I spent most of this year’s ViCEPHEC talking with people (and telling everyone about the fantastic PERIODically podcast). Teaching-focused staff are so rarely together at critical mass, and the conversations developed in ways I couldn’t imagine happening elsewhere.

I’m currently running on an Academic Workload platform for an elected position in the RSC’s Higher Education Group, and workload was a natural conversation starter - people approached me to talk about it. This meant I heard a lot about people’s experiences, and got to ask about their relationships with workload. This blog draws together some of the workload things I heard without identifying anyone.

Precarious contracts promote over-work

Lots of teaching staff are (or have been) on fixed-term contracts for extended periods of time. These often require academics to shoulder switching costs (e.g. moving house, becoming familiar with a new employer’s curriculum) and to absorb extra work graciously when managers hint at the chance of contract renewal. Living like this is intensely stressful, frequently resulting in significant medical consequences and often in changing our relationships with the teaching we do.

A few people who had got permanent contracts after surviving a period of precarity talked about how it was only after a few years of job security that they had begun to value themselves and their time more highly.

Promotion can let people access part-time work

A few people talked about how promotion to higher pay levels had let them move to part-time working patterns, or how they hoped to do this in future. Part-time work does not eliminate over-work, but it can give people more agency: no-one can stop you doing what you want to do on your day off, but you can say no to things on your day off.

I understand from employment research that the % over-work is typically significantly higher in part-time academic contracts than full-time, but I hadn’t considered the autonomy of that work before. Still, it seems bad that working significantly beyond contracted hours is so common.

Student needs are higher than they used to be

The consequences of the pandemic are still very much with us. This was expressed in several ways. For example: patterns of poor engagement, low social cohesion of cohorts, different pastoral problems. Addressing these issues requires academic labour.

There was one particular comment early in the conference about the increase in student applications for adjustments and mitigation. Someone had put an extra hurdle in place to reduce the number of applications from students (it sounded like some kind of extra form with an earlier deadline, but perhaps I misunderstood). This worked: fewer applications came through. In turn, this reduced the academic workload of processing and judging the applications.

I think putting an extra barrier in place is a bad thing, as it will deny some students access to equitable treatment. At the same time, I understand how the time pressures academics experience provide a clear incentive to triage. I don’t think an extra hurdle is the right answer, but I see how it might be seen as pragmatic. It is incredibly sad that people feel like they have to choose between teaching well and working reasonable hours.

Sometimes we can be more efficient

There were a few people who talked about deliberately spending less time working. This was often a response to some lifestyle change (e.g. becoming ill, having children), and people expressed surprise at how needing to be home by a certain time made them work better in the day.

Pastoral care is often associated with emails, and I had a few conversations where the habit of checking emails in the evenings was talked through (consensus: don’t do it! - no problem will ever be solvable on a Sunday night). The volume of emails and time taken on them seemed to vary quite a lot, and different institutions have different email cultures. The chance to ‘switch off’ is a really important part of how we perceive workloads; if we’re frazzled we are easier to overwhelm.

There was some discussion in the formal ViCEPHEC programme about clever ways of reducing marking load. Alison Hill’s talk about scaling unique assessments had a lovely discussion of automating the marking of certain calculations.

People often come to workload with the view that it is either structural or individual. Of course, though, there are elements of both. It’s important to think about the things we can change about our behaviour, but it is also important to understand that we often navigate difficult institutional structures if we try to work reasonable hours.

The centralised University

Centralised admissions in Universities often have workload consequences for Chemistry academics. Over-recruitment can mean timetables (especially for labs) need to be torn up, and a larger student body swells the day-to-day workload of teaching, feedback, and pastoral care in ways which aren’t always (?immediately?) reflected in staffing levels.

Under-recruitment may reduce marking load, but can also reduce job security and increase stress. In the mid-to-long term, organisational restructuring caused by under-recruitment introduces switching costs (who do I email about module changes now that we sit in the School of Natural Sciences?).

The centralisation (and reduction) of professional services teams has significantly increased workload. Student-facing departmental admin in particular has been a very painful loss, shifting a lot of routine communication and signposting onto academic staff as well as weakening institutional memory of what to do in unusual cases.

Invisible work: approachability and strategic incompetence

I had a small number of conversations which addressed the idea of approachability. Teachers who make themselves approachable get approached, which takes time. Teachers who are not approachable do not get approached, which saves time. There is a cost to being approachable and a benefit to being unapproachable.

It was perhaps one of the workload themes which presented the most brutal contrast between personal and institutional values. Every student who approaches you because a big-shot professor is a poor personal tutor is a chance to see what a University (or a Department or a colleague) does and doesn’t view as worthwhile. This surely promotes cynicism, which the literature suggests is a key contributor to burnout.

It also places certain staff in positions of moral hazard more frequently. It is often hard to stop worrying if you signpost a struggling student to a service with a 6-month waiting list. And students can come to staff with issues which resonate with academics’ own painful experiences. It is exhausting to have this kind of conversation and then send the student away while you go and give a lecture.

Thinking about quitting

Perhaps the thing I hadn’t heard so openly before was a handful of superb people talking about how they had considered quitting this year. I’m sure some element of this is true in all jobs all the time, but I hadn’t heard it in conversations at ViCEPHEC before. Was this because I was having conversation about workload? Or because of being in-person after years of online ViCEPHECs during a gruelling bout of online teaching? Or some new truth about teaching in 2022-23? It’s very unclear to me, but it was also dispiriting to hear that brilliant educators can’t always see how to keep going. 

This idea contrasts so starkly with the rest of the conference. Every talk was a celebration of the students we teach and the subjects we share with them. Every Q&A was a demonstration of the technical and creative labour of constructing excellent teaching.

Conclusion

I didn’t speak with everyone (there were so many people this year!) and I didn’t speak just about workload, but I do think that people want to talk about workloads more. I’m sure that there are other experiences - and I’m confident that many of them are really positive - but it also seems clear that many workload stories are substantially negative.

Workload seems like an area which affects everyone but is rarely presented as a community issue - we experience our own workload in our own context, and aren’t always aware of how other people are encountering similar issues. I think there is probably scope to improve people’s workloads by just talking openly about what is normal and what is reasonable.