The word “unprecedented” was commonly uttered throughout the Covid-19 pandemic but it really is no understatement to say that the shift to remote working transformed the world of work almost overnight. And while, for universities, the transition to online teaching made all the headlines, the impact of home-working on back-office functions was just as profound – and, arguably, longer lasting.

While, historically, academics often worked from home when their lecture schedule or research activities did not require them to be on campus, professional services (non-academic) staff were typically present throughout the working week. Hence, many embraced the better work-life balance offered by working from home and were keen to hang on to it even as the pandemic receded and other employment sectors went back to the office full-time.

Post-pandemic, universities moved to hybrid working patterns, whereby most professional services staff were only required to be on campus for some of the working week. And, five years on, that remains the case. Of the nearly 80 UK universities that responded to a request for details of their current working arrangements for professional services staff, all have some form of hybrid policy.

A number of institutions have a “tiered” approach, with attendance requirements varying by job role. UCL, for example, distinguishes between “on-site first” roles, whose incumbents are expected to spend at least 80 per cent of their time on campus, “hybrid” roles, with 20 to 80 per cent attendance requirements, and “remote-first” roles, which permit staff to spend more than 80 per cent of their time at home. 

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Queen’s University Belfast has a similar policy; workers required to be on campus at all times include gardeners, security staff, lab technicians and catering and hospitality staff. Roles that are “mostly campus-based” but have some degree of hybridity include student advisers and personal assistants, while marketing officers and data analysts have the greatest freedom to work from home.

It is not possible from the information provided to determine the proportions of professional services staff across the sector that fall into each category, but the University of Lancashire (formerly the University of Central Lancashire, Uclan) said that “approximately half” its professional services staff “are needed on campus all the time, or virtually all the time”. Some institutions still try to incorporate a degree of flexibility even for these workers; Newcastle University, for instance, offers “varying start and finish times where appropriate”.

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Rachel Reeds, author of Surviving and Thriving in Higher Education Professional Services, and interim head of admissions at Plymouth Marjon University, noted that at many UK universities, hybrid working policies for particular university divisions are determined by their own managers, which makes them dependent on those managers’ “personality” and opens the door to inconsistencies across single institutions.

She also noted that the financial crisis had led universities to cut costs on estates and facilities: “I know at some institutions that I’ve worked at that there wouldn’t be room any more [for all staff],” she said.

Nevertheless, many universities’ work-from-home policies remain “under review” and, , some institutions have become stricter on campus attendance requirements – which hasn’t always gone down well with staff.

In April, for instance, professional services staff at the University of Liverpool who are members of the Unite union voted in favour of industrial action after the university informed them that they would be required to spend 60 per cent of their time on campus – up from 40 per cent. The dates of the strike action have not yet been announced but Unite previously said the strike could cause disruption to exams and clearing.

The university has argued that increasing the time expected on campus by one day a week for full-time staff members will “strike the right balance as a face-to-face higher education provider” and will “enhance the experience of campus for our students and improve the impact colleagues have in their roles by spending more time together”. 

While the change in policy does not take Liverpool out of step with other UK universities, Samantha Marshall, the North-West regional officer for Unite, said that there had not been “adequate consultation and negotiation” and was being viewed as an “imposition” by staff.

“Over the course of the last three years, people have made changes to their working and domestic routines and altered their lifestyles…while maintaining their professional responsibilities for the university,” she said, stressing that increasing minimum campus attendance will disproportionately impact parents with young children and those with caring responsibilities.

“There are no permanent desks any more [at Liverpool]: everything is a hot desk,” Marshall noted, adding that the squeeze on space has even resulted in the university suggesting that staff can have their team meetings “in the pub”, which she considers “completely inappropriate”.

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A Liverpool spokesperson said: “Formal consultation with our recognised trade unions has taken place in line with our agreed procedures and we continue to meet with them to discuss this issue. All relevant assessments, including in relation to health and safety, are being undertaken to ensure staff continue to be provided with an appropriate working environment.”

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Not all staff are work-from-home diehards. One professional services staff member who has been affected by Queen Mary University of London’s merger of its School of English and Drama with its School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, said that that while their original school had previously felt like “a big family”, hybrid working was making it difficult to form new bonds with academics and professional services staff from the other merged school.

“We see less of [colleagues] now, and we see barely anything of the staff we’ve just merged with. So I think hybrid working has made the merger more difficult in that sense because it just makes it more difficult to form a community,” the staff member said.

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They added that long hours and exhaustion have become standard following the restructure; they had even cancelled their own annual leave on one occasion because they had too much work to do following the merger and staff cuts. And when they work from home, they feel the need to soldier on even when they are ill. 

“That is a detrimental thing about being able to work from home," they said. "When people are ill, much more often they are still working and not taking time to recover…everyone’s just burnt out. People are getting sick repeatedly and everyone’s exhausted.”

Petra Boynton, a social psychologist and author of Being Well in Academia, is particularly concerned about the well-being of professional services staff, particularly given that conversations about staff mental health often focus on academics. With their long hours and even their illnesses being hidden from managers by working from home policies, the suffering of professional services staff is becoming “invisible”.

The fear of job cuts could also be increasing “presenteeism”, Boynton said, whereby staff feel pressure to work on campus in an attempt to make their value more apparent to managers – or to form relationships with other teams that might be able to offer them an alternative position if necessary.

That is all the more so because of the wave of job cuts sweeping UK higher education, which is forcing remaining staff to pick up the slack. Moreover, some worry that professional services staff members’ decreased visibility to senior managers as a result of hybrid working is one reason many of them have been laid off. Prominent examples include Sheffield Hallam University, which is looking to cut 400 professional services staff, the University of Nottingham (250), the University of Bedfordshire (240) and Durham University (200).

Marjon’s Reeds echoed Boynton's concerns. While the work and value of professional services staff has always been invisible to some extent, hybrid working can “reinforce that invisibility” to academics, she said. “Say a professor pops into an office and there’s no one there: there’s then the assumption that there was never anyone there and they’re not going to be able to help them.”

By contrast, Reeds argued, academics have become more accessible since the pandemic, with the rise of platforms such as Zoom and Teams facilitating contact with them even when they are working remotely.

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David Meech Mazumdar, department manager for strategic planning and development in the London School of Economics’ Department of Management, has a different perspective. He believes hybrid working has improved the relationship between professional services staff and academics by making their attendance obligations more “equitable”.

Tensions sometimes arose pre-pandemic because “there was always a sense that professional services staff were the ones that were in the office all the time”, said Meech Mazumdar, who last year published a . But the pandemic “opened everyone’s eyes to exactly what we did as professional services staff” – and he noted that LSE has not made cuts to professional services staff in recent years.

Nevertheless, he is conscious of the danger of hybrid working making colleagues “invisible” to each other. Hence, his department has introduced “community days” once a month, when academics and professional service staff are all encouraged to be on campus. Activities are laid on, including joint lunches, well-being sessions, walking tours, quizzes and even massages.

“In some ways, we’re almost more visible [to each other than pre-pandemic] on those days because people make a real effort to go and see each other and to meet with academic colleagues,” said Meech Mazumdar. “That sort of informal setting, where people can just chat, is really, really useful; it was something I was really conscious that we needed.”

While few of the professional services staff that Times Higher Education spoke to wanted to go back to pre-pandemic ways of daily commutes and work-life imbalances, Boynton thinks that more of such initiatives are needed to maintain positive work environments. There is currently a “sadness” around hybrid working because “the opportunity to make things more accessible [is] being lost within all this other stuff”, she said.

“When you’re doing it properly, home working or hybrid working is a chosen and negotiated balance. It’s not an imposition.”

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