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When my daughters were in high school, they both played on various teams. Soccer, cross-country running, cross-country skiing and tennis. Games and tournaments often started in the late afternoon.
Since I live in a small college town, many of the parents attending these games worked at the local college. A high proportion of kids had parents who were faculty or staff.
Professors are some of the hardest-working professionals on the planet. There is a myth about faculty work that it is an easy job. The reality is that professors work all the time, and the higher one goes up the faculty ranks, the more one works.
Faculty jobs are intense, demanding and draining (for many reasons), but they are also flexible.
Professors, to a large extent, own their time.
Professors have regular commitments, from teaching schedules to committee meetings to office hours. But outside of these scheduled and committed times, they can (mostly) work where and when they want. (Which also explains why professors work all the time.)
In terms of kids' sports, what this meant is that the professors I knew were able to attend afternoon kids' sports without suffering so much role conflict and role strain. If they weren't teaching or scheduled in a meeting, they could attend a soccer game or a cross-country running tournament with little guilt.
Professors were not supposed to be somewhere else.
As a staff member, my attendance at afternoon kids' sports events was always a bit more complicated. Like other staff members, I would go to the games. But I always felt that I was attending on "work time" -- the regular academic business day schedule when most staff are expected to be available.
As an academic staff member, you really didn't own your time.
That was before COVID-19.
For the past year, what I've observed is that norms of academic staff autonomy and workplace flexibility have been disrupted.
While certainly not universal and highly dependent on specific job responsibilities, it does seem to be the case that when it comes to work -- (some) staff are acting more like professors.
Is this true at your school? Is it true for you?
With many (if not most) professional staff working remotely, the rhythms of academic life are in flux. In speaking to academic staff at many institutions, there seems to be a consistent shift toward more flexible work patterns.
I'm seeing that academic staff are showing greater confidence in shaping their work around life, rather than vice versa.
This shift is occurring out of necessity. COVID has made school and childcare arrangements enormously challenging for parents of school-age and young children.
These changes in academic staff workplace norms seem to not only be limited to parents. While I've not seen data about this shift, the best I can offer is a hypothesis. It does appear that there is a shift occurring in working norms among (some) academic staff. What I'm seeing and hearing (anecdotally) is a move toward greater flexibility.
In practice, I think this means that academic staff are doing some things during traditional work hours, such as family-related activities or shopping or exercise. In turn, these same staff may be shifting their work to early mornings, nights or weekends.
None of this is new. Some academic staff always worked flexible and nontraditional hours. And certainly, this privilege of working more flexible hours is not universally shared, with only some professional staff able to claim this flexibility.
What is new, I think, is how broad this pattern of academic staff work has become under COVID.
Remote work has brought with it greater recognition of the relationship between internal motivation and productivity. Managers can't easily observe academic staff work -- yet academic staff continue to work incredibly hard.
When it comes to academic workplace norms around autonomy and flexibility, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the work of some (mostly professional) academic staff to look much more like some (tenure-track) faculty. This is a big shift. A welcome change.
Staff benefit as much as faculty from control of their time. Autonomy and flexibility are as good for the productivity and morale as staff as they are for professors.
The question is, will this shift stick once the pandemic is in the rearview mirror? (Whenever that will happen.)
Once we can safely all be back on campus, will this historical autonomy and flexibility divide between faculty and staff start re-emerge?
Just as the post-pandemic campus is likely to include many more academic staff who continue to work (at least partly) from home, we also might see these staff continue to want to maintain the autonomy and flexibility they exhibited during the pandemic.
Will university HR departments and managers be OK with this change?
Will campuses engage in a conversation about autonomy and flexibility for nonfaculty?
Will academic staff feel as empowered to prioritize family commitments post-COVID as they were required to during COVID?
Is this more of a story of only a few privileged academic professional staff and less of shifting academic staff workplace norms?
Once the pandemic ends, will academic staff be able to attend their kids' afternoon sporting events without guilt?
