Reply from Professor Grith Lykke Sørensen

By Professor Grith Lykke Sørensen, 4/29/2024

As a matter of fact, I believe that it is commendable to map the actual working hours at universities. Weekends, holidays and evenings can be consumed as academic staff struggle to keep abreast of our workload, while we are contractually obliged to work 37 hours, and other hours are considered ‘interest hours’ (extra hours not directly required by the employer). However, those hours are often spent on teaching administration, filling in travel reimbursement forms, calculating reimbursement of expenses, coordinating calendars, issuing meeting invitations, filling out forms for infrastructure service units and other administration.

The problem, as also pointed out by Thomas Buchvald Vind, is that new forms/systems are now being added to the seemingly ever-growing list of administrative tasks. Tasks that may each seem manageable but which may, taken together, constitute a surprisingly large part of your workload. 

With the basic principle settled – that it may be beneficial to map the actual working hours – the next question is how the new information should be utilised.  Academics are facing increased demands on their individual endeavours in terms of securing funding for institutional operations and increased teaching and research output. 

In the worst-case scenario, academics will be presented with yet another performance parameter, ‘output per hour’, and we will have to explain why our individual performance does not match our high number of working hours.

In the best-case scenarios, registering the working hours will reveal that things are not as bad as people think; alternatively, academics will be relieved of some administration or other time-consuming non-core tasks, or academia will focus on team performance rather than individual performance in the future, so that is easier to distribute the work tasks. 

Only time will tell what is up and what is down.