the word value and conversation so we say things like I value your opinion or that item you know I want to sell it for fair market value or even this bracelet has sentimental value for me. So those words are a assigning worth or importance to something right so now we take that and we translate it to the workplace and there you'll hear things like a company's most important asset is its employees or the one that if a company takes care of their employees their profits will take care of themselves. So those are ascribing value in some way to this idea of what employees bring to the workplace and so it's a value proposition that is much more complex than the idea of I do a job for you, you pay me a salary that that's kind of the, you know, the bottom line of it. But what all is wrapped up in that? I do a job and you pay me a salary? If you want your employees to stay and to be engaged employees I think you have to really take that farther right there has to be a way that employees feel that they're valued other than just receiving their paycheck. So some employees who maybe don't feel valued might have the luxury of saying well then I'm going to leave here and I'm going to go work somewhere else but everyone doesn't have that luxury so if someone doesn't feel valued they may end up becoming disengaged at work. So then it is down to that bottom line equation - I'm doing the work you're giving me a paycheck and that's about it and that's a sad way to go through your work life especially when we think about how much time we spend at work. Time has its own value, right, and how we spend our time and where we spend our time and with whom we spend our time so I really think it's important like you said to elevate the conversation above this exchange of work for compensation. I think there's a lot more to talk about. Yeah definitely. And to take it a step further it also makes me think about the way we attribute value to things through the connotation that's attached to the way we evaluate performance, the way we reward performance, the way that we think about what is it that we're measuring the metrics we're measuring and the productivity of our employees and I'm not even, you know, thinking about in academia yet. We can get there and I think we're going to have a really rich conversation about that but just in general non-discipline, non-profession specific there's always metrics and I think there's a very strong connotation attached to the metrics and company or an institution has that sends a message of value it sends a big message so what gets measured by definition is what's valued. So if there's this one of my big things in a in an organization is, you know you have your company values, usually your mission statement, your core values and if your core values don't match up with what's being measured then you have a disconnect and so if you have great words like innovation and respect and you know diversity but your measures of how an employee's work is evaluated doesn't take into account those things then that disconnect is hard for us to understand. I think as employees and it really really bothers me when core values are just words on the website rather than being lived in in daily work life and so that's a whole other use of the word value, right? What's important to me in a behavioral way, which almost doesn't have the monetary connotation assigned to it, and then how do you define how who and who how do you define innovation, for example, if that's probably one of the core values and you want that to show up in the work, how do you measure that, who decides how it's measured, who decides what it is like, who defines that, and so there is the is it defined is it pulled into the daily work is it measured and then who does all of that? Is it co-created? You know, I don't know how often I've been involved in co-creating my performance evaluation ahead of time, right. So I think that an organization can do some things around that which is maybe it's simply a question on the annual evaluation that is and hopefully employees are having an opportunity to do a self-evaluation, you know, describe some ways in which you live the company's values and maybe you do more in one of the value areas than another. I think that's one way another way that I have had values kind of made living in the workplace is when I start a meeting I would have you know organizations do different things they'll do you know start with successes or wins or whatever I would have people start with a story about how they applied our values and work since our previous meeting so that's another way I love that because you know I would venture to guess I know from my experience in academia, and I would venture to guess others have the same experience as well - there's a lot of time invested in coming up with an organizational values and revisiting the the values every so often often aligned with when you're revisiting your strategic plan for the next five to seven or however many years your institution does it and you're right we spend so much time in that how are we manifesting, bringing it to life and aligning it with how we embrace it create space for it recognize it and for lack of a better word reward it or evaluate that it's actually happening. Exactly. And I also appreciate the examples that you gave Kate is that using like incorporating the values into your daily work happens on a daily basis at a meeting you know in these kind of like little micro interactions and engagements with one another as peers as colleagues as teams I think just that constant reminder I know Rachel and I having done a lot of our teaching and simulation we start with this basic assumption to help create you know from let me just like that from the Center for Medical Simulation to help create an environment where learners can feel comfortable taking risks in the in the service of learning and we use this statement every single time without fail consistently whenever we engage with our learners to embark in this experience. So I think the consistency is key the daily reminders can be very helpful and that can really make it feel like you're living these values. That's fantastic. Yeah. I think it's an important aspect of a healthy work environment to first of all have values that had, as Rachel said, they get revisited sometimes. So when they get revisited who gets to weigh in on what the values are going to be? You don't want it to be something that happens at a senior leadership off-site retreat. You want employees involved in what are the values of this organization because if you're involved in figuring out what they are then presumably you're more likely to be able to live them and display them and you know incorporate them into your work behaviors. This makes me think about and if you don't mind going here with me for a moment taking our lens this 30 mile view big picture values of an organization institution and narrowing our lens a bit to the value of the individual that the individual brings to the institution and the value the institution has for the individual the employee and if we take it within the context of academia and what's really running for me right now is this conversation around or this theme about the disconnect between how the values that we may espouse or want to embrace and how it's evaluated. And I think about in academia how there may be a disconnect in the way we evaluate the productivity of our faculty in terms of those values and for me one of the the big things running for me is I know Michelle and I have colleagues that work at an institution where their evaluations or annual evaluations are based on an annual what's called an annual faculty productivity report and it's endearingly called the zero report because when faculty sit down to fill it out and answer all of the questions that's what, 6, 7 page, I may be stretching the number but it's a long list it's the answer to the question is zero. Zero, zero, zero, how many hours have I done this year, how many times have you done this - zero and faculty there's a feeling that faculty walk away with this is a reflection of my productivity and it can be very disheartening when I would venture to guess many of those faculty are putting in 60 plus hour work weeks are incredibly committed and dedicated and pouring into their institution, their students, the profession and that's how they're being evaluated. And so it kind of leads me to this question of in academia we tend to think about value in terms of research dollars. A lot that the value that especially with research intensive faculty bring their value is often in measured in research dollars or funding. And I think for faculty who are not research intensive who may be clinical or professional track non-research, non-tenure track they have a difficult time articulating their value because their currency is not in research dollars. So I'm curious to hear what your thoughts are with how faculty if they're not bringing in research dollars but yet still contributing and bringing value - how do they articulate that value and how do we shift so we're really valuing their contributions? Well, so if we could all answer this question it would solve one of the great mysteries of academia! I believe, so as you know, my entry into academia was late career for me. I had been in organizations for over 30 years and within a short time I came to realize that that value issue. I realized that research faculty who were bringing research funding are highly valued in academia and for good reason, right? But I knew that that wasn't what I would be doing. So I'm a DNP prepared faculty member. I actually after a few months went to the dean and said, do I need to get a PhD? Because from my organizational experience I always identified what was valued by the organization and tried to contribute to that so here I am kind of seeing this, you know, this value thing that happens and and in academia and I knew that I wasn't going to be doing that and I was trying to figure out if I was in the right place very early on or if I needed to do something different. And the dean said, no you don't need to get a PhD. We hired you for your expertise. So in that situation she was describing value to the expertise that I bring to the particular courses that I was teaching and they didn't require me to go down this other path but it was kind of a very significant kind of awakening for me about you know this what happens in academia so I think we can all agree it's much easier to quantify grant funding dollars than it is to quantify things like student success, student retention, student experience which I think is super important. And so your question kind of implies how... how do we deal with that as faculty who are not research focused faculty? And I think the answer one of the answers is questioning kind of that artificial imbalance between teaching and research. Looking at what we've done from a system perspective that is is artificial. So, for example, I think about why are some academic leadership positions available only to tenured faculty because when you think about it, the track that a teaching faculty is on is about you know excelling at that part of the academic world right being really excellent at teaching and it's in it moving students through their programs and all of those things and it seems to me that academic leadership roles need those kinds of faculty to be promoted into but there are many instances where that's not even an option. So I think that's one imbalance that we should question. I think another one we should question is how much publication is really needed for teaching faculty. You want us to be excellent teachers. We want to be excellent teachers. So how much time, how much of my time because remember back to the comment that time equals value, right? How much of my time do you want me to spend publishing versus improving my courses and just continuing to make sure that they are, you know, have all the most current materials and, you know, everything about my courses is at the highest level? So that's another one. And then another one I think about that we should question is are our activities inclusive? So, for example, do teaching faculty feel welcome at research presentations or research committees? Those events that happen all the time in colleges of nursing that are you know shining a light appropriately so you know I want to be sure it's clear that I believe there need to be both sides of this coin, right? The you can call it the teaching side in the research side or you can call it the knowledge development side and the knowledge to dissemination side. Whatever you want to call it there needs to be both but do teaching faculty feel welcome and is there an inclusive environment around all of the activities that happen in the college. So I've said a lot. I'll pause for a moment I think you've raised really excellent questions and food for thought and tying that to is it reflected in how we're evaluating faculty and how we're using criteria or informing criteria for promotion to reflect that they are experts in their field of what they're doing spending their time doing right if that equates to value and it doesn't always necessarily fall into these nice clean buckets of pubs and presentations and funding scholarship research. And you know, Michelle and I have had this conversation several times about the value we get from or I should rephrase it, when we talk about impact the impact that educators specifically nursing educators are having to the profession, there is, we think, and I'll let Michelle chime in here based on our conversations, there is still value and impact we get from designing a MOOC or having some national webinar where we're getting hundreds of people providing feedback to us on the style and our objectives and the content we're delivering. I find personally a lot of value in influencing my practice and how I shape my future contributions just as much as when I get three blind anonymous reviewers on a manuscript I might submit and so it's different and I'm not saying one is better than the other or putting some quantitative or qualitative label on it and I guess my point here is it's not an either/or. I think there's an and. I think there's a space to consider other forms of contribution and impact beyond these three clean buckets of publications and presentations and research and I may have added a lot of spice out there when people listen to this. Well I think one way because you talked about quantitative how to do it that way one way because we have these buckets of service you know scholarship and teaching right but do they all have to be equal on the evaluation? So when I put together a rubric for a paper I always let my students know you see that section right there that's worth 40 points that's the most important one make sure you're really paying attention and putting the meat that I'm asking for in that part that's worth 40 percent the part that's worth five percent. Yes, I still want you to do but you know I've ascribed value to the different parts of the rubric so should we rebalance teaching scholarship and service and if you're a teaching intensive faculty members should it be 60 of an evaluation where service and scholarship are 20 each and maybe the opposite for research intensive faculty roles. I don't know that that's the solution I bet that there are schools out there that are doing something like that but it just you know there's got to be a way during that process for us to feel like the piece that we bring is valued by the organization. One thing I want to kind of circle back to something also that you just said Rachel too, is that when we as faculty are doing things like innovating, right, creating a new program, innovating, really presenting like you said on a...really stretching ourselves and challenging ourselves to get out of our comfort zone our organization right it's more of a state or national level if there's an opportunity to do that in that effort think about how much internal growth happens think about how much work and if you I think people that talk about money use the word return on investment if I'm doing these things that require a much higher level of knowledge skill and ability quite honestly and they might not be research. I'm not even going to put research higher. I'm going to say it's not research but it's creation it's innovation. It's something different and all of this that. I'm putting into it. I'm going to also put out into everything else I'm doing you know. I think it goes back, I'm going to put it back into the classroom. I'm going to put it back out to my colleagues and it's disseminating at the same time. It's just a different format you know. I just I wonder if there was, I wish there was a way when you talk about evaluating, I wish there was a way to measure that right that academic work that goes into doing some of these things that are quite productive, but not research. I agree with that I think for example redesigning a course and bringing it kind of to a higher level and having it then be evaluated by students and students having a positive experience in that course and it helping move them towards their goals that that's a lot of effort and it shows up on our evaluation criteria you know have...you redeveloped a course and again it feels like, you know, yes no. You can say yes, I have but is the value of what that work effort took is that recognized? And sometimes it is sometimes it's not, but it should be. We want to be conscious of our time boundaries. This conversation could go on and it will. We will pick up with our conversation with Kate discussing how faculty value is defined on our next episode.[Music] Thank you for joining us on this episode of NLN Nursing EDge Unscripted Surface. We hope you join us next time. Until then, remember whether your water is calm or choppy, stay connected, get vulnerable, and dare to go beneath the surface.[Music]