Lives in the balance

As concessions to work-life balance go, it hardly sounds radical: permission to log off from email between the hours of 10pm and 8am, to turn off webcams for calls after 8pm, and to check emails only a few times at weekends “unless work demands it”.

No, this memo was not issued to staff in a university near you, it was sent out to lawyers at the elite London firm Slaughter and May, described by one member of staff as “a bit like a five-star hotel…[clients know] that if you call room service at 2am for a sundae, you’ll get one”.

As for high-paying legal clients, so for fee-paying students, I hear you cry.

The guidelines might not sound like much of a utopia, but they at least represent some acknowledgement of the brutal long-hours culture of corporate law, and the particular rigours of the pandemic period.

As one partner told the Financial Times: “During the pandemic, there was no demarcation in people’s days, the more junior people just didn’t know when to stop…We sometimes need to empower people to behave like normal human beings and have their own expectations of a life.”

All this might sound familiar to people working in academia – a key difference, though, is that Slaughter and May pays even junior staff salaries that would make most senior academics weep.

This week, we publish the findings of our Times Higher Education work-life balance survey, a repeat of a poll we first conducted five years ago, in which we analyse the thoughts and experiences of 1,200 respondents working in both academic and professional services roles at universities around the world.

The findings will surprise none of you, but make sobering reading nonetheless.

While much has changed since the last time we conducted the survey – notably a shift to flexible and remote working that persists in the UK and Europe in particular – much also has not, with a high proportion of respondents reporting simply unmanageable workloads even with punishingly long hours.

This is particularly true of those working in academic roles, with almost a third saying they work an average of 10 hours a day or more, and many still finding this insufficient to stay on top of their load.

There will be those who say that this has always been the case in academia, a vocation as much as a job, which expects and demands an unusual level of devotion from PhD level up and is brutally efficient at weeding out those who do not go above and beyond.

There is truth in that analysis. The hypercompetitive nature of research in particular, and the individuals it attracts and who succeed, may to a certain extent guarantee a work-life imbalance that would be considered unacceptable to many other professions.

But that is neither the whole story nor an end point to the discussion that needs to be had about the demands being placed on university staff, and the impact it has on them as individuals.

A couple of factors worth adding to that discussion include the heavy-duty compliance culture that has been allowed to develop within higher education, in which everything is monitored to a degree that creates more and more work for all involved. This reflects a few things, including the pressures on universities as entities that – in some countries, at least – are both public (requiring accountability for public investment) and private (bringing with it the pressures of the market).

Also relevant in England is the broken funding system, which is underwriting a broken culture – for years universities have sought to grow student numbers as aggressively as they could to help paper over the cracks and subsidise areas of activity that are not properly resourced.

But in many cases this has not resulted in commensurate increases in teaching capacity, with more juggling of workloads required, and more on precarious and short-term contracts.

Even this is less viable as a way to balance the books at a time when inflation is running riot and domestic tuition fees remain frozen, which hardly suggests the cavalry is about to come over the horizon.

Where does that leave things? In a pretty parlous state, as described by one UK professor in our opinions pages this week: “I look around at colleagues and their attitudes seem to vary along a spectrum from combative anger, through pervasive anxiety, to sullen resignation,” writes David Alexander, professor of emergency planning and management at UCL.

That sense of despair, one suspects, comes from a recognition that the competition inherent in academia means that, ultimately, those who decide enough is enough will simply be replaced.

Yet even if it works as a business strategy, burning people out is not humane; if even Magic Circle law firms can recognise that, then surely universities can do the same.

But it will not be enough for managers to email their permission for staff to log off at a civilised hour. They must also ensure that workloads make that possible.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com