Reforms intended to improve organisational efficiency within universities can tend to result in increasing administrative workload for academic staff, according to a new study.
Peter Woelert and colleagues from the University of Melbourne worked with Future Campus to haul in responses from 350 academic staff working at 37 Australian universities in a study of the impact of administrative duties on the workload of academic staff. The researchers have provided a wealth of insight into a little-studied area impacting many thousands of Australian academics – and have also provided practical, evidence based measures to reduce the impact of system change and centralisation on academic staff.
The researchers found that there appeared to be a “striking mismatch” between organisational initiatives intended to improve efficiency and additional workload experienced by academic staff. Administrative centralisation was perceived to be an ineffective approach to serving needs, and merely pushed more work onto academics at the coalface.
“Evident among our participants’ responses are considerable levels of dissatisfaction with the current state of university administration in Australia. Whether this reflects academic staff’s resistance to change, local implementation issues, or more fundamental flaws—or a combination of these—they are a cause for alarm and strongly suggest that universities in Australia can ill-afford to be complacent,” the authors state.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the respondents were strongly in favour of getting more administrative support with 88% strongly agreeing they needed support staff in order to do their job effectively and 88% disagreeing that they had enough support staff in their area at the moment.
81% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their workplace was heavily reliant on casual staff and 90% said there was additional administrative load in having a highly casualised workforce.
A male Level E professor summed up concerns over a lack of professional staff in his area: “Fewer staff employed locally. Regular turnover of admin staff. Lack of clarity over who to contact for help. Lack of continuity of support. And a general sense that professional staff are overwhelmed with workload and unhappy in their roles. A common remark is that when we hire a competent person, they won’t stay here for long as the job is not enjoyable.”
Respondents mentioned how they strongly disliked box ticking exercises such as mandatory video training, which appeared to offer little value other than demonstrating compliance.
The researchers found four inter-related recurring themes with concerns about staffing:
“(1)deficient organization of core administrative processes, particularly approvals, (2) unclear or ineffective organization of assistance and help functions, (3) centralization of administrative services, and (4) (frequency of) restructures.”
The authors identified a range of opportunities to reduce administrative load by providing human expertise to support new system rollouts; to identify true costs of learning new processes when restructuring and reducing the number and/or length of meetings.