How to Make Faculty Meetings More Productive, Values-Driven, and Meaningful

Do you look forward to faculty meetings? Can you recall a faculty meeting that left you feeling inspired? Faculty meetings are a place for business, but they are also a unique mechanism for members of the department to gather, connect, celebrate achievements, and work together on shared goals of excellence in education and research. Unfortunately, most faculty members do not have formal training on running effective meetings, and faculty meetings are often poorly organized, have inequitable distribution of voices, and are not events that faculty members look forward to as part of their job. Faculty meetings that waste time lead to disengagement and poor attendance and can ultimately drive people away from the department. We wondered whether we could identify a subset of critical problems with faculty meetings and, antithetically, find commonalities among departments that hold productive meetings. As part of our broader efforts through BME UNITE to strengthen departmental culture and create a more supportive academic community, we offer practical strategies to make faculty meetings more inclusive, engaging, and productive. This perspective was collectively crafted by members of the academy from different career stages and diverse perspectives (race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and more) with the goal of establishing guidelines for how to make faculty meetings spaces for effective and democratic decision making. We suggest creating inclusive agendas, increasing efforts to give everyone a (figurative and literal) seat at the table, and using organizational tools to save meeting time. These strategies can be applied locally to faculty meetings and lab groups, and tenets from these strategies could extend to meetings across the university. Implementing these changes will improve the culture and create a safe space to exchange ideas, which will ultimately increase retention, productivity, and meaning.