Evening all,
What with the various disturbances over the past few years, it's really striking to me how the pattern and modes of work have changed for me, my team/s, the academics we work with, and for students. I'm not talking about workloads or volumes or anything like that necessarily (although this plays a role), but rather what the work actually looks like, day to day.
As you would all know, the way we all worked pre-covid is very different to how we work today. Prior to covid, the whole team came to the office, and every meeting we had with students was in person. Now, one thing I've observed from holding hundreds of these "conversations" is that, as one might expect, students aren't all the same. What they may not tell you in person they will happily write to you, they may prefer a Zoom meeting to in person. Indeed it has been my experience that despite offering all of the above as options, a VAST majority of students responding to misconduct concerns will choose to write back to us. I don't put any particular weight or value in that choice. Sometimes it's because they have to face up, and having a 48 year old bearded man across the desk makes that more difficult. That makes sense. It may be because they are neurodivergent and an in person meeting might make the process even harder for them. I have no interest in making misconduct matters harder for students. I have interests in assurance of learning, righting wrongs to educational communities, but not punishment, or the cabbage-brained stupidity of "give em a scare." Facing the consequences of poor decisions is scary enough, no scarers required.
So, back to the originating topic of how and where we work, once we hit Covid the team already had such a load of work that branching out from on person meetings to include any mode a student preferred was not only necessary for pandemic reasons, but logical as a way of working into the future. We talked more on Teams than we ever did in the office, because you can mute it when you want. Once the pandemic was "over" (I see you, immunocompromised folks) the way we worked through the pandemic didn't change really at all. Of course it's nice to meet people for a coffee from time to time, and to develop new connections, but when one of your team works in Queensland (I'm more interested in quality than location), a few of them (including yours truly) have been advised to avoid campus for security reasons, working primarily online and coming together periodically, on campus and off, is just common sense.
Which also reminded me of an article I saw a while ago, which has a couple of quotes I find instructive. Firstly, "“I think it’s much better to be caring about your workforce rather than caring for your workforce", and second "as well as proceeding along the learning curve, companies needed to progress along the unlearning curve, jettisoning practices and assumptions that hinder success."
To me success means a team that love working together, who see the individual and collective value everyone brings to our work, and are the best in the world at what we do. It also means my folks being able to pick up their kids from school, and balance out busy home lives with busy work lives. It does not mean sitting in an empty office after spending 2 hours and thirty bucks to get there, talking to students on Zoom because they don't want to come to campus.
Until next time,
KM
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