Biology Workload Creep Report, 2023
In November 2022, we surveyed School of Biology staff about their perceptions of their workload, including how it has changed over time and the impact of those changes on staff well-being. “Click here for the full report (pdf)”. Here we present a brief overview.
We had 70 respondents (31 woman, 32 man, 7 not disclosed), three quarters of whom were academic staff and the remaining were professional support staff. The overwhelming majority of respondents report increased workloads over the last three years (87%). Nearly all respondents (also 87%) worked over their contracted hours. A non-trivial fraction (27%) report working extreme hours (>55 hrs/wk or part-time equivalent). Adverse health consequences arose from increased workload for 90% of respondents, leading to formal sick leave for 7 members of staff (10%). Two thirds of staff experiencing serious health consequences from workload do not take formal sick leave. A majority of staff (60%) answered that they “virtually never” take their designated annual leave (i.e. holiday).
We make specific recommendations to alleviate unnecessary overwork. Our guiding principle is that excess work must be controlled using subtractive, not additive, actions. These focus on actions that can be implemented at the School level, but we also make University-level recommendations. They fall into four categories: Teaching, Support, Reporting Systems, and Workplace Norms.
Recommended Actions (Abbreviated)
Senior management should be empowered to challenge the status quo for themselves, but it is important that they do that on behalf of colleagues, staff and students they manage. It should be seen as reasonable to ask: Is this meeting necessary? Can I call someone on the phone rather than exchange multiple emails? Do I need to send this email out-of-hours? Is this task necessary?
The most frequently mentioned aspect of teaching seen as contributing to workloads which could be eliminated are tutorials. Over a quarter of respondents mentioned tutorials as the School-level task which could be streamlined or dropped: “BSET tutorials – drop”, “[T]he current set up of BSETs do not help anyone including students”, ““BSET” tutorials … are of dubious benefit”, “[S]crap tutorials”, “An easy way of reducing workload is to eliminate tutorials.” The observation that attendance is low (or non-existent) implies that many students feel the same way. We therefore recommend that they be disbanded, although care must be taken to avoid negative unintended consequences.
There are two ways to alleviate PSS workload: hire more PSS, or subtract or streamline existing tasks undertaken by current PSS. There are several areas of particular urgency: the School should provide more administrative support for timetabling, entering grades, setting up Moodle, and lecture capture (when it is desirable or necessary). This might be accomplished by hiring more PSS, or it might be accomplished by reducing the necessity of such tasks in the first place. Professional support staff require clarity from line managers about their roles, and healthier boundaries on what tasks they are vs. are not required to undertake.
The most frequently mentioned cause of workload creep was teaching, and the most common comment about teaching was the work involved with recording lectures. There are circumstances in which lecture capture serves important EDI goals, and we reinforce the School’s commitment to those. For accessibility, University policy permits students authorised by Student Services to record lectures using their own devices. However, the University’s current lecture capture policy does not address these; it currently mandates the use of e.g. Panopto lecture recording in all cases excluding only two extremely narrow exceptions. We suggest a formal recommendation to the Assistant Vice Principal (Dean of Learning and Teaching) to make lecture capture voluntary, rather than compulsory, or fully automate lecture capture as is done at other comparable universities.
Second-marking takes time both to complete and also to administer. As an example, Senior Honours literature reviews comprise 10% of students’ final mark for the SH module, yet every report is double-marked. Less but more focused assessment will benefit all staff and students alike.
Coordinating ad hoc visits is extremely inefficient for the potential benefits, and entails workload for academics participating in the visits as well as PSS involved in coordinating logistics. We recognise arguments for using these visits to address widening access goals, but assess the benefits to be very marginal, and outweighed by the negative impacts on staff in terms of reduced time and focus for teaching and research priorities.
There is evidence that in-person interviews are an environment and form of assessment in which bias is more likely to arise; this observation has informed the wider University’s recent moves to omit in-person interviews during promotion applications, for example. We advise not interviewing postgraduate applicants, and instead making decisions based on paper applications, with the proviso that prospective supervisors take an early and active role in speaking directly with applicants.
To increase job satisfaction there needs to be more flexibility to drop ad hoc roles; this includes service roles taken by academic staff as well as committee roles taken by PSS. Currently staff can get stuck with undesirable/unrewarding jobs for far longer than is optimal. Biology EDI have developed tenure and turn-over guidance for common School roles; this should be revised and awareness raised with staff regarding their ability to request role changes. Role tenure should be more explicitly considered during annual reviews.
Named roles potentially have a generative effect on workload: their existence implies an unfilled need for work, which can lead to the delegation or creation of more tasks than existed before. The establishment of deputies for most committees and centres may have helped distribute workload, but these should be minor ‘stand-in’ and sounding-board positions rather than positions with additional workload. Senior Management within Biology should undertake a systematic review of all named roles within Biology to establish whether the number of expected commitments for these can be reduced.
The Biology EDI group’s guidance on out-of-hours emailing should be advertised more widely. A proscriptive approach is unlikely to encourage consensus on shifting workplace norms, but encouraging PIs and MGMT across all roles to apply a “send delay” on emails written on evenings and weekends would help convey the message that private time off work is respected.
