Three good reasons for caring about professional staff in higher education

When I joined QUT in July 2010, I was surprised to meet with academic and professional staff, no admins. I was explained that anyone in the team is a sound professional with a real, unique expertise. All this must be acknowledged in how we call and address colleagues. Over the past 23 years, I have been thinking about it very much. I was involved in a number of consultancy projects with various types of organisations where it appeared that professional staff play a central role. I remember a case where a management ordered a study on professional staff was perceived in the organisation. It was found that their role was not clear to most and their value underestimated. Yet, we should care for our professional staff!

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Professional staff is our front office staff

It is counter-intuitive to consider that our professional staff is in the front-office. We would all spontaneously think that academics are front-office staff, as they are teaching students and are contributing to knowledge they share with society. If we think twice about it, we find that professional staff are always the ones at the fore when anyone has questions about the functioning of whatsoever.

You are a student and have questions about your timetable or your marks; you go first to the “office” where every professional staff member is eager to help and advise you. You are a visiting scholar or a sessional academic and do not know in what classroom you are teaching today; you go to the office. It is therefore no surprise that professional staff office be geographically central to the school building. Everybody visiting the school sees you and knows they can revert back to you if they have any sort of questions.

I have always been in this situation: in case of any question or issue, professional staff has the answer or the solution.

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Professional staff makes the organisation

Given its centrality to the school’s day-to-day operating and good functioning, professional staff de facto knows everything about the organisation. As a result, outwith the Strategic Apex, nobody but them has the best understanding of the organisation. They are involved in a number of working groups and coordination committees where they share information and experience with their counterparts from other departments.

At the end of the day, they design the processes we follow. At times, as academics, we are upset because of this jolly bureaucracy. We cannot help complaining about these procedures, instructions and other deadlines imposed on us. Professional staff arrived at these as conditions of organisational good functioning.

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Professional staff are organisational memory

Something about which we do not really think is that all these processes professional staff members design and enforce are a way of making, storing and sharing organisational memory. Our professional staff members care about leaving a clean, clear and working place to newcomers to the organisation.

In this respect, I will all my life remain very thankful to Maud Cotte , Nathalie Quenez , Isabelle de menou , nadege friess , Tiphaine Rocipon , Heather CONKLIN-WITTRANT , Jing Lejeune , Jennifer Rossignol , Jinnie Hinderscheit , Mélanie Perruchione and Stella Lishman for explaining to me the whence and whither of everything relating to my role. In the past, this happened; since then we have decided to do that way… Should you want to work on a cooperation agreement with a potential partner institution, I remember we did this with such-and-such, which may help. We are now using this software although it is imperfect, but it has been fixing a number of major issues we had the with other one in the past…

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All in all, I like saying professional staff members have always trained me on every single new role I have taken, wherever in the world, in whatever institution. I would like to praise them and thank them today for everything they have done for me and do for all of us.

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