Development of a Faculty Work Load System: A Case Study in a Public University

Introduction

In Thailand, public universities and private universities have different ways to assign the work of a faculty member and evaluate the performance of a faculty member. Private universities are just like private companies. Each faculty gets either a short-term contract or long-term contract. Their performance gets evaluated and the salaries get increased proportionally. Unlike public universities which are government organizations, the most faculty members are government officers. Their performance evaluation is less important since it has very small effect on the salary increment. The salary increment for government officers depend mainly on the whole yearly government budget and the seniority of the officer ranks. Thus, the government officer faculty may not pay attention to the performance towards the organization. To motivate them, outsource income is assigned as top-up on the salary. Thus, some internal regulation on workload characterization needs to be developed for assigning such a bonus.

The faculty members in Thailand are focused on the teaching job. However, there are various types of the universities based on Thailand Ministry of Education. Some institution is only focused on the graduate level. Most of these are in the urban area. They have a number of high-quality students. Thus, the research can be focused intensively. Some institution is a teaching type of institutions where many thousands of students exist. Most of these are in suburb areas. Then the faculty member cannot do research much. Among the two kinds, like our university, we have both undergraduate level and graduate level and we are in the middle tier university where most of students are not of high quality. The institution needs to focus on both research and teaching since the university ranking is dependent on both sides. Then the faculty member need to do both research and teaching.

For small to medium size universities (5,000-6,000 students), such as the university in the rural area, the teaching staff is sometimes inadequate (http://www.mua.go.th). Also, there are limited budgets to hire the administrative persons. Lecturers, then, need to do administrative works besides teaching. The administrative works are more for the case of a small faculty where the number of administrative persons is very few. The faculty members have to teach 4-5 courses per semester plus administrative works. Then, researching time becomes less though it is also important. To clearly identifying the workload unit for teaching and research, the faculty member needs to write the summary report. Such the documents may be subjective unless the clear regulation on the working unit for each type of job is provided.