ADVANCE Partnership: Ensuring Fair Access to Career-enhancing Opportunities on Medical School Faculties

University Of California-San Francisco, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

The project focuses on improving the operations of medical research workplaces such as medical schools to improve hiring and retention of medical school faculty and researchers. Workplaces can lose highly qualified staff when there are perceptions of unfair workloads among workers. The project will empower managers with tools and strategies to ensure fair workload distribution among researchers in medical schools. To accomplish this goal the project team will implement an evidence-based intervention which includes a workshop for leaders in academic medicine to learn how to combat these perceptions and to train on using a Tasking Tool to track workload over time. This project builds on past research that showed that there are different types of work in most organizations, and that the different types of work afford more or less positive credit toward career enhancement. Thus, it becomes a problem when some staff are burdened with large amounts of “non-career enhancing” work, as well as when some staff are provided “career enhancing” opportunities more frequently than others. This project is designed to increase awareness of this issue among managers and leaders in medical schools and train them to effectively collect and monitor data on the distribution of the different types of work among all staff. The type of work that is assigned to employees is an important factor to consider in promotion and tenure decisions in academic workplaces and in employee performance review processes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.