left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

During the Covid lockdowns, most (though, importantly and crucially, far from all) of us in the university sector were working entirely from home.  At this time I occasionally started the day with an MS Teams post to the team I was in, pointing out that it was some random landmark day (‘Morning everyone, Happy National Cheese Day’).

A manager’s equivalent of a dad joke, perhaps, but it was one of those lockdown things to try to encourage a sense we were still all working together, despite the physical separation.  Thankfully I had team mates who were more creative in how they approached this, but we were all trying to do what we could to maintain that sense of being a team engaged in a common purpose.

the new normal

I was reminded of all this, as today is a particular anniversary.  On 20 January 2022 the final ‘work from home if you can’ edict from the UK government was lifted.  We were still some months away from all Covid-related restrictions being removed, but it was still a landmark.  What was once inconceivable (huge numbers of people working at home, physically separate from all colleagues), and which became all too real, had ended.

Of course the emergence from all this was gradual, undertaken at different paces and in different ways in different universities.  Much of the time it varied between teams within the same university; and some of the time between members of individual teams.

And it took place within the broader national context of what was often termed as ‘the return to office’, a term I never liked as it felt that it overlooked the significant numbers of people in the sector and the country as a whole who had been ‘in the office’ (or their equivalent) for much if not all of the pandemic.

On occasion it ended up being the cause of skirmishes, and sometimes battles, in broader culture wars about the rights and wrongs of ‘working from home’.  Even now we see flare ups in certain parts of the media, but overall we’ve started to see a consensus emerging where for work that doesn’t by its nature require physical presence at all times forms of hybrid working have become a norm.  There are multiple detailed variations (I’ve seen ‘hybrid’ used to describe requirements that people be on campus three days a week; and situations where in-person attendance has been expected once a month), but essentially a much larger part of the workforce now spend part of their time working from home, and part working on their organisation’s premises.

We all grew to hate the phrase ‘the new normal’; but in terms of the working lives for many (not all, but probably a majority) working in universities, this ‘new normal’ has arrived in the form of hybrid working.

what this might mean

For many of us working in universities this has probably been the biggest change in working practices and conditions that many of us have experienced.  That’s true across the board, though I suspect in some ways less so for academic colleagues.  Of course there was significant variation between individuals, but prior to the pandemic academic colleagues already had significantly more flexibility over where and how they worked than members of professional services.  The reduction in this flexibility was one of the biggest adaptations I had to make over 20 years ago, when I moved from being a research fellow to work in university administration (as we still called it then).

I wonder though whether we’ve taken sufficient time as a sector to reflect on what this means.

There was some great work by Richard Watermeyer and collaborators on the impacts on higher education of the pandemic, including specific research on the impact on working patterns for professional services.  And JISC’s Digital Experience Insights Reports helpfully give us a sense of views within the sector on the crucial digital aspects of hybrid working in the higher education sector.

But I wonder if we’re thinking enough about an important dimension of the implications of the emerging norm of hybrid working.

(Just in parenthesis, thankfully we seem to be past the worst of the in-person vs. digital teaching skirimishes but clearly there are ongoing issues about what our communities look and feel like now from a student perspective and the impact of that on student belonging, engagement and success. That’s a really important set of issues, but in this post I want to focus on the staff perspective).

community and belonging

At their heart universities are academic communities.  And my sense from having spent time across multiple university campuses over the last couple of years (both as an employee, and as a visitor) is that the communities feel different, altered following the pandemic.  Sometimes it feels less rich, a little hollowed out as we have moved to more hybrid forms of working. Possibly because we have moved to more hybrid forms of working.

I’m not for one moment suggesting that we should pull back from the changes we have seen.  There are very significant benefits to individuals, universities and wider society of the move to hybrid working, and we cannot and should not lose these.  And actually moving away from hybrid working for many if not most universities is unlikely to be practical. Sector growth means that university estates could not cope with a full return to campus, even if that was to be feasible or desirable from other perspectives. And discussions with colleagues suggest that in many universities reducing the amount of the estate allocated to professional services (either to accommodate student number growth, and/or to allow for reductions in running costs at a time of financial pressure), is increasingly common.

The challenge for us is how we ensure that the sense of community that is essential to our universities is maintained and developed, in the hybrid working age.  At times it feels as though our approach has leaned towards thinking that the connection and interaction between individuals that is essential to building and maintaining community and a sense of belonging, takes place in those now shorter periods of time when we’re physically present in our universities.  Less, and in some cases little, thought seems to be being given to how genuine connection and community building can be supported, encouraged and facilitated while colleagues are working remotely from each other.

And by that I don’t just mean ‘our committees allow people to join in person meetings via Zoom/Teams’; or ‘I can contact colleagues really quickly and get a near instant response on Teams/Slack’. That’s communication.  I mean thinking about how that genuine sense of connection, belonging and community is actively maintained over the many times in the hybrid new normal that people are working in different locations.

There is a danger that if we really too much on team-building and connection being too focused on in-person contact, and time spent working from home delivering communication but not meaningful connection, that our university communities become not only different but poorer. And this danger may be compounded by a false sense of security. That we don’t feel that this is happening, when it is but it is masked by the cultural capital that was built up in universities, and teams within universities, prior to the pandemic, and that what we’re actually doing at the moment is burning our way through this existing capital.

And this is important. Many in universities now spend as much if not more time working remotely, and this can’t and shouldn’t change. And we have colleagues who for good, health-related reasons spend little or indeed no time working in-person. If we are to be truly inclusive we can’t rely solely on in-person activities to maintain and develop the sense of belonging and community in our universities.

sharing practice

Of course there are resources out there that address this issue. I’m also sure that there are some universities or sector organisations that are doing this well.  And I suspect that in those where that’s not the case, there are areas and teams that are really effective in this area.  I’m happy to be corrected on this, but I’m not sure whether we’re doing enough though to identify and share effective practice – recognising that there will never be a silver bullet for this kind of issue.

If that’s the case, perhaps this might be a space for one or more sector-bodies to think about what might be possible.  There are obvious candidates – e.g. Jisc, or AdvanceHE.  If I’m right that the shift to hybrid working has been more significant for professional services staff, in the extent of the scale of change involved, perhaps this might even be something that the newly-renamed Association of Higher Education Professionals might want to think about.

It could be that I’m worrying over nothing, but there’s a danger that a combination of an understandable desire to put the pandemic behind us, and the desire not to fall into the quagmire of the hybrid/in-person working argument, stops us reflecting on crucial aspects of the new world of hybrid working that higher education is now in.  And is unlikely to leave.