I’m writing this while ducking out of the afternoon session of a two day conference, about two hours drive from where I live and work.
I spoke at the event earlier today (having got up early to sort out my presentation at the last minute!), and have been trying to take in as many of the fascinating presentations and ideas flying around as I can. I’m currently not doing either of those things, or building networks, or even just enjoying the surroundings of an unfamiliar place, because I have other work to do.
I’ve been diving into my “day job”, on and off, all the way through this event. I’ve had meetings to attend, arrangements to see to, the ever-growing avalanche of emails and personal messages. I want to finish this piece, and a few other bits of work, before I drive home.
I know if something “big” happens, or even if the OfS releases some board papers, there’s every chance I’ll be working tonight. I already know I’ll have to work over the weekend. And then there’s next week. And then there’s the rest of the term. And the academic year.
Very demure
This isn’t just my story – this is the story of pretty much anyone who works in higher education.
You’re up early – Monday morning, reading the Wonkhe Monday Briefing over a coffee before you start “work” (though isn’t this also work, of a sort?). What time will you finish today – I mean properly finish, not sit down in front of the TV to answer emails on your phone? How many hours will you work this week? This month?
People tend to work in universities because they are passionate about the work they do. Maybe supporting students to achieve their goals feels like the most important thing in the world, maybe it’s the cutting edge of academic research, maybe it’s coming up with a timetable that works for everyone, or finally getting that student data in to HESA, or even keeping the whole show on the (financial) road for another 30 days. But when you do feel passionate about the work you do – a positive – you often end up doing far more work than are meant to (to be clear, a negative).
We set and reinforce cultural norms about working hours and workload ourselves. Our peers are working hard, our colleagues look like they are always working (one of my colleagues is Jim Dickinson, just saying…), and it becomes expected and normalised that we step up and do our bit.
Very mindful
It’s hard to talk about workload without looking like you are admitting failure. That you are coming clean that you can’t cut it in this fast-paced high intensity world. That the sheer joy of the flow state is alien to you. Bro, you don’t even lift.
There’s even a bunch of you who will have read the opening of this piece as a weird flex. Perhaps you were thinking “so he’s at a conference, boo hoo. I’ve been to seven conferences this week. Including one in Aberystwyth. And I still wrote two module descriptions, three academic papers, and marked 80 assignments”? Others will see it as evidence of poor planning and inefficiency on my behalf (I hold my hand up).
But in an environment, in a sector, where it is normalised that everyone is working long hours and long weeks is anyone really being efficient? Are the decisions we are making, or the words we are writing in hour 60 that week really our best? Are the working patterns we set in our 20s really doing us any good in our 40s?
Very cutesy
Workload is a huge problem in higher education. From students through to senior leaders. There. I said it. There are huge problems in recruiting, and keeping, professional services staff – you can earn more, and get better working conditions, elsewhere. In the academic world, if you duck out from self-funding the publication of that journal paper you wrote at the kitchen table one weekend this summer (and responded to reviewer comments about last weekend) there are millions of hungry young post-docs who would have your job in a heartbeat.
Workload turns up every year in New JNCHES (pay and conditions) negotiation. It’s always a priority for employers and unions to sort the issue out. But nothing ever seems to happen – it’s less of a priority than pay, so it just becomes something else we have to address at some point.
So with the sector facing yet another financial crisis, do we all just get on the grindset straight away? Put your snowflake-y demands for a work-life balance on the back burner. Take one for the team. Pull that working weekend, that all-nighter. Let’s face it, you’re not even going to do anything as a result of reading this article. You’ll clock off at around 8pm, do your emails in bed, get up early tomorrow for one more run at the backlog. Because that’s what we do.
The cheques we are writing for these long days and long years are cashed on the health and wellbeing of actual people. The cost is our health, our effectiveness, our lives, our relationships, our families. And eventually the cost our employer will face in replacing us when we can’t do it any more One day soon we will be forced to address the results of our workload – perhaps we might want to do it before we damage ourselves and the people around us?
High workload is obviously a massive issue for all staff in HE. Good to see recognition of it here. But we have to be a little careful in framing this in a way that implies that this is a result of staff passion for their job, or something staff have much control over.
This would be a major category mistake for PS staff, and for many academics too. The causes of this problem are structural. Staff have needed to cope with massive and ongoing change over the past few years (COVID, financial crisis etc), on a diminishing unit of resource. The hiring of staff does not keep pace with demand. Authors of other articles in WonkHE might do well to remember this, for they are all too often framed in a way that implies that ‘doing more’ is easily possible.
Workload is compounded by HE leadership. Universities are – perhaps almost uniquely – led by people whose primary qualification is not experience in leadership and management and have never worked in the professional operation side of their industry. They have limited understanding of the demands they place on staff. Yet the strategic initiatives and change projects keep coming. No University ever hired a VC PVC or Academic Registrar who said things were fine as they are, and they wouldn’t change much, thank you. Ongoing disruption seems almost baked into the system.
100% agree about the endless change initiatives, often when existing processes or recent initiatives don’t work as they should. I have also come to the view that universities do too much and it’s too complicated, just the amount of different compliance regimes etc that they are involved with. Simplifying and reducing the breadth of activity unis do to concentrate more sharply on the core business of research and teaching would be one way to address the work load issue. But a lot is baked into the competitive nature of academia (e.g. applying for grants, publications). As teaching and admin has expanded to fill up more time, so academics increasingly use weekends/ holidays etc as research time …
Yes, this. The amount of regulation alone has massively expanded, and this ultimately gets passed on to academics, though they may not realise it that’s what’s driving the admin. Also, there is very little glamour in making things work properly. PVCs don’t get promoted by promising to fix the VLE system, yet that sort of practical help would be very useful.
I completely agree. I used to have passion for my job but that has been eroded. Now all the additional time I put in is simply to prevent everything getting worse and creating an even bigger headache to fix. The extra evening work is to prevent a future weekend of hell. It’s also to stop the burden falling on the rest of the team. There’s no redundancy, for lack of a better word, built into the system. If anyone drops the ball, everything falls apart. If I don’t pull my weight, it’s more likely someone else in the team will drop the ball. If I said no to the unpaid overtime, I would only make my work environment more toxic for the seven hours a day I have to endure it.
I’ll be fairly unpopular for this post, assuming anyone reads it, but here goes… In my experience academic workloads, at least as institutions see and implement them, are far more flexible and generous than in most other industries, and if academics tried to get away with much of what is considered ‘standard practice’ in academic roles they’d lose their jobs in most other industries within a year. (I’m not talking about PS here as I have less experience of this). I don’t disagree that workload models have got less generous over time, but the work is still possible, and even at a more hostile institution the flexibility and self-strategy an academic career offers is just much preferable to the average job.
There is simply no way that people are doing 48-hour weeks if they’re doing the job as the institution understands it, and in reality if an academic does such a week, it is for at most a few weeks a year, with other weeks far less intensive.
But more often than not this type of 48-hour week involves colleagues doing as much as 4x the hours on grading as allocated, even if the allocation is unfair; in experience, colleagues just will not economise on their marking, even if they’re providing far too much, often literally unhelpful, feedback. There’s professional pride, ok, but it quite often overlaps to self-destructive stubbornness.
Then there’s working hours. We’re told quite often about academics working weekends, and evenings, and this is undoubtedly a bad thing and should be avoided where possible. But the flipside to this is a situation where very few academics have *anyone* checking where they are, or what they’re doing, for much of the year, or even much of the teaching term. There is a flipside to not having to be in the office every day, and realistically if workloads were, as UCU wanted in the last IA, reduced, they would 100% bring with them the expectation of the institution – even with a trusting managerial team – actually knowing what a colleague not on AL was doing in e.g. the last week of June, including being in their office for most of the week. I certainly don’t know what the people I manage were doing at that point in time. you simly can’t have it both ways.
With that there’s also research. Colleagues should look at what they are allocated for research, and at least trying to put it into practice. If you have 20% of your time for it, for instance (as is the max at most post-92s – FYI people who don’t know that world), that’s per year, and basically will end up located primarily after the teaching term has finished. It it’s 20%, you will not be able to get a monograph done in a year or two, and your university will not expect that level of output without additional support. As far as projects that run all year relate to this, in eg social sciences, if these aren’t externally funded, then they should only run in a limited extent in the teaching term, with managerial discussion, and if they are externally funded they’ll have buyout. Too much of this is located not in what the institution wants, but in what the colleague actively wants to be doing or has imposed pressure on themself to do. I get that there IS institutional pressure on colleagues – but i’m also tired of people only looking at the downsides of one of the most flexible and rewarding jobs out there.
I like your posts on here and tend to agree with most things you say – including here. My only gripe with the system is how long the simplest of tasks takes. For example, submitting an article for internal REF review. Should be 30 seconds, more like 20-30 minutes. Cumulatively over the year it mounts up and eats into research. However, I generally agree, especially on things like marking. Academics are usually their own worst enemies.
When junior academics and PhD research students are expected to work at least 10 to 12 hour days, often for 6 if not 7 days a week, as I see far too often in intensive research depts, the system has failed. Welcome to academia…