Is this the end of the academic office?

There are perennial battles between the estates team and the rest of the university, and one of the most frequent and the most bitterly fought is the one over office space.

Cast your mind back a decade or so, and work at a higher education provider was a thing most often done in an office, during office hours. The pandemic experience put rocket boosters under the already growing trend of remote working – and the return to campus after restrictions ended did not mean, for a lot of people, a return to the office.

The cost of commuting, the availability of parking, and the comparative absence of disturbances at home compared to the office made it very tempting to do the more individual (writing, reading, responding to messages) parts of employment from a makeshift desk in your living room – hitting the bright lights of the campus for meetings and engagement with others.. And, despite a few high profile campaigns to the contrary, this was not something that could be put back in the box for the good of campus atmosphere.

The current trend to growth in student numbers mean that, outside of a select few, the academic office has outlived its usefulness as a teaching space other than for the occasional one-to-one meeting. However, academics do really value having their own space on campus, even if it is shared with one or two others (for professional services staff, the open plan office is pretty much the normal state of affairs by now – but few are as keen on forswearing their own desk for a “hotdesk” that may or may not be available).

In the main, university estates are largely configured around small academic offices and dedicated teaching spaces. The cost of utilities (energy in particular) has grown, and the case for lighting and heating many small, locked, rooms that are maybe used a handful of times a week is becoming harder and harder to make to Estates teams under huge pressure to cut costs while keeping the campus running.

Indeed, the latest Annual Report from AUDE notes that another common money-saving tactic – postponing repairs and other maintenance – is now having a significant impact on the condition of the campus. But that isn’t the bit that will make governors sit up and take notice: it is the (admittedly anecdotal) assertion that universities have between 10 and 40 per cent more space than they need, and the cost of running such space is significant.

AUDE’s public-facing report (and the longer write up aimed at governors from AdvanceHE) don’t say the quiet bit out loud but I will – much of this underutilised space is a series of small office rooms. And with the finances of many providers becoming impossibly tight, something is going to have to give.

Estates need to meet current needs, but have been designed around historic patterns of work. As the AUDE executive summary has it, underutilisation:

translates directly into spend that is difficult to justify, at a time of financial constraint. That much spent on heating and energy, unjustifiably. That much spent on maintenance, cleaning, and security, unjustifiably. As property operational costs have risen sharply in recent years, with huge rises in energy accompanied by rises in staffing costs, insurance costs, and similar rises in many more categories, universities are sitting on simply extraordinary amounts of space that is not used in anything like an economically viable way.

The way universities “work” is changing and the current estate doesn’t really meet the needs we currently have. But the conversation – as it so often is – is about culture, rather than offices, corridors, and energy use. What does it mean to do the work of a university, and how might it be done differently?