From spider to bee: Part three

In part three of Rose Brooke’s comparison of digital publishing in the public sector to the private sector, the constant invitations to meetings and accepting that some things are just out of your hands are two more culture shocks to get used to.

Meetings, meetings, meetings

Good grief! I’ve never had so many meetings in my life! Granted, in B2B there was a lot more travel involved and so pinning whole teams down for team meetings was much harder than it is when everybody is campus-based 95% of the time, but I do enjoy that our department head has fortnightly-to-monthly meetings with all of Comms and Marketing to inform us of management decisions, celebrate any departmental news and achievements, and to generally touch base with us as a group in a relaxed forum.

It says a lot for transparency, and although public sector transparency is mandatory, while in the private sector it is discretionary, I believe good communication from the top down is worth the time. The only time we got together as an office at my last job was at the Christmas party. However, I’m sure plenty of my colleagues at the university would prefer if this was the case here, when their inboxes are brimming with requests, scurrying from meeting to meeting getting more and more behind and spending a small fortune on lattes in the process.

Our bi-weekly/monthly department meetings are in addition to the weekly meetings the web team has with our line manager, as well as a more relaxed content editors’ meeting, which can sometimes be very specific and concerning one project only, sometimes a source of creative inspiration, and sometimes a bit of a venting session. Bonus - it usually takes place in the cosy surroundings of one of the university’s many coffee shops. Coffee really is the lifeblood of the public sector.

In the private sector, I think some managers would be appalled if a team spent core working hours drinking cappuccino and chatting about how their weeks are going, but I am really enjoying these meetings as a way of bonding with the team and as a way to soundboard with a group of peers. It’s amazing how you can work things out between yourselves, just by feeling you can talk openly with your contemporaries and planning how as a group you can bring real change. It also helps build my confidence as I balance the demands of the school with the consensus of the other digital content editors. In my first week, the head of department told me to remember ‘who is it for?’, ‘what’s it meant to do?’ before agreeing to publishing anything – ANYTHING. Her words resonated with me because it was strange to be able to reject content based on its merit and relevance, without factoring in commercial value.

Academics and students vs businesspeople

Often these requests for content come from the people the school orbits around: the academics (did you think I was going to say students?). 

Now meetings with industrial marketing officers, the media-schooled chief executives I was so used to interviewing, and other businesspeople at trade shows across manufacturing were a piece of cake. The media game was a simple one to play with a formula you get used to quite quickly. Academics are not businessmen. They do not have PR teams or company lines to follow. This is a challenge unique to working at a university, but it is true that meetings with academics are different. Walking into a meeting with an academic is becoming a bit of an Alice in Wonderland experience for me, because academics by their very nature are eccentric and many have gone from their postgraduate research to working within the very school they got their doctorate from, so the customs of business meetings were never adopted. I don’t know if a grumpy caterpillar sitting on a toadstool is going to ask coarsely ‘WHO ARE YOU’ and lecture on, basically ignoring me for the rest of the meeting, or if I’m going to be warmly welcomed into a ramshackle office with jazz playing and be handed a herbal tea by the Mad March Hare and asked about what kind of fiction I’m into.

No longer the magazine editor in an ivory tower, I now work for the School, and some academics see me as IT support, while others are enthusiastic when they meet me and want me to help them give their projects wings. Every professor is different, and some are more pleasant than others, but no matter how difficult they are to communicate with, their work is interesting.

It takes as long as it takes

One of my new colleagues described working at the university was a bit like the bureaucracy immortalised in Terry Gilliam’s chaotic sci-fi Brazil. There are committees for committees, and sign-offs for sign-offs, and emails to academics that don’t get a reply – and then suddenly do six months later.

For a B2B editor, this is probably the most frustrating new normal to get used to. As a B2B editor, the onus is on you to get that magazine to print on time. If the copy isn’t there, you have to find something else. But here, working on university content, in a lot of cases, I cannot finish a job until the right person tells me it is OK to proceed. And as long as I have reached out to them, that’s all I can do. I thought this would be stressful, or feel like 'passing the buck', when in fact it is very liberating.

For sure there is plenty I can do while waiting for sign-off, but projects can drag out over weeks and months because of the back-and-forth nature of working for a university, which is definitely going to take some getting used to, with the help of a very complicated, overstuffed Wunderlist.

Read again - From spider to bee: Part one

Read again - From spider to bee: Part two