WORKFORCE campusreview. com. au
A full-time chore
Increasing proportions of sessional staff make management more complicated; the right software can help keep everything in order.
By Leslie Tarnacki
The increase in sessional staff at universities and colleges is one of the most significant changes in Australia’ s academic workforce from the past two decades.
According to the University of Melbourne, the proportion of academic staffing doing sessional teaching more than doubled during the 1990s, from 10 per cent of full-time equivalent staff to more than 20 per cent. Recent research indicates that today’ s figure is closer to 50 per cent, with some estimates suggesting that more than 53 per cent of university classes are now taught by sessional academics. While this is a global trend, the move to sessional academics in universities has been particularly high in Australia.
Financial pressures are part of the reason behind this push to embed more part-time, casual and temporary teaching positions into tertiary institutions but some staff are also moving away from academia’ s traditional tenure-track career path.
Many senior, tenured academic staff are moving towards retirement age. And some younger academics taking their place aren’ t looking for a tenured or even full-time position. Sessional employment can help meet their needs.
The rise of the sessional worker in academia means tertiary institutions face the daunting challenge of managing an increasingly patchwork and transient workforce with processes and technology designed to handle full-time employees. In many cases, the existing traditional systems simply aren’ t sufficient.
There are a number of administrative hurdles when keeping track of sessional workers. The main challenges for universities include:
• tracking multiple positions spanning across sites and departments
• calculating rates based on activity, credentials, site or department
• properly allocating time to correct cost centres
• creating workflows based on organisational structure
• making retrospective adjustments to prior periods.
Many academic institutions still rely on manual processes that use spreadsheets or other outdated technology to manage their workforces. This opens up the possibility of errors, particularly when it comes to rosters, timesheets and attendance, as well as leave management. It also makes it difficult to get a clear picture of how a sessional workforce is performing and where changes might be needed to serve students better.
Institutions still using such manual processes are unlikely to achieve the maximum potential efficiency of a sessional workforce.
By automating workforce processes and including self-service options for employees, organisations can reduce the amount of time required to manage workers. And they can unlock the benefits of a more sessional workforce. For example, they can gain better insight into the strategic strength of a sessional workforce, use resources more efficiently, and achieve greater levels of compliance.
Implementing a management system that automatically supports different employee requirements and shows a complete view of all employee positions and timesheets is essential to getting the best results from a sessional workforce. It is important to adopt a best-in-breed approach when it comes to workforce management software. The right technology should monitor and manage a fluctuating employee register properly.
WFS Australia has identified four key ways workforce management technology can help universities monitor and support their sessional teaching staff: 1Track hours and absences. Sessional teaching staff often have to speak with students outside of working hours, making it difficult to track hours worked accurately. Automated workforce management software lets universities monitor hours and absences and calculate leave loadings and entitlements, as well as negotiate the complexities of the modern awards system.
Short-term sessional employees are generally not entitled to paid leave. However, universities can better work out extra loadings offered in lieu of annual leave by using technology to monitor hours and absences.
For long-term sessional employees, who may be entitled to parental leave or long service leave, workforce management technology can automatically tally the accumulated allowances at the end of any given period.
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