Colleges are hosting in-person graduations. More campuses are requiring vaccinations for students and employees. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eased up on mask policies. Does that mean it’s time to go back to your campus office?
At some colleges — and for some positions — maybe not.
Many higher-education employees want to retain flexibility into the fall semester. That may look like adjusted hours or a split between an at-home, in-office workweek. Or it could mean a student-advising team has one person on virtual calls and two people in the office. There are countless paths forward, but this fusion of new digital-workplace norms into pre-pandemic remote-work policies will bring forward new questions about equity, technology, and the role of physical space on campus.
Here are five questions college leaders will need to ask themselves as they make the transition:
1. What’s on the books already?
Dig into human-resources handbooks and find pre-pandemic remote-work policies. These often took the shape of work agreements made between employees and managers under very different circumstances. When campuses across the country shifted to remote work due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many universities temporarily allowed remote work for most employees and suspended these kinds of agreements.
Returning to these documents has been the first step for many colleges considering operating hybrid offices in the fall semester, said Lisa Berglund, an associate director for the research arm of the consulting firm EAB. The company has received roughly two dozen remote-work policy drafts in the past two months.
Some of the pre-pandemic policies now appear risk averse, Berglund said. They often stipulated that employees had to get high-level approval or have worked at their university for a particular length of time to qualify.
Other policies seem to be grounded in a lack of trust. In one, for example, a “manager had the right to come to your home and prove that you are working in a productive and safe workplace,” she said. “It’s extreme to imagine, now that we’ve all been working remotely so much.”
2. How are you ensuring an equitable hybrid workplace?
Clear standards on work assignments and evaluations will be extra important if some staff members continue to work remotely. It’s easy for a hallway chat to become a new project assignment, and managers will need to make sure that employees who work from home have similar opportunities.
At the University of Central Florida, supervisors must handle work assignments for telecommuters “in the same manner” as for non-telecommuters, according to guidance updated in April. Performance standards, that guidance says, must be “measurable and results oriented.”
That type of guidance, “encouraging managers to focus on the results and outputs of a staff member,” has come up more frequently in conversations with chief human-resources officers, Berglund said. It tells supervisors not to confuse sitting at a desk with productivity.
Flexible remote policies, proponents argue, can foster equity on their own because they create space for workers in different situations to see to their personal needs. Alternative work arrangements, for example, could make workplaces more accessible for employees with disabilities, those who are taking care of children or elderly parents, or those who do not want to move to a college town, Berglund said.
There will also be equity questions between teams that operate differently. Campus police officers, for example, will have in-person requirements for their work that staff in the finance office might not. But campus leaders should be sure that two supervisors for similarly functioning units don’t have completely different approaches to allowing remote work, said Chris Halladay, associate vice president for human resources at Lehigh University and a co-chair on a task force to safely open the campus.
At Lehigh this fall, employees will need to create formal agreements with supervisors that outline how frequently they will be permitted to work from home, but eventually, position descriptions will include “mode of work.”
3. What do students expect?
In their communications, college leaders have emphasized that they do not want post-pandemic remote work to chill an on-campus atmosphere, a selling point for prospective students and some new hires.
While acknowledging that more staff will work remotely in the fall than before the pandemic, Lehigh in April addressed the issue of students’ expectations. Students chose the university “because of its distinctive and high-quality residential college experience,” Halladay and his co-chair wrote in a memo to staff. “Optimal service will generally be accomplished in person.”
What does that look like? Students “don’t want to walk by an office that’s dark and read a sign that says, ‘Call this number,’” Halladay said in an interview.
One question that will need further research is how students’ expectations have changed during the pandemic, Halladay said. Some may want to access certain services or even elements of classes online. “I don’t think any of us, anywhere are going to unlearn the lessons we learned this year.”
In an opinion piece for Dartmouth College’s student newspaper, one student said that some short check-in meetings should continue online. “I don’t enjoy having to walk across campus for a 15-30 minute meeting — especially when it’s early in the morning, or freezing outside,” the student wrote.
Scott Fletcher, dean of Lewis & Clark College’s Graduate School of Education and Counseling and chair of a task force on post-Covid work, previously told The Chronicle that some students may well prefer remote meetings after traditional business hours. He pointed to graduate students who work day jobs and may want evening, virtual conversations. Elvyra San Juan, assistant vice chancellor at the California State University system, said at a Chronicle virtual event that some health or counseling appointments will most likely continue virtually after the pandemic.
4. What technology — or technology training — is needed in a hybrid workplace?
On-campus meetings may still need to include a link to a virtual meeting room so that remote employees can log in, Berglund said. The Lehigh guidance in April acknowledged that the campus will continue to use Zoom for meetings.
Supervisors will also need to consider other technology questions. Should new hires receive a laptop or desktop when they start on campus? Is campus Wi-Fi strong enough to support many more virtual meetings?
Those are some of the questions that the University of South Florida is mulling over. During the course of the pandemic, employees there connected to one another and to students through video calls. The Wi-Fi in campus employees’ homes supported these virtual meetings.
Now, South Florida is anticipating that many of these Microsoft Teams meetings will continue, with a large number of them taking place on campus. That means the university will need to ensure its internet speeds are strong and reliable, said Sidney Fernandes, vice president for technology and chief information officer.
In an online guide to the hybrid workplace, South Florida urges remote employees to follow established data-protection procedures for university information. Such guidance could thwart hackers, but employees should take care to protect campus information and devices against seemingly benign threats. One scenario follows an employee named Fred. “After Fred has finished his work, his kids find his university computer sitting on the table and use it to play. What is wrong with this situation?”
Answer: Fred should have logged off at the end of the workday and used a password to protect his computer.
“Flexible work is a privilege, not necessarily a right that someone has,” said Angela Sklenka, vice president and chief human resources officer at USF. If someone isn’t complying with university policies, including on security, “it becomes a performance issue.”
5. What regulatory questions exist?
You may not get the green light to move to Bermuda and keep your campus job. To start, some campuses are requiring that staff work from a commutable distance. That’s Georgetown University’s plan — for the next academic year, employees will need to work from D.C., Maryland or Virginia. Some jobs for the subsequent year will have “mode of work” added to their descriptions after the campus determines “the most effective ways to conduct our work,” the plan says.
“It’s much more difficult and complicated when you start going out of state, out of country,” Berglund said.
A preliminary analysisby the University of Michigan focused on similar considerations. There are complications for out-of-state employees, the analysis found. Employment law — around hazard pay, paid leave, and discrimination — differs from state to state, and tax-withholding questions can arise, too.
At this point, the analysis warned, work in other countries outside of Canada is “discouraged” and requires central administration’s approval. Hiring a remote employee in a foreign country “has the very real potential to make the university a taxpaying taxpayer in those countries.” The university’s president has acknowledged that more people will work partially remotely than before the pandemic. But the university is not planning for a “substantial increase” in out-of-of state employees, Rich Holcomb, Michigan’s associate vice president for human resources, said in a statement to The Chronicle.
The University of Central Florida put the onus on employees to figure out tax questions: “The university will not provide tax guidance, nor will the university assume any additional tax liabilities on an employee’s behalf,” one manual stated.
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Considering Work-From-Anywhere Policies for College Employees? Answer These 5 Questions First - The Chronicle of Higher Education
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