campusreview. com. au workforce
Happiness is a clear schedule
Academics find greatest satisfaction when they can work uninterrupted.
By Antonia Maiolo and Amie Larter
Academics are happiest when they can work without interruptions, like on weekends, a Charles Sturt University study of academic work practices has found. The study, which sampled research and teaching academics at an unnamed Australian regional university, sheds light on what makes academics both happy and effective in their work.
Senior lecturer in economics at CSU Dr Rod Duncan, who was joined by the university’ s associate professor Branka Krivokapic-Skoko and Dr Kerry Tilbrook for the study, says results have implications for the management of academic workloads at universities.
“ Existing literature already describes a contemporary Australian academic landscape of frustration and discontent,” he says.“ But we have not had empirical evidence of what a happy and effective academic does in their day-to-day work to make them so.
“ This study supports the notion of academics’ need for‘ flow’; that is, long periods of uninterrupted time working on a single task, such as research, although this condition is unlikely to exist for most academics today.”
For the study, academics provided an average of 100 days of 24-hour diary entries, which recorded an hour-by-hour breakdown of their activities, selfreported emotional wellbeing and work effectiveness. Results, which were published in an article,“ Does Academic Work Make Australian Academics Happy?” in the current Australian Universities’ Review, showed academics were happier, and more effective, when they could spend large amounts of more unregulated and less fragmented time on research, such as on weekends.
“ What we found was that academics got around [ disruptions ] by working on the weekends, and that’ s why they were quite happy [ to do so ] because they got to do what they wanted to do when they wanted to do it with few interruptions,” Duncan says.“ We think this points to frequent interruptions and time fragmentations as important issues for academic work that haven’ t been looked at to date.” One puzzling finding was that research time made academics feel happy about their day, but not effective. Meanwhile, delivering tutorials and lectures made the academics feel effective but it didn’ t make them happy.
“ The puzzle here is that we all imagine academics are intrinsically self-motivated workers – they like working on the weekends because frankly they like doing some of the tasks that they are asked to do in their work week,” Duncan says.“ So for those employees you would think work effectiveness and work happiness would be highly correlated. And we did find that. But we also found that … teaching and research time seem to be moving in the opposite direction for these individuals.”
Duncan says researchers observed a gap between performing a research-based task and seeing a concrete reward for it.
“ An academic might spend half a day rewriting the code in some simulation, working on an introduction or analysing the data, and at the end of the day you might look at what you have done and see nothing concretely, visibly achieved within that day,” he explains.“ When you get the rewards for research achievement, it’ s those rare moments when you get a success in a research grant or get a paper published and those things happen only a couple of times a year.
“ So it’ s that gap between the work the academics are doing and the rewards they get from the work that’ s causing this problem – the gap between happiness and effectiveness.”
It is the opposite for teaching. Academics quite often see the evidence of their effectiveness in this area, but rarely report happiness.
“ We think here that the academics aren’ t reporting happiness from teaching time because of the perception – at least in academia – that research is much more highly valued by institutions than teaching,” Duncan says.“ The academics find the teaching work rewarding – it’ s one of the tasks that they became academics for but they are sceptical whether good teaching will lead to promotions.”
Duncan says universities are going to have to do a lot more if they want to produce an effective and happy academic workforce.
“ We need to be seeing more teaching rewards and better promotions for good teaching academics,” he says.“ The academics need to be able to see that there are visible rewards for good teaching.” n
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