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Inside Higher Education
Streamlining
'Shadow Work'
Cornell looks for ways to cut time professors spend on administrative
requirements, as opposed to teaching and research.
By Colleen Flaherty
November 8, 2016
Bagging our own groceries, printing out boarding passes, pumping our
own gas -- everyone's day involves some "shadow work," tasks that
previously would have been performed by someone else paid to do them.
But academics’ professional lives increasingly are subsumed by such
shadow work, and the implications for their core efforts are stark. How
much actual research does a researcher get to do, for example, when he
or she spends hours a week on various administrative burdens?
While faculty shadow work is a widely acknowledged problem, it’s gone
unaddressed at many institutions. It’s rarely, if ever, out of malice.
But administrators who want some information think nothing of sending a
survey to hundreds or thousands of professors and giving them a
deadline. It only takes a click from a central office, but it's one
more task for professors.
Cornell University is trying stem the tide with a new initiative aimed
at recentering academic work on academics.
“There’s a core group of faculty here that’s very sensitive to this
issue, and we have to address it, or it’s a path to perdition,” said
Sol Gruner, John L. Wetherill Professor of Physics at Cornell and a
member of its new working group on bureaucracy reduction. “We’ve also
had an administration that’s been sensitive to the fact that academics
are feeling increasingly put upon in this way.”
Gruner chaired a committee of arts and sciences faculty members that
produced a 2015 report on streamlining research administration. The
committee found that administrative burdens on faculty and staff have
“grown explosively at Cornell” and are now a “major impediment to the
successful functioning of the university.” The report identified two
main sources of burden: shadow work, which it defined as the
displacement of work from trained staff onto faculty, and “overzealous
risk management, which paralyzes research function.”
Regarding shadow work, the report says that there was a time when
“faculty and staff research travel was largely handled by a university
travel office and when much of the routine burden of writing papers and
grants, requesting reimbursements, collecting information for sponsored
project progress reports, performing inventories, etc., was handled by
secretarial and unit office staff. No longer.”
Today, the committee continued, “faculty and research staff are
increasingly required to do these things themselves. In polling
colleagues across the college about research inefficiencies, we find
the growth of shadow work -- the movement of work that does not require
a great deal of training to perform from lower-paid staff to more
highly trained and paid faculty and staff -- to be a serious problem at
the root of many complaints pertaining to red tape and work
inefficiency. We believe that nothing is more corrosive to academic
excellence than squeezing out all time to think.”
Shadow work creeps because it seems likes a simple way to cut personnel
cuts, according to the report. But it’s often just assumed that
replacement processes foisted onto faculty members, such as data entry,
will save time or costs over all.
While the new faculty or staff user “incurs considerable mental
overhead in task switching, especially for tasks that are performed
only occasionally,” the report says, “a staff member serving many end
users can get very efficient at collecting and entering information
simply because they do it more often.”
To reduce shadow work, the committee emphasized drawing a clear
distinction between centralized staff and those embedded in academic
units. While centralized staff often create more work for faculty
members, localized staff often reduce it. The report argues, for
example, that professors “with major research enterprises are in effect
the CEOs of small companies and as such need significant support.”
Next, the committee urged rigorous study, or “validation,” of new
policies and procedures that are supposed to save time or costs.
“The understanding must be that, without exception, the new process
will not be implemented until the end-user group is of a consensus that
the new process is (a) required, and (b) on balance less work than the
process being replaced, and (c) not redundant with other processes,”
the report says. “A sustained, long-term solution will require a deep
understanding of what shadow work is, and the development of ways to
quantitatively measure it” as scholars.
Administrative tasks for further study include travel, purchasing,
reimbursement, human resources issues, safety reporting, progress
reports to sponsors and administrative units.
“How many hours a month are typically being spent performing each
function?” the report asks.
The committee proposed a five-part plan to alleviate the administrative
burdens on faculty and staff, including recommitting to the notion that
Cornell’s highest goal is excellence in research and teaching, and
making “all decisions about policy and procedure through this lens.”
Other ideas include limiting and in some cases reversing the
centralization of staff and appointing an “anti-red tape czar” to
oversee and adopt streamlining efforts.
The group had the support of Cornell’s president, Elizabeth Garrett.
But she died of cancer in March, just six months after her
inauguration, putting the bureaucracy reduction initiative somewhat on
hold.
Cornell’s new interim president and president emeritus, Hunter R.
Rawlings III, has since backed the initiative.
“The time faculty and academic staff spend on tasks not directly
related to the academic mission has grown as compliance requirements
and the use of technology have increased, and the hidden costs of this
shadow work have become a critical issue throughout higher education,”
Rawlings said in a recent statement. “Faculty and academic staff time
should be prioritized toward our primary goal of excellence in
scholarship -- learning, discovery and engagement.”
Rawlings, Gruner and mix of other faculty members and administrators
have formed a new working group dedicated to the issue of reducing
bureaucracy, of which shadow work is a major contributor. “We’re
looking at what’s consuming our time and how we can reduce it so we can
more effectively teach and do research,” Gruner said. “Our approach is
to ask common-sense questions when we’re undergoing a change in
procedure or doing some new kind of survey … about whether we’re
decreasing the work load and whether we’re improving the situation in
terms of what people have to do ancillary to their job.”
First up is testing Concur, an integrated travel management system the
university is considering adopting. The dean of the faculty is
currently accepting volunteers to test whether the program actually
saves them time, compared to their current practices for arranging and
getting reimbursed for work-related travel.
Gruner said arranging travel through, say, a travel agent 15 to 20
years ago took a 15-minute phone call. Now it can take the faculty
member working on his or her own up to an hour or more, he said -- at a
significant cost to the university.
“That’s not really why I was hired -- I was hired to do teaching and
research,” he said. Testing the system and not just assuming it is
efficient is the kind of change that this effort wants to see become
the norm.
Charlie Van Loan, dean of the university faculty, said the "benefit to
Cornell is obvious — more time for teaching and research. One wasted
15-minute slot spent on pointless bureaucracy can ruin a whole day."
Shadow work isn’t new. But at Cornell and elsewhere, Gruner said, the
2008 financial crisis brought new efforts to shrink budgets -- meaning
reductions in clerical and other staff and the displacement of certain
kinds of work onto faculty members.
Information on how much time shadow work costs faculty members is
scant, probably because it’s hard to measure and varies widely from
discipline to discipline and institution to institution. Gruner's own
demands differ from those placed on a faculty member in a department
with large numbers of undergraduates, many of whom will want
recommendation letters to pursue graduate school, for example, he said.
And of course demands placed on Cornell professors will differ from
those placed on community college instructors, who have large course
loads and often large class sizes -- and often less administrative
support.
Shadow work is also distinct from other administrative demands placed
on faculty members, such as that related to federally funded research.
But it’s safe to say that reducing shadow work would at least help
alleviate other administrative pressures on faculty members, which
remain high.
Two separate surveys of investigators by the Federal Demonstration
Partnership, in 2005 and 2012, for example, found that principals of
federally sponsored research projects spend, on average, 42 percent of
their time on associated administrative tasks. A National Science Board
task force on administrative burdens convened in 2012 found that
researchers’ most burdensome requirements included financial
management, the grant proposal process and progress and other outcome
reporting.
A 2014 National Science Foundation report on the matter concluded that
failure to address these issues has resulted in wasted federal research
dollars, and that at a time of fiscal challenges and with low funding
rates at many federal agencies, “it is imperative that these issues are
addressed so that researchers can refocus their efforts on scientific
discovery and translation.”
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