What about the workload? Do you feel safe at work? Do you feel like you belong? Do you start work on Monday feeling rested? In 2022, eight hundred and eighty-five employees (18.6 per cent) completed the questionnaire for the second ‘sustainable employability monitor’. A low response rate. For the first survey in 2018 (both have been commissioned by the Executive Board), 63 per cent of all employees participated.
The results can therefore not be compared one-to-one with each other, the researchers write, but if one compares the two monitors on “a higher level”, one will see that very little has changed in the last four years. A considerable number of employees run a “very high risk of experiencing a burnout”. Also, “It is alarming to see that a substantial number of UM employees are still in dire need of recovery and experiences a workload that is high or too high.”
Short fuse
According to Angelique de Rijk, professor of Labour and Health at (FHML), the summary of the results on UMployee (intranet) does not do justice to the seriousness of the situation. A politically tinted summary, she feels. She read the more than two-hundred-page report in detail, considering the number of Post-it notes, underlining and comments in the margins. “The burn-out percentages are not mentioned, for example: 16.1 per cent of administrative and support staff (obp) and 34.5 per cent of academic staff (wp) is at a high to very high risk.” She also points out the percentage of people (46.6 per cent) that has a lot of trouble with “emotional distress”, one of the characteristics of a burnout. “We score almost twice as high as the average in the Netherlands. Or take exhaustion, another indicator: 22 per cent of UM staff has a very high risk of that. Of all Dutch employees, only 6 per cent scores that high. The researchers formulated all their results in extremely neutral wording in the report, but even they speak of ‘worrying figures’.” What does this mean for employees, she wonders aloud. “These people are extremely tired, which must affect the quality of their work, it just has to. The same goes for co-operation: people who are that exhausted, do not always have their emotions in check, they may have a short fuse, spontaneously burst into tears, or quickly take offence.”
Looking for the impossible
A large portion of this overburdened group (almost 60 per cent) has taken steps to reduce the workload, the report states, but in a lot of cases this has not always been successful. De Rijk: “You see that this problem is too great for any individual, this is about the system failing. Especially the group that combines research with teaching, like the assistant professors, are getting into trouble. They exhibit the lowest labour satisfaction rates and the greatest risk of experiencing a burnout. This just proves that when you look for the impossible, you won’t find anything. There is a large group at our university that is merely trying to keep their heads above water. That threatens UM’s power of innovation. How can you come up with new ideas if you are constantly tired?”
Overtime
On average, employees are appointed for almost 35 hours per week, but the actual number of hours worked is structurally five hours per week higher. Again, this is an average of all personnel, academic as well as support staff, so there are people who do less overtime, but also some who do much more. De Rijk: “It is harrowing to even have to say it and it has not been researched yet, but I hear all too often that a professor becomes seriously ill around the age of retirement. So, you worked really hard all those years and now you can’t even enjoy retirement.”
E-mails during the weekend
Mark Levels, professor of Health, Education and Work at the School of Business and Economics and programme director at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), walks into his study on the Tongersestraat with a freshly submitted thesis in his hand. “Always a wonderful moment when it has been printed,” he says visibly pleased. To immediately follow with: “This PhD graduate was the first to ask if I could not send any more e-mails during the weekend. My initial reaction was: ‘I work a lot, also at the weekend. If you don’t check your e-mail, we won’t have a problem. But that wasn’t the lesson. The lesson was that I myself shouldn’t work during the weekend. Was it not Gandhi who said: ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’?”
Killing
He was shocked at the results of the monitor, “this is a point of concern, to put it mildly”. Levels sees how hard colleagues work and how involved they are. “A researcher does not have an easy job. You have to be really good at something that is complicated, you are continually confronted with criticism, and at the same time – this especially applies to junior researchers – deal with the ‘impostor syndrome’. Aside from that, expectations are high and the competition is killing. You have to excel, so you automatically run fast.”
How can we prevent people from being forced over edge? He sees an important role here for the leaders within UM. “Education and research are important tasks; we must do them well. But we, as employers, must create a socially safe atmosphere where it is perfectly okay for people to say: no, this deadline won’t work for me, not at the moment because a family member is sick, or I have just had a baby and that takes some getting used to. It would be a good thing if we no longer saw this as failing.”
A boss who is also struggling
That is why it is important that those in charge consider the private situation when career planning is on the agenda, Levels emphasises. “The greatest bottlenecks – as appears from this report too – are in the group of employees who are without a permanent contract and the assistant professors. They often combine their work with a young family. They have to juggle a lot of balls: teaching as well as doing research and bringing in subsidies. If you really take ‘Recognition and Rewards’ serious, you look at the strengths of these people and what is realistic at this moment in their lives. You would be doing them a tremendous pleasure by not putting extra pressure on them with a tight deadline.” But it also helps if the boss shows that he or she is also having problems with the workload. “This is about a cultural change and you can only make that change by giving the example.”
What if this means that a publication, or a thesis or a project is finished later than planned? Or if a possible promotion takes place later than expected? So be it, Levels says cheerfully, it is not such a disaster. “We have to earn our own money here at ROA, all money comes in through subsidies and we expect our people to bring in their own funding. But with each job we are being offered, we ask ourselves: will it fit? Do we have the people and can we do it on time? If not, we will talk to the customer. And if that person can’t rearrange, then we don’t take on the work. I used to get up at 4:30 to work, I also worked during weekends, I no longer do that.”
Shorter academic year
A shorter academic year, one of the points of action that came out of the first sustainable employability monitor, and with which we are now going to experiment, would “help tremendously,” Levels expects. “I worked in Oxford for a while, where they have three terms of eight weeks, they did have some elective courses in between, but staff did have the opportunity in the meantime to do research. At ROA, my team tries to plan one week a month that is ‘free’: no appointments with PhD students, no meetings about projects. Teaching still continues, but a relatively empty week like that gives you the time to drop in on a colleague, read articles and to write.”
De Rijk is more critical. “A shorter academic year is a good idea if you also reduce the number of blocks, and especially the number of contact hours per block, and in doing so also the demands made on students. But will the accreditation committees agree with this. Will we still meet the criteria?” Students must spend 1,680 hours on their study per year (an academic year consists of 60 ECTS, each credit stands for 28 hours). “You can’t just shop around in those points of action, everything is connected.”
Standard hours
De Rijk: “If I ask around what the biggest obstacle is, the thing I hear most is: the number of standard hours (how many hours a lecturer receives for supervising a thesis, putting an exam together, etc) is not realistic. That has to change, we should receive more time for the tasks. At the moment, I get 1.5 times the number of contact hours for a tutorial group meeting. Look: you have to go to the classroom, you have to manage I don’t know how many systems, you have to take the time for students who want to talk to you after the tutorial, with questions about content, personal problems, and even if you are an old hand at it like me, I still have to go through the material beforehand every time.” De Rijk knows that doing less than your best, is not the solution. “People have high work commitment; they don’t want to dial it down and work less hard for half of the time. You want to do good work.”
Vicious circle
In short: more money is needed for education, De Rijk concludes. “Otherwise, we will never free ourselves from this vicious circle.” Yes, she knows that there are now starter grants and encouragement grants for assistant professors, but will they actually reduce the workload, or will it be more of the same? “In the future, assistant professors can buy themselves out of teaching. Who is going to do it then?”
What definitely needs to be done, according to De Rijk: “Organising our affairs better, let us divide up the tasks and differentiate more: should an assistant professor do so much teaching and research? Maybe you should teach more at the beginning of your career, after all you have already proven yourself as a researcher, you have your PhD. Then later on, less teaching and more research and going after subsidies.”