Faculty Focus Group Project

Feedback provided by our community of faculty, staff, and students shows that P&S is a place where people have great pride in what they do, whether they are treating patients, conducting research, studying medicine, providing community service, or doing the important day-to-day work that supports our missions. Although we lose faculty each year to other academic medical centers, we are proud that far more faculty are joining P&S than leaving. During the past four years, faculty left at a rate of 3.5% per year, but faculty joined P&S at an annual rate of 9.5%.

Faculty vitality is defined as feeling energized by work, looking forward to coming to work, feeling pride in one’s workplace, and finding work to be personally satisfying and not resulting in burnout. Not wanting to take the vitality of our faculty for granted, we embarked on a project to learn what areas of our operations contribute to our faculty’s vitality, determine ways to reinforce our strengths, and identify areas that need improvement. In focus group discussions held with faculty during the spring of 2015, faculty identified the following strengths as characterizing P&S:

  • Faculty are proud and energized to work at Columbia because of the collegiality, great people, and integrated research, patient care, teaching, and community service missions.
  • Faculty appreciate the financial turnaround and fiscal stability that characterizes today’s P&S.

Areas of improvement identified by faculty focus groups:

  • Stress is increasing while work-life balance is decreasing, and the necessity for changes in processes that contribute to additional stress is not always explained.
  • Increased barriers to getting work done include resource constraints, increased administration/bureaucracy, and incompatible systems.

The focus group discussions showed that P&S has a strong group of professionals who set high expectations for themselves and others. The challenges they face are consistent with a rapidly changing and challenging academic medicine environment characterized by managed care, NIH funding levels, increased compliance requirements, and other mandates.

View a presentation on the process and summary of the focus group project.