Last year, colleges and universities — like many companies and state agencies — were in a scramble for talent amid a historically low unemployment rate. Jobs in higher education might have paid less than in the corporate world, but colleges could always sell candidates on their mission, a sense of community, and — at mid- to upper-tier institutions, at least — job security.
How times have changed. Now colleges and universities are looking at not only historic layoffs but also the possibility of permanent closure. And with nearly everyone working from a basement couch or a dining-room table, support services for employees have been transformed in a scramble to deal with connectivity issues and work-life balance.
For human-resources offices in higher education, those trends — and more disruptions to come — could prove especially challenging. HR offices in higher-ed — “pits of bureaucracy,” some complain — are too often at the edges of decisions about work-force planning on campus, HR officials say.
“One of the huge challenges for human resources over all is perception — the perception that we are the record keepers, the policy police, and that we are the doers and not the planners and the strategy focus group,” says Andy Brantley, president of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. “The majority of the budget of every organization — particularly higher education — is people. If the human-resources leaders aren’t helping the key leaders across the institution think about how they best use the talent and the skills and abilities of those people throughout the organization, they’re not doing their job.”
Human resources in organizations outside higher education has been elevated to a more prominent position in recent years, working directly with leaders on strategies to attract talent and on navigating an increasingly contentious legal environment for employers. But in higher education, only about a quarter of human-resources directors report directly to the president, and many HR employees are scattered throughout colleges and departments, possibly leading to redundancy or inconsistencies in HR services, according to research by ABC Insights, which tracks administrative positions at colleges. As a result, much of higher ed’s HR work, according to the research, is merely transactional.
For example, in an ABC Insights study of the HR work force at one top research institution, 63 percent of the HR workers were performing duties related to employee paperwork, processing benefits, or distributing information about employee services — bureaucratic duties that might be automated instead. Many times, HR tasks were performed by employees who had no human-resources training, leading to legal exposure for institutions.
Still, the decentralized, scattered nature of HR is changing, particularly at larger institutions, to follow the corporate world.
“In the corporate world, the head of HR reports to the CEO in just about every single case,” says John Whelan, vice president for human resources at Indiana University, whose position was recently elevated to report to the president.
Under that kind of structure, “the decisions that HR is making are driven by the strategic decisions of the organization and not the other way around,” Whelan says. Human resources needs to have a broad and nuanced understanding of the structure of a college or university, its short-term and long-term goals, its position in the marketplace, and the challenges to its viability, he says. “HR is at its worst when it’s disconnected. When people complain about HR, they say things like ‘They don’t even understand what we do.’”
Faculty members — a huge portion of the campus work force— often have limited contact with HR, and may not even see themselves as working for their institution in a traditional sense.
“When I was at Columbia University, it was anathema to refer to a faculty member as an employee,” says Brian K. Powell, vice president and chief human-resources officer at Chapman University. “One said to me, ‘I’m not an employee of Columbia. I am Columbia.’”
Looming Pressures
In the wake of the pandemic, imagine the academic world that could emerge. Institutions could be in a new talent war as the economy recovers, especially as they shift their missions and create academic programs in new or reinvigorated fields after Covid-19. Working from home might become customary, which means that colleges and universities could employ people all over the country or the world, to either secure talent or pay less. Campus workspaces could shrink or become shared, leading to new turf battles to manage.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
The immediate future poses particularly pressing challenges. The higher-ed work force is contracting suddenly — and it may get worse. Many institutions have noted that students’ deposits for the fall are holding up fairly well, given the lockdowns and closures that ended the school year early this spring. But a resurgence of Covid-19 or skepticism about the value of an online-only fall could lead students to forfeit their deposits and opt for a gap year, leading to crashing enrollments at many tuition-dependent institutions.
Under that pressure, mistakes could happen.
Tony Lee, a vice president at the Society for Human Resource Management, says higher education seems to have been caught flat-footed, without robust business-continuity plans. In this environment, institutions could be tempted to make across-the-board cuts, which might seem easier, fast, and “fair.” A strategic approach would involve thinking about which employees represent the direction the institution needs to take, how to maintain the character and diversity of the workplace, and how to care for the people who are working extraordinary hours in an uncertain environment.
“HR is attempting to make sure decisions aren’t made that will have a long-term negative impact on the brand of the institution,” Lee says. “It’s HR sitting down with all the managers, trying to figure out: What do we need to survive, what people are required to keep the business going effectively, and which aren’t? And those are very tough decisions.” Robust data about a college’s work force can help in making decisions.
New Workplaces
Human-resources offices also typically oversee the office environment and attend to the physical- and mental-health needs of employees. But with stay-at-home orders issued across the country, all kinds of organizations have had to learn how to support employees who are clocking in from the couch. Working from home has raised the stress levels of some employees and isolated others, leading to mental-health challenges amid all the anxiety and uncertainty.
Faculty members have long worked from somewhere other than their offices. But for staff members at many colleges and universities, who normally work only on campus, the new arrangements are unfamiliar. Initially, institutions merely made do, says Whelan, at Indiana. But if working from home becomes a long-term arrangement through the summer — or a way to ensure social distancing when classes reconvene on campus — his office will help managers devise techniques for supervising and supporting employees at home.
“We are finding people who are on two extremes of the spectrum,” he says. “You’ve got some people who have never worked so hard in their whole life — they’re on meetings for 10 straight hours a day and doing email at night. And then you have other people whose work has just disappeared.”
Productivity really depends on the person, not on the location.
For many institutions, the shifting working arrangements have led to culture changes that could stick. Before Covid-19, “our campus was really lukewarm to the idea of working from home,” says Susan Norton, vice president for human resources at Augusta University. The public institution in Georgia had been involved in telemedicine, but the notion of allowing its staff to work from home raised worries about productivity among supervisors.
“Productivity really depends on the person, not on the location,” Norton says. “If there is a silver lining with this whole challenging situation that we face, it’s going to be our openness to teleworking as a reasonable way to allow flexibility. It’s not just about face time. There are plenty of people, and we have a lot of face time in the office, but they may not have accomplished much.”
A big portion of the work force seems to prefer working from home. According to a survey this week by the Society for Human Resource Management, 43 percent of employees would want to work from home more often to avoid the commute, be more productive, and have more time for their families, exercise, and hobbies.
Ergonomic issues in home offices remain a long-term challenge. Augusta requires employees working at home to sign an agreement saying that they have a space that is conducive to work, with ergonomic furniture that the employee has purchased. (Norton says the university does not purchase furniture for home workers because the regulations and paperwork used to track state property are too burdensome.)
But human-resources chiefs believe the new openness to working from home could help higher education solve major financial challenges in the years to come.
The need to rethink space management is important.
“As many campuses realize that their capital-construction ambitions are probably maxing out,” says Powell, at Chapman University, “the need to rethink space management is important.” Cultural hurdles abound: A third of the space on a college campus is offices, and departments can hoard square footage, as it is often a proxy for status.
But if campuses can get past worries about the productivity and connectivity of at-home employees — and if HR offices can resolve issues related to working conditions, policies, pay, and taxes — the trend could allow colleges to reduce their building footprints or seek cheaper labor.
“It could allow cash-poor or resource-sensitive colleges, particularly smaller ones, to pay wages that might be competitive in certain parts of the country, but may not be competitive in Southern California or in metro New York City,” Powell says. “There are unique opportunities here if we embrace them.”
