In the fourth academic year since Covid-19 upended the campus experience, hybrid work has found a permanent place in higher education. That much is clear from a recent Chronicle survey that was underwritten by Cisco. Most respondents said their work force was operating on a hybrid basis, and more than three-quarters of those working in a hybrid setting didn’t want to go back to a fully in-person work environment.
But while many administrators and faculty members who completed the survey, which was conducted in July, supported their institutions offering a hybrid-work option, they also expressed ambivalence about whether such an arrangement was best for their teams or students.
Nearly two-thirds of academic and administrative leaders said their campuses were working on a hybrid basis, with 36 percent operating fully in person. For faculty members, it was more evenly split: 51 percent reported an expectation that their role be hybrid, and 46 percent said they were expected to work fully in person. Among those whose institutions are fully in person, faculty members were less likely than administrators to want to work in a hybrid manner. The same concerns about hybrid work that first emerged during the pandemic — about the difficulty of making genuine connections with students or co-workers over Zoom, maintaining morale and a sense of equity when some employees enjoy more flexibility than others, and ensuring productivity in a liminal workspace — surfaced in open-ended survey responses.
“Hybrid was a disaster, even after we learned good practices to employ,” one instructor wrote in an open-ended response. “Managing two different modes for one class meant less brain cells for the core task for the instructor. Online is a poor substitute for in-person communication for the 18-25-year-old university crowd.” Others explained that while they preferred to teach entirely in the classroom, some research and writing tasks that require deep focus were easier done from home. Part-time remote work also allowed some to more easily meet with students and colleagues.
Overwhelming shares of administrators and faculty members — 93 and 86 percent, respectively — agreed that a hybrid setup benefits morale, with some writing that they’d lose talented employees or would themselves seek employment elsewhere without it. But for some, that desire ran up against higher ed’s longstanding status as a brick-and-mortar institution, as a place that both houses and serves students. “I think this would be a morale booster,” one administrator wrote of hybrid work, “but we are a service industry, and I don’t know how to manage it successfully.”
Many institutions seem attentive to that problem: 63 percent of faculty members who responded to the Chronicle/Cisco survey said their institution had done a good job helping managers navigate a hybrid-work force, and 69 percent of administrators said the same. Two-thirds of both administrators and faculty members said they felt their institution was successful in “fostering a collegial and collaborative workplace culture in a hybrid environment.”
A third of administrators said managing a hybrid-work environment was easier in 2023 than it had been in 2022, and 46 percent rated it about the same level of difficulty. Just 20 percent reported it had become more difficult to handle hybrid work. That things have gotten easier, or at least not harder, stems partially from experience — as several respondents wrote, “people are more used to it.”
Gauging Productivity
John P. Jones, executive director of the media-resources center at Wichita State University, said of the approximately 30 people on his team, 20 to 30 percent of them work mostly or fully hybrid. That degree of flexibility is possible in part because of the work the center does — for example, helping faculty members with instructional design. “I’m very proud of the amount of flexibility I’ve been able to offer many of my folks, and I’m also painfully aware that I’m able to offer that flexibility largely because of the nature of our work and not through any great virtue or skill of mine as a manager,” Jones said. “It just so happens that we do work that in some cases can be done remotely, and I’m willing to see that as a possibility.” Employees whose work is largely digital, like those working at Jones’s center or in information technology, are the most likely across higher ed to work remotely or in a hybrid format.
For some roles, Jones said, it’s easy for him to evaluate employees’ productivity without having to watch them. If unanswered help tickets begin piling up, for instance, he knows someone is lagging behind. But often, questions about what an appropriate amount of work to expect from an employee might be, or whether they’re producing it consistently and at a high level, are more difficult to answer, particularly at a distance. “If we can’t use seat time anymore to understand whether an employee is giving us an appropriate amount of their time and effort, what can we use?” Jones said. “The magic wand I would wave would be one that gives us clean, trustworthy, easy-to-use measures of all employees’ productivity.” Absent that, after three years of hybrid work, he feels fairly confident in his own ability to evaluate and manage his team.
So does Samara Reynolds, executive director of career services at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her team’s success during fully online work makes it easy for her to trust them, and she’s also mindful of staying personally connected with each employee, which she does by setting up weekly or biweekly meetings with her direct reports and time every other month to talk with other team members about how they’re doing. Most of Reynolds’s employees work three days a week in the office and two days from home, and each semester they select which days they’ll be going to the office.
Reynolds’s office also splits the modalities of services it offers students. Most students, she said, prefer to engage virtually, even when offered the option to schedule an in-person appointment. But certain resources — free headshots for students or a professional-clothing collection they can browse — can only be offered in person, and both students and employers have told her they find in-person career fairs more effective than the online version.
They’ve done away with synchronous hybrid format — say, some employees participating in a meeting in person while others beam in virtually, or trying to host a campus event with both online and in-person attendees — which Reynolds said creates its own dissonance, aside from being technically and logistically tough to pull off.
While hybrid work might be more broadly accepted, hybrid teaching tends not to be. At the University at Buffalo, for example, some faculty members are still wary of hybrid teaching, said Claire S. Schen, an associate professor of history. “We fear an erosion of our own status and the significance of a college education in person and the exchange of ideas,” Schen said, adding that some of her colleagues don’t know how to measure the efficacy of hybrid instruction. To answer that question, Schen plans to teach a large general-education course with two asynchronous lectures and a third in-person class this fall; she’ll survey students for their impressions of the format at the beginning, midpoint, and end of the course. (Normally, Buffalo’s history department doesn’t offer hybrid or remote courses during the fall or spring terms, but Schen got special dispensation for her fall experiment.)
So, has higher ed reached a saturation point? Will it veer any further in favor of hybrid or remote work, or lean harder into the in-person experience? Jones, at Wichita State, thinks it will be difficult for higher ed to shift to an increasingly remote work force like many employers in industry have done. It’s one thing to marshal a remote or hybrid employee base when most of those employees are doing similar work, but it’s another when a manager like Jones oversees six small teams, each of which has its own measures of productivity and success. At Wichita State, Jones said, “those are teams of anywhere from two to six people. So how do you expand that and make that work on a company of 500 people? I think it’s a big, big challenge for an organization as diverse as a university in a way that it isn’t for a corporation that has a lot more homogeneity of work.”
Even institutions that are operating fully in person have adopted the principle of flexibility that underlies hybrid-work policies. “It simply doesn’t make sense (for our students’ sake) for our staff to work off campus,” one community-college administrator wrote, explaining that allowances might be made for certain jobs or in short-term situations. The college’s staff struggled with fully remote work and returned to campus sooner than many. Yet leadership has also “cultivated an environment that gives employees a generous degree of flexibility to handle personal situations that may arise, and for the most part, staff appreciate that leeway and avoid exploiting it,” the administrator wrote. “It’s not quite hybrid, but that flexibility does go a long way in helping employees manage the work-life balance that drives most requests for hybrid-work options.”
