Academics’ attitudes to on-campus working ‘contradictory’

University staff are less enamoured of working from home than people in other industries but spend more time doing so, a study suggests.

Surveys commissioned by the Australian design firm Hassell have revealed contradictory attitudes to work modes. University staff generally have a higher regard for campus than workers in other sectors have for their offices. Yet barely one-quarter of university employees are in the workplace full-time, compared with almost half of their non-university counterparts.

The surveys of 300 university staff and 500 “regular office workers” found that the former generally went to campus because they saw benefit in being there, while the latter went to the office because their employers required it.

Just 43 per cent of regular workers operated in “hybrid manner”, splitting their days between home and the workplace, compared with 72 per cent of university staff.

The surveys also found that 26 per cent of “regular” workers had private offices, with most in open-plan situations. By comparison, 81 per cent of university employees had private or shared offices – most “sitting unoccupied when staff work from home”.

For an environmentally aware profession, academics are surprisingly dismissive of the carbon footprint of their work habits, the report says. “Clearly it’s not efficient to heat and cool an empty office.”

Geoff Hanmer, an adjunct professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, challenged the assumption that private offices were bad for sustainability. “An empty cellular office with no lights [or] air conditioning uses very little energy,” he said. “An open-plan space must be air-conditioned at least 50 hours a week, whether there are 10 or 100 people present.”

Professor Hanmer, managing director of the architectural firm Arina, said academics’ attachment to private offices was understandable if they were undertaking complex research or supervising PhD students.

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“Academic workers…have long enjoyed working from home in practice, even though it may not have been formalised in any way,” he added. “Professional staff learned about working from home during the pandemic emergency phase and liked it. For many of them, it is a good option, both for them and the university.”

Professor Hanmer said it was in universities’ interests to encourage their academics to spend as much time on campus as possible. “If it took a large office with a fireplace, bookcases and Afghan rugs to keep a top-flight academic on campus, I would provide it.

“Unhappy academics do not make for productive research, and it does nothing for loyalty to the institution.”

The surveys found that few university workers would be prepared to trade their offices for modest pay rises, although more would forgo private workspaces for new research equipment or better amenities.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com