The Flexible University Workplace
The workplace is becoming more flexible. Freelance and contract work is on the rise – 34% of the U.S. works on a freelance or contract basis and that’s expected to soon rise to 50%. More people are shifting where and when they work – 38% work remotely at least some part of their week. More people are using flexible co-working and serviced office solutions – co-working space now makes up 37% of office space New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco. So, how does this apply to the workplace for faculty and staff in higher education?
One way of thinking about how the workplace has changed is that the same set of ideas is diffusing across sectors at different rates, depending on the applicability of the forces for change and how resistant an industry is to change. More than twenty years ago, consulting organizations moved from assigned offices to a variety of unassigned spaces to account for how little time people spent at the office and how much of it ended up being about working in teams. These strategies have long since been adopted in sales organizations, financial services, and pharmaceuticals and are just now hitting law firms; for instance Minter Ellison moved to an unassigned, activity-based work environment in Australia. Higher education is next.
Next up: The University Workplace Colleges and universities are the next in line to recognize that the spaces they provide often don’t support the work to be done, are not financially feasible in the long-term, are not environmentally sustainable, and can inhibit the core activities for which a campus exists – interaction among students, faculty, and staff. In our interviews and focus groups with faculty at dozens of institutions, most people volunteer that they cannot be productive in their office due to visits from colleagues and students and so do concentrative work at home, in the library, or a coffee shop – places where they can’t be found and interrupted. At the same time, out of classroom contact between students and faculty about readings and assignments is a critical driver of engagement according to the National Survey of student engagement (NSSE), but only 40% of freshman have had such as experience.
So, a new take on the university workplace is needed. Not only is it not working, it’s generally the largest non-residential amount of space on campus – typically 20 to 30% of the overall portfolio and often twice the amount of classroom space. It’s growing rapidly: office space on a per student basis has increased 153% since 1974 accordingly to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. This is compounded by another problem: most colleges and universities don’t actually have an articulated workplace strategy – a way to use their space, culture, and work process to achieve their goals – but rather they only have a set of practices and standards that have accumulated over time and may no longer be relevant or even coherent.
How are Colleges and Universities similar to other workplaces? The same trends that are facing companies are also changing where, how, and when people work at colleges and universities. Just as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 34% of all employees work on a contract or freelance basis today and this will rise to 50% by 2020, the proportion of part-time faculty has risen from about 25% in 1975 to 40% today according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Faculty and staff are also quite mobile like workers in other sectors, in many cases more so as there are more places to go across the campus; for instance a faculty member will spend her day not just in an office and meeting rooms, but in a classroom and laboratory as well. Just as Gallup estimates that 38% of workers work at least part remotely each week, work at universities is also becoming more distributed, both from individuals working from home or elsewhere and by moving administrative groups like IT, finance, facilities, and advancement off campus or to the periphery.
The work of faculty and staff is also becoming more collaborative; for instance the average number of authors per paper grew 38% from 3.2 to 4.4 from 1996 to 2015 according to the Economist. Likewise as institutions try to better coordinate the delivery of student services like admissions, financial aid, registration, and finance, they are moving to create “one-stop-shop” service points and co-locate staff groups in collaborative settings.
Colleges and Universities also have outdated standards that don’t align with how faculty and spend their time. Gensler’s 2016 workplace survey showed that people spend 47 to 54% of their time collaborating, but a typical university will allocate 64 square foot desks and 120 to 240 square foot offices, but only 15% to 20% of their space for meetings. Even though collaborative work often takes less space per person than individual work, these proportions are off if people are spending about 50% their time in 20% of their space.
How are Colleges and Universities different than other workplaces? Higher education institutions are facing significant financial pressures that drive reflection into budgeting for facilities and their operations. State support for higher education has decreased 10% in the last 10 years according to the Center for Budget and Policy priorities, during which time enrollments also increased 12% according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Student success is also quietly in crisis with only 59% students graduating in 4 years at non-profit institutions (and an abysmal 21% at for-profit institutions). So, institutions are rethinking their faculty and staff spaces to better support student success. There has also been considerable growth in professional administrative staff at college and universities, increasing 38% from 1990 to 2012 at public universities and 42% at private, non-profit universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Higher education institutions generally tend to have more generous space allocations on a per person basis than in other sectors: while CoreNet has found that space per person has declined 33% since 2010, from an average of 225 to 150 rentable square feet per person, a recent benchmarking study of 10 top universities determined an average of 190 net assignable square feet per person for faculty and staff (about 250 rentable square feet per person) – 66% more than their corporate counterparts. Finally, while not universal, there does seem to be more general resistance to change in how spaces are allocated, used, and operated in higher education compared to other sectors; in some cases, this can be due to a lack of hierarchy, especially among faculty, in comparison to corporate counterparts. University leaders are less so in a position to set new terms for space but rather must seek consensus and approval.
How Can Workplaces in Higher Education be More Flexible? While colleges and universities can employ many of the same strategies that have helped companies better align their workplace with their workforce and how they work, there are also some opportunities specific to academia. First, institutions can accept the reality of a more flexible workforce: faculty and staff will want and need to work from a variety of locations and part-time faculty are likely not going away and so ought to provided shared spaces in which they can be productive and meet with students – and this can have a big impact because a Purdue University and Gallup study concluded that having a professor that cares about you as a person doubles the likelihood of a student’s engagement (but unfortunately only 14% recall having such a relationship).
Institutions can also find new ways to accommodate growth given the historical increase in student enrollments of about 1% per year and the increase in staff of 1.75% per year. This might include ways to “grow in place” by increasing the density of the workplace to accommodate more people in the same amount of space, introducing unassigned activity-based workplaces for groups that are a good fit, and removing duplicate spaces since it’s common for a faculty member to have multiple offices such as one in her department and one at a research institute or in a clinical setting. Colleges and universities can also acknowledge how much work is done in teams – face-to-face and remotely – and upgrade the support for collaboration including allocating more space to collaboration as well as the technology to share audio, video, and information on screens. Finally, look for opportunities to create spaces that are not dedicated to one audience like students, faculty, or staff but rather can serve all three in the same place to enable interactions while saving space and money in the process.
What’s the Best Way to Get Started? To put these ideas into action, we recommend that you pilot concepts in order to test the ideas, build momentum, and gather data can use to convince those people and groups that are more skeptical or resistant to change. More important than quantitative data are the stories as these are the real currency on college and university campuses and the way to appeal the irrational “elephant” not just the rational “rider” to use psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s analogy for the mind.
First, find groups that are willing to try new things. Business schools, academic health centers, or entirely new programs with visionary leaders are often the best opportunities. For instance, brightspot worked with the Office of Human Resources at University of Minnesota and MIT Sloan School’s Executive Education to create new activity-based work environments with unassigned desks. The University of Minnesota Rochester also took the opportunity of a new campus to question assumptions and employed strategies like providing gym memberships instead of building their own fitness facility and also created an open office environment for faculty, with adjacent spaces to meet with students individually and in groups.
Second, given the rise in part-time faculty as well as the trend to move administrative units off-campus, institutions can create a shared work environment for its more mobile workforce. A co-working hub could either be run by the university or a local operator and could provide touchdown space for staff to be productive before or after coming to campus for a meeting as well as adjunct faculty who have more transient work patterns. For example, while not a co-working space per se, the UCLA Library created “Inquiry Labs” – “Inq Labs” for short – that are hybrid spaces for library staff and students. They have staff workstations, shared meeting spaces, and shared consultation areas all inhabiting the same flexible space so the “living room” area might be used for a staff meeting in the morning and a student workshop in the afternoon.
Third, universities can update their space standard to result in savings by reducing the sizes of offices and workstations while still increasing the amount of space devoted to collaboration. There are several examples of universities creating these more efficient and effective environments such as the University of California San Francisco’s Mission Hall or at the University of Washington Bothell. This sense of efficiency can even be taken a step farther to look not only at space, but space, cost, and time simultaneously; for instance, the utilization of classrooms is typically scrutinized on campus, yet our analysis comparing capital cost per square foot per hour used ($/nasf/hr) revealed that offices are 6x to 10x as expensive as classrooms.
Finally, none of these strategies will be possible without a participatory planning process to enable organizational change. People need to be part of designing their own future. Institutions can create a deliberate change program by learning from Everett Rogers’ lessons about the diffusions of innovations when he identified the different segments of a population and when and why they’ll try something new. There needs to be an intentional strategy of working with early adopters, followed by creating opportunities for early adopters to convince the early majority, and then a smart communications program that signals to the late majority that “everyone is doing it” so it’s time for them to jump on the bandwagon, and finally a way to coerce the remaining laggards who’ll only change when they have no choice. Along the way, institutions can make the case for change by making the change observable, making it easy to try, making it simple, communicating its compatibility with what’s happening today, and communicating what the relative advantages are.
As new workplace strategies are adopted, organizational change management is crucial to enable people to be informed, excited, and prepared. Faculty and staff need to know what’s happening and why. Colleges and universities need an intentional process for setting norms and building the skills people will need rather than moving them to a new space and hoping they will miraculously work differently without any training or discussion about how to do so. As they implement changes, institutions need to keep in mind that changing the workplace isn’t simply a “space problem.” It is much more complex, involving institutional goals and strategy, culture, work process, organizational design, and support services – to name few. So, holistic approach is a must.
The time has come for colleges and universities to adapt and apply new ideas about the workplace. New work patterns, financial pressures, growth on the horizon, and the crises of student engagement and degree completion all demand new approaches. The benefit of being in the sector at the tail end of the changes in the workplace is that there is so much to learn from by looking at other sectors. The challenge will be finding the right groups – with the right leadership – to start with and coupling that with the right strategy to assess, adapt, communicate, and scale up.
(Acknowledgements: This article has benefited from numerous conversations with people: Jeanne Narum from Project Kalescope, Jeff Zeibarth from Perkins+Will, Howard Wertheimer from Georgia Tech, Sally Grans-Korsh from NACUBO, and Brian Swanson as well as my interview with Peter Schmidt for his “Future of the Faculty Office” research with Jeff Selingo, which also provided a few useful statistics and case studies for this piece)
(This article originally appeared in the June issue of Workplaces Magazine. Check it out! https://bellow.press/LatestWP)