Employee Experience in Higher Education

Higher-ed turnover peaked at 16% overall in 2022-23 and edged down to 14% in 2023-24 — still above the ~12% pre-pandemic baseline (CUPA-HR, 2024). That directional improvement is real, but nearly one in four higher-ed employees says they are likely to look for other employment in the coming year, with compensation cited as the top reason (CUPA-HR, 2025). That is a structurally high intent-to-leave rate for a workforce already under staffing pressure in student services, facilities, and adjunct-heavy departments.

The headline figures hide a more important story: employee experience on any given campus is not one story. It varies sharply by employment category, by whether someone holds a tenure-track appointment or teaches per-course on a semester-by-semester contract, and by whether their department chair is a genuine advocate or a distracted administrator. Getting employee experience right at a university means distinguishing between those populations — not running a single culture initiative and hoping it lands evenly.

This page takes a holistic view of campus employee experience across classified staff, tenure-track faculty, and the contingent majority. For depth on faculty governance and the tenure-track/adjunct divide, see Employee Engagement for Universities & Faculty. For the quantitative case on turnover cost and retention tactics, see Reducing Staff Turnover in Higher Education. For the broader campus engagement guide, see Employee Engagement in Higher Education.

Here is the finding most higher-ed HR conversations skip: although compensation is the top stated reason employees say they are considering leaving, it is not the strongest predictor of who actually stays. CUPA-HR's 2025 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey, covering 3,791 employees across institution types, found that job satisfaction and well-being — specifically a sense of belonging, feeling valued, and being engaged — are the strongest predictors of retention. Confidence in leadership ethics and values is the second-strongest predictor, rising to that position from seventh place just two years earlier (CUPA-HR, 2025).

What this means practically is that institutions directing their entire retention effort at compensation adjustments while leaving belonging and leadership trust unaddressed are spending on the weaker lever. That does not mean pay is irrelevant — real wages matter, especially for adjuncts and non-exempt staff. But for institutions where across-the-board salary increases are constrained, belonging, visible recognition of value, and ethical leadership are where the available effort goes furthest.

"Job Satisfaction/Well-Being is the strongest predictor (by far) of retention... the second largest predictor of retention is Confidence in Leadership Ethics/Values." — CUPA-HR, 2025 Higher Education Employee Retention Survey

The implication for campus leaders is to measure and act on belonging, inclusion, and supervisor quality at least as rigorously as compensation benchmarks — not as a substitute for pay work, but as the parallel investment the data actually supports.

Campus employee experience is not uniform. Three populations share the institution but live it differently.

Classified and professional staff are the operational core of any university — administrative coordinators, facilities workers, IT support, student-services counselors, financial-aid officers. They show the highest turnover within the higher-ed workforce: part-time non-exempt staff turned over at 22% in 2023-24, compared to the 14% overall rate (CUPA-HR, 2024). Their experience is shaped by pay compression — new hires earning near what long-tenured colleagues make — fewer visible advancement pathways, and less intentional investment in belonging and development relative to faculty.

Tenure-track and tenured faculty turn over at 7% (CUPA-HR, 2024), low by any sector standard. Their stability rests on academic identity, shared governance, and institutional belonging that most other campus workers lack. The risk for this population is not exit but disengagement: when governance becomes performative, when workloads expand into research time, or when the institution signals that faculty voice does not actually govern academic decisions, the cost appears not in turnover data but in diminished scholarship, reduced mentoring of junior colleagues, and a withdrawal of the discretionary effort that defines faculty contribution.

Contingent and adjunct faculty are 68.2% of all faculty — the majority of the teaching workforce — with per-course pay ranging from $3,200 to $6,320 in 2024-25, often with no benefits, no path to tenure, and no governance seat (AAUP, 2024-25). Their experience is characterized by job insecurity, exclusion from institutional belonging, and real wages that have fallen in purchasing power (AAUP, 2025-26). Any campus employee-experience strategy that treats adjuncts as an afterthought is misreading its own workforce: when more than two-thirds of the faculty teaching your students feel invisible, the student experience suffers alongside their own.

The most consistent finding in CUPA-HR's retention research is that supervisors matter — for both turnover and belonging. CUPA-HR's analysis shows that supervisors who can advocate for staff, grant schedule flexibility, and who receive institutional backing and development are significantly less likely to leave themselves — and they reduce the turnover risk of the people who report to them (CUPA-HR, 2025). The same dynamic holds for department chairs: a chair who buffers workload, protects research time, runs faculty meetings with genuine deliberation, and advocates for adjunct inclusion shapes whether individual faculty members feel valued enough to stay.

Belonging and feeling valued — the strongest predictors of retention in the CUPA-HR model — are not abstract institutional constructs. They are lived through the daily interactions employees have with their direct supervisor or department chair. An institution can publish a belonging statement and fund employee-resource groups while individual supervisors are micromanaging, withholding flexibility, or failing to advocate upward for their teams. The gap between institutional intention and front-line experience is the mechanism behind the disconnect between good survey scores and persistent turnover.

The practical move is to treat supervisor and chair development as a retention investment, not a compliance exercise. Institutions that equip supervisors to run stay conversations, advocate for staff needs, and model flexibility retain more people at a lower cost than those addressing retention only through compensation cycles.

Hybrid and flexible scheduling misalignment — what employees want versus what they get — is one of the lowest-cost retention gaps institutions can close. CUPA-HR research identifies supervisor-level flexibility advocacy as a material lever: supervisors who are empowered to grant flexible arrangements retain more staff than those operating in rigid policy environments (CUPA-HR, 2025). Where the institution sets policy-level flexibility, supervisors are the implementation layer that determines whether the policy is real or nominal.

For non-faculty staff, pay compression compounds frustration when they also lack schedule flexibility. A long-tenured coordinator who earns only marginally more than a new hire and works a rigid in-person schedule while comparable roles elsewhere offer remote flexibility has had two motivations to stay removed simultaneously. Where institutions cannot immediately address compression through market adjustments, building visible career ladders for non-faculty staff and delivering genuine flexibility are the evidence-based compensating differentials CUPA-HR's 2025 research supports (CUPA-HR, 2025).

For faculty, flexibility takes a different form: protected time for scholarship, reduced committee-meeting load, and autonomy over when and how they fulfill instructional and research obligations. These are largely cultural and structural — they cost less than a salary adjustment and signal more institutional respect than most one-off recognition programs do.

Recognition improves retention when it is done well: well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to have turned over after two years, per Gallup and Workhuman's 2024 study of 3,447 employees (VENDOR-REPORTED — Workhuman is a recognition platform; pair this with CUPA-HR's independent belonging findings as the corroborating anchor). The challenge on campus is that recognition has to fit a workforce with very different professional identities.

For tenure-track faculty, recognition that lands is protected scholarly time, research support, and genuine acknowledgment of scholarship by peers and institutional leadership — per AAUP's guidance on faculty recognition and professional identity. "Employee of the month" framing can feel reductive or insulting to faculty whose professional identity is organized around the independence and quality of their academic work. The message that works for this population is: your scholarly judgment governs academic decisions and we protect the time you need to exercise it.

For adjunct and contingent faculty — the large majority of the teaching workforce — basic belonging is the recognition gap. Being included in department communications, invited to teaching-team discussions, and treated as a colleague rather than an interchangeable semester contractor costs almost nothing and directly addresses the exclusion that drives adjunct disengagement. Per-course pay equity and multi-year contracts are structural fixes that belong in a different budget conversation. Daily recognition and belonging are actionable now and produce real returns.

For classified and professional staff, specific, multi-source recognition outperforms generic praise reliably — specific verbal feedback ranked highest among educators surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center, with roughly two-thirds not finding public shout-outs valuable (PLAY-014 / EdWeek Research Center, 2024). Staff who receive frequent, specific appreciation — from supervisors, peers, and even the students and faculty they serve — feel more valued and engage more actively with the institution.

Actify's recognition layer — peer and manager acknowledgment, milestone recognition, activity-first engagement, wellness programs with friends-and-family participation, and a flat pricing model that does not punish you for including the full staff — fits the staff and adjunct experience well. It is not the right tool for replacing shared governance or resolving per-course pay inequity; those are structural. For building the day-to-day belonging and recognition culture that CUPA-HR's data identifies as the strongest retention predictor, it fills a real operational gap.

Start with what the data actually says. Nearly one in four higher-ed employees is likely to leave because of compensation (CUPA-HR, 2025), and faculty real wages decreased ~0.4% from fall 2024 to fall 2025, with a cumulative 7.5% pandemic decline still not recovered (AAUP, 2025-26). No belonging workshop fixes a real-wage decline. No recognition platform substitutes for adjunct contract security. The structural fixes — pay equity, shared governance that means what it says, multi-year adjunct contracts, realistic staff-to-student ratios — have to be named and addressed first. Using belonging-and-values messaging as cover for avoiding compensation work erodes leadership credibility in exactly the way CUPA-HR's data shows: confidence in leadership ethics is the second-strongest retention predictor, and it has to be earned through action, not messaging.

And yet the same data is clear that belonging, feeling valued, and engagement are the stronger predictors of who stays — not compensation alone. This is not a contradiction. Compensation sets the floor below which people will not stay. Above that floor, whether they feel seen, included, and valued by their supervisor and institution is what determines whether someone who could leave actually does. That is the mechanism that gives campus leaders real leverage even in tight budget cycles.

For university HR directors, people-ops leads, and provosts operating across multiple bargaining units and governance structures, the practical prioritization looks like this:

1. Name the structural issues first. Don't lead with an engagement platform if the real problem is adjunct pay below a living wage or governance consultation that substitutes for genuine faculty decision-making authority. Using mission or belonging rhetoric as a substitute for structural relief — what Kanter and Sherman call the nonprofit martyr complex, applied to higher education — backfires and damages the leadership trust that the CUPA-HR retention model shows matters deeply.
2. Invest in supervisor and department-chair quality. Development and empowerment of supervisors is the highest-leverage, most budget-efficient intervention available. It directly improves belonging, flexibility, and recognition for everyone in the reporting chain simultaneously.
3. Differentiate by population. What tenure-track faculty need — governance primacy, scholarly time, research recognition — is different from what adjuncts need — belonging, security, basic inclusion — and from what non-exempt staff need — career visibility, flexibility, compression relief. A single culture program cannot serve all three effectively.
4. Use recognition and engagement tools as multipliers. Tools like Actify — peer and manager recognition, activity-first engagement, wellness, light monthly pulse, flat pricing — work as the layer that makes belonging visible and consistent day to day. They amplify the structural work when the structural floor is adequate. They do not replace it.

The university HR director who gets the most from belonging and recognition investment is the one who has already put compensation equity and governance integrity on the institutional agenda — and uses engagement tools to hold the culture together while that longer work proceeds.