Staff at UK higher education providers are under severe pressure.
Mass participation in HE, the need to quantify results and draw in “customers” have led to universities setting formal strategies, a new venture for most.
However, the strategies are not formal strategies as designed by businesses but are more akin to a set of organisational aspirations.
These aspirations have targets (or KPIs) attached to them, and often without underpinning data to evidence the starting and end point of the target, there is no way or means of achieving or truly measuring progress towards the targets.
Research by Cantwell and Maringson shows that in mass HE systems, HEIs can be divided into two categories – high positional or social value and low social value.
However, this split isn’t so clear-cut, and a middle-zone emerges where providers try to be everything to everyone.
Stuck in the middle
These providers constantly face an internal struggle of how to stand out in a crowded marketplace, and are driven by chasing every metric, which leads to a culture of decision-making driven by fear.
The fear of not meeting the targets, fear of negative reviews from students in the student-as-customer scenario, the fear of loss of income, the fear of slipping down the league tables leads to a very unhealthy perfectionist attitude within the organisation.
In addition, HEIs are burdened with poor organisational memory caused by frequent changeover in leadership positions. Therefore, trying to trace a result to a target metric via an original action point is impossible, blurring the cause-effect picture and demoralising staff who never see targets fully achieved.
On the ground the fear-culture translates into endless meetings, torrents of emails and long working hours (which aren’t captured, monitored or reviewed) which cause stress and burnout.
Added to this, the discontent of staff at the coalface of providers arising over pay, pay gaps, contract security and pensions sends pressure back up the chain of command, affecting staff at all levels.
In an organisation, burnout can be contagious – and in close-knit departments this domino-effect could be detrimental for staff morale.
Staff are taking industrial action, sick leave and early retirement. The work culture is toxic and with the goodwill of staff being withdrawn, this feeds back to strengthen feelings of resentment.
By continuing in this vein all providers, but in particular those in the middle-zone are hitting the self-destruct button.
Burnout and its effects
Burnout, a subsection of stress, occurs when chronic stress related to the workplace is not managed appropriately, and unlike anxiety and depression, is solely focused around work.
Burnout can affect both physical and mental health with the WHO describing symptoms as:
- “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
- increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
- reduced professional efficacy” (Burn-out an ‘occupational phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases, 2019)
There is no doubt that these symptoms are unpleasant for the sufferer, but the organisation will suffer too. For an organisation, burnout is associated with higher staff turnover or, if staff choose to stay within an organisation, it leads to lower levels of productivity and staff no longer caring about their work or colleagues.
It has taken collective action to start addressing working conditions and their effects on staff and it now needs to take collective action from providers and governments to move forward.
While continued discussion and negotiations with staff are essential, UK HE needs to reassess itself as part of the healing process.
Knowing your niche
In order to reassess, providers need to undertake a full analysis of their organisation both from an internal and external perspective.
Knowing more about the external audience in particular would give valuable feedback to a provider thus providing a very powerful tool in focusing strategy and targets therefore reducing burnout.
Each provider has its own strengths and weaknesses. If they were to embrace these and move to focusing on only a handful of metrics, instead of every single one, this would reduce the pressure on individual providers and their employees by matching resources to work need.
This idea of knowing and working with a smaller section of the external market in greater depth is known in business as a niche strategy. Many providers will say they know their niche, but lack of joined-up data is preventing a true picture from emerging.
A key part of understanding a niche is understanding the social networks, boundaries and interactions within it and a provider will not just have one niche, but many niches as they will likely vary by subject.
Whatever the niche’s dimensions are, within the niche the audience has similar needs, demands and values.
This is because people within this social space readily communicate with each other, and this regular interaction, according to Bourdieu, leads to formations of social networks of similar people which is underpinned by an unwritten social code.
Therefore, if the needs are similar, then the way to satisfy these needs will be also closely aligned and therefore this information will give a provider the ability to set relevant and realistic targets, making metrics easier to achieve.
Targets should be based on the data which reflect the market segment, working with it and not against it and these should be the basis for a well-founded strategy. Information from the niche gives clarity and direction, which gives staff on the ground a clear indication of what to prioritise thus streamlining decisions and workload.
In addition, to make the review 360 degrees, providers need to gain an understanding of the real workload, not just the workload as submitted for the TRAC return and a nationwide workload review undertaken.
This would allow correct allocation of resource to key targets. review undertaken by an independent and cross-sectional group representing staff and students from across the country.
It is crucial therefore to develop a sector-wide understanding that while HE is for everyone, not every department at every institution has to be everything to everyone. Providers can work better as a nationwide team with each individual institution serving different market segments according to their strengths.
While the above isn’t a quick win and won’t resolve the pay dispute directly, it will have a positive effect on workload.
HEIs need to know and accept their niches. They must match their strategy and set priorities in harmony with the niche. This clarity will improve organisational decision making and consequently reduce admin, making staff healthier and happier.
A few HEIs and organisations such as DataHE are embracing this approach already, but in order to stop the current self-destruct mode, data needs to underpin decision making and the sector-level data needs to be made accessible to all in a joined-up system.
I agree with much here, the current managerialism in the sector is also a factor, with their over-reliance on metrics, and their use as weapons on ‘under-performing’ staff, mainly but not exclusively Academics.
“HEIs are burdened with poor organisational memory caused by frequent changeover in leadership positions.” Indeed they are, and many on University Council like it that way as it prevents effective questioning of their decisions and repeated mistakes. Those like myself who are long-term employee’s who hold the ‘corporate memory’ have oft been the targets for redundancy during ‘restructuring’.
“If you aren’t making any mistakes, you aren’t innovating. If you’re making the same mistakes, you aren’t learning.” Rick Warren.
“Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.” Marcus Tullius Cicero