Is this the end of the academic office?
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
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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?
There’s a risk that debates about offices stay inward-looking. From a student perspective, the bigger question might be whether universities can design space that supports flexible staff working while also providing clear, legible points of access for help, support, and guidance. I think we can!
My university expects academics to be available all five weekdays 8:00-19:00. Timetabling can schedule your teaching at any time within that. When you are actually teaching of course changes per semester (and in some subjects: per week). You could have one lecture starting at 8:00 and another finishing at 19:00 the same day. You could have teaching spread over all five weekdays.
This is very different from professional services staff who usually negotiate fixed working hours (and fixed working from home days) with their manager.
If a university expects such flexibility from its academic staff, it should offer something in return.
I’ve visited lots of students on sandwich years. These students work in an open plan office. For my meetings with them and their manager, a meeting room has to be booked. It is not unusual that this has to be done weeks in advance. Get rid of academic offices and those one-to-one meetings between academics and students will likely have to similarly be booked weeks in advance. I’m sure that will do wonders for student satisfaction.
Quite. Working that way in academia would make those often delicate, sensitive conversations where we provide support for students having problems or in distress much more difficult to have privately. And those meetings are becoming more frequent, not less.
To reduce this to a conversation about academics offices turns this all a little click bait like. The question for us all is how we can use the space we have better and how much we all need. Work patterns that turn Wednesday and Thursday into peaks while the ends of the week are at barely 50% occupancy mean we all need to adjust.
I can give you eleven reasons why it isn’t clickbait – and number seven will shock you!
While there might be a trend for greater working at home, worth bearing in mind the often very different circumstances and needs of staff. For some, e.g. with small children at home, including myself in the past, working at home was not really an option, or at least, not a productive one.
From the junior end of the career ladder, its lovely to see a conversation about estates provision based on operational need rather than status. I spent my PhD conducting sensitive qualitative interviews from bed in a shared house and student tutorials in the shared kitchenette off our 20-person open plan PhD office (PhD students were not allowed to book meeting rooms). At post-doc there were only 5 officemates and I could at least book meeting space, but I’d often end up having 1-1 zoom or in-person meetings in a 30-person classroom as the number of bookable small meeting rooms was nowhere near sufficient. Lucky was the other research group, trusted with a spare key to the PI’s office and allowed to use it when empty.
I’m now PSS and yesterday conducted a performance-focused 1-1 with a team member while sitting on the stairs outside our office, because all the meeting pods were full. Last week I was asked at short notice to attend an in-person committee meeting, but it meant spending the morning working on confidential student data whilst in the student library because there was not a single desk available to book in the open plan at less than 24 hours notice. I miss seeing colleagues in person, but target my on campus days for Monday/Friday to avoid this.
I respect that senior academics need quiet spaces to read, think, and counsel, but they’re not the only ones. More than once I’ve taken meetings sat at the end of a corridor of empty academic offices because it’s the quietest available spot. And that’s even before consideration that being permanent, well-paid staff means you’re much more likely to have a stable home setup, with an actual office space rather than negotiating with flatmates for kitchen table access. When four days out of five academic offices are serving as glorified lockers rather than utilised spaces, a conversation needs to be had.
Weird post. All this seems to tell me is that you’re poor at planning and willing to risk breaking various confidentialities.
Fortunately I have documented several times, in writing, that the lack of confidential meeting/work space risks breaching several important data protection protocols and have been repeatedly told that the space available is the space available and to just deal with it. You can’t plan to use resources that you’re not given access to or for activities you don’t know you’re going to be asked to do.
Very aware that I’m ranting into the void, but typing this out on the train home has at least reassured me that I’m doing the best I can. Here’s the decision making behind the two recent PSS examples.
It is Monday morning. You are asked to come to an in-person only committee meeting tomorrow, to cover for an ill colleague. You try to book a desk but there are none available. You can:
– Refuse to attend the meeting.
– Reschedule other meetings to allow you to travel to campus only for the in-person meeting, then go home.
– Reschedule work so you’re not accessing student data on Tuesday, but the work is due on Thursday and you have just lost an afternoon to an unexpected committee meeting.
– Hope someone booked a desk and didn’t show up (Tried and failed).
– Work from the office kitchen and be interrupted every 5 minutes by a question about whether you’re there because there are no desks (Tried and failed).
– Chose a seat in the corner of the library, making sure your laptop is never left unattended and do the work as scheduled.
– An other option?
It is Wednesday. You are reviewing the work done by a junior colleague, but it doesn’t meet the institutional style guide in important ways you have previously coached on. The work is due next Tuesday. You can:
– Ignore the errors, send the work out and get called out by your boss.
– Fix the errors yourself, rearranging other work to do so.
– Ask the person to go through and double check the work meets the style guide.
– Have a meeting to talk through the main errors and the importance of following the style guide.
I did the third option and by Weds pm there were still errors. Said staff member does not work Fridays. I am booked on campus on Thursday and cannot WfH as have agreed my partner can have our workspace that day. There are no meeting rooms available at times me and team member are available. I could wait til Monday but again, I am booked on campus and no meeting rooms available until the afternoon. I would often do a walking meeting in this situation but need to screen share to highlight remaining errors. So, I take the chance on a pod being available but its not, so I make the call that sitting on the stairs (where I have a good view of people coming from either direction) is better than taking the call in the open-plan office. Again, would be interested in how to better solve this problem otherwise.
The assumption that PSS work is low-paced and predictable simply doesn’t hold in today’s environment. When insufficient private spaces are available, you sometimes have to make the call that an ‘imperfect’ space (corridors, stairways) where you could be heard is better than an open-plan office where you’ll definitely be heard.
Thank you for the concrete realism.
The purpose of co-located spaces for work is for ease of communication. Once you have cheap secure high-quality video and data communication, why do you need offices for administration (and meetings)? What spaces are required for teaching is another issue.
Another reason for mergers.