The first attempts to evaluate staff started under the leadership of Dean Friedová. At that time, the first model of “career development and attestation regulations” was drafted, which was discussed by both in the main academic bodies and in a broader faculty-wide forum in 2016-2017. However, the Dean did not have time to put this proposal in practice. Nevertheless, several years later, it became one of the sources of inspiration for the proposal drafted by the Rectorate, which is now laid down in Rector’s Directive 28/2021. 

The proposal presented by Dean Friedová was much simpler. Its aim was to differentiate between the majority of standardly working academics and a very small group of employees whose performance was problematic, and allow the faculty to dismiss the latter. Therefore, this evaluation was only supposed to concern employees with open-term contracts that would otherwise be difficult to terminate. The Rectorate’s proposal amended the original concept, emphasising the positive and motivational dimension of each employee’s professional growth, including the remuneration. 

Our faculty tried a simple “pilot evaluation” already under Dean Pullmann in 2021 (organized by Radek Skarnitzl). Dean Lehečková drew upon this attempt in a number of aspects, but at the same time decided to approach the evaluation in a much more comprehensive way. In April 2022, she presented her proposal of career development and evaluation rules (whose authors are, apart from the Dean, particularly Radek Chlup and Daniel Berounský) to the faculty bodies and the academics for discussion. There was a number of comments, most of which were taken into account by the faculty management (see the section Comments and the response to comments). 

While most of the comments related to partial aspects, some questioned the underlying principles of the whole evaluation. Often, they also expressed a concern that the evaluation would not improve the position of academics at our faculty, which is already difficult enough, as they have to face increasing bureaucracy and performance pressure. Of course, the faculty management takes such fundamental criticism seriously and is aware that evaluation systems have their downsides and can distort the university environment. However, these undesirable effects cannot be avoided by rejecting the worldwide accepted culture of evaluations to which we are already subject anyway (the faculty itself is evaluated by the university, ministry or grant agencies). Rather, the solution is to cautiously accept this culture that allows us to sensibly develop its positive aspects and minimize the downsides.

Therefore, for example, our evaluation model avoids reducing academic work to quantifiable and economically profitable goals and rather wants to assess it in its complexity. This should be achieved, among other things, by a number of text fields in the self-evaluation forms, which allow academics to reflect their own academic values in the evaluation, and thereby address the potential reductiveness of the system and contribute to its improvement. We also want to reduce the risk of excessive performance pressure by avoiding a competitive setup, but rather setting a clear ceiling that does not need to be exceeded. For example, we only assess five publications from the last five years and academics can get succeed with even fewer (provided the number is balanced by quality). We do not push academics to compete with each other in the number of high quality publications. The pressure is also reduced thanks to the five-year periodicity, which allows everyone to alternate periods of increased productivity with more relaxed periods. In this respect, our system is friendlier than some others that evaluate workers annually.