A survey of professional staff has found that administrative burden has taken its toll on staff, saying that restructures, a lack of consultation and failures to limit workload are causing concerns.
Findings from the national survey are presented in a new paper from the University of Melbourne’s Peter Woelert and colleagues which states that, “Although professional staff are central to the operation of universities, little effort has been made to understand how these staff see these administrative burdens impacting their work, and to harness their views on how to best tackle such burdens on the ground.”
When asked how administrative burden could be reduced, 60% of respondents said that reducing the number of organisational restructures should be a priority, followed by 57.5% who begged to be consulted before new digital solutions to ‘streamline’ processes were imposed. Just over half (51.7%) said they believed academic workload models were useful, but there was no equivalent for professional staff – meaning there appeared to be little limitation to the work piling into their intrays.
More than four out of every five (81.5%) of respondents said the administrative burden reduced the amount of time they could devote to the core purpose of their role and 73.1% said it constrained their ability to support their colleagues.
The paper notes that professional staff are framed in negative terms, “as a source or at least a symptom of increasing administrative burdens within universities.”
“It is worth noting in this context that the Accord also incorrectly claims that the proportion of professional staff at Australian universities has been increasing due to, for example, increases in regulatory burden (2024, p. 232), whereas in reality, such proportion has remained remarkably stable over recent decades (Croucher & Woelert, 2022).”
“Ultimately, and contrary to the position embraced in the Universities Accord, the findings presented here clearly demonstrate that relevant decision-makers in Australia can ill afford to ignore universities’ professional staff when it comes to the challenge of tackling the issue of administrative burden. Rather than being considered a mere symptom of administrative burden, universities’ professional staff and the insights they can offer need to be recognised as central to developing effective responses and solutions to the issue,” the authors concluded.
