The ACE Equity-Minded Faculty Workloads Report identifies 6 linked to equitable workloads: Transparency, Clarity, Credit, Norms, Context, and Accountability. Below you'll find the definitions and suggested tools for developing each condition.

The ACE Equity-Minded Faculty Workload Worksheet Booklet provides sample worksheets to guide the process of implementing service dashboards, service audits, faculty expectations guidelines, compensation for key roles, credit systems, teaching credit swaps, planned service rotations, planned teaching time rotations, differentiated workload policies, modified criteria for tenure and promotion, and restructuring and reducing committees. 

Visible information about faculty work activities 

Tools

• Faculty Work Activity Dashboard: Identifies the kinds of work that must be done to maintain an academic unit and what work faculty are doing beyond it. Dispels myths and misconceptions among faculty about the workloads of colleagues.  It informs historically marginalized faculty of the norms, so they know when to refrain from volunteering.  Finally, it reveals unintended inequities in assigned service and teaching that compound over the trajectory of a faculty member’s tenure in a department.   
  • Requirements: Faculty service audit; Faculty work activity dashboard 

Identified, defined, and understood benchmarks of faculty work activities 

Tools

• Explicit Policies: Faculty expectations guidelines identifying the exact amount of teaching, research, and service expected for faculty at different ranks and different employment categories. (tenure eligible, instructional, and clinical). Clarity about the conditions in which compensation is associated with a taking on a role, compensation range, type of compensation, and how faculty can indicate an interest in a role. 
  • Requirements: Faculty collaboratively created guidelines that balance university, departmental, and faculty needs given employment categories 

Departments recognize and reward faculty expending more efforts in specific areas 

Tools

• Extra Effort Workload Bank: faculty members can bank their extra effort work in one area in order to do less in another area. 
• Teaching Credit Swap Systems: Units define teaching workload for all faculty and provide opportunities for faculty to meet their teaching obligations through different pathways. 

Departmental culture includes the expectation and commitment that workloads are equitable 

Tools

• Opt–Out System: addresses disparity for less desirable/career enhancing work. Faculty make the argument for why they alone should not have to do the work versus approaching it with “why would I agree to do that work.” 
• Planned Rotations: service and teaching assignments are rotated among all department members. This avoids social loafing. 

A reward system and load assignment that recognizes different strengths and interests to achieve shared departmental goals.  

Tools

• Personalized Employment Arrangements: policies that include negotiated deviations from traditional work expectations. These arrangements are used to evaluate faculty members at the end of the year.  
• Individualized/ Modified Appointments: agreements for faculty members who were hired to do different kind of faculty work or scholarship that is interdisciplinary thus more difficult to traditionally evaluate. 

Mechanisms are in place that track the fulfillment of work obligation and awarded credit for fulfilled responsibilities and to avoid or address social loafing. 

Tools

• Restructure and Reduce Committees: review all committees to determine the number of members, the role each member has, the purpose, and how often the committee meets to determine redundancy and degree of effort. 
• Statements of Mutual Expectations: outlines the obligation that faculty members have to the community this might include agreed-upon behaviors that fosters completion of departmental work (attending committee meetings). Statements may be used in annual reviews.