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WORKFORCE
2Monitor professional development. Workforce management systems can monitor an employee’ s progress with professional development programs and help determine how that progress is being reflected in the classroom. This helps maintain quality and consistency.
Sessional staff on casual or short-term contracts do not have the same sort of continuity to help establish a development overview as full-time, permanent staff. Workforce management software can help establish this continuity by collating a series of progress snapshots made available by accumulated work hours.
Software can also help match the skillsets of teachers with particular activities and ensure they are exposed to learning opportunities that will improve student outcomes. 3Provide access from anywhere. Sessional teachers often can’ t access university-owned computers the way tenured staff can. This can make it tricky for them to get to some resources. It also means time worked may not be logged when it should be and pay and attendance registers may not be accurate.
A cloud-based workforce management solution lets users log in from any web-enabled device without installing plug-ins and applications. This supports working flexibility and productivity. It’ s a valuable tool for sessional academics who find themselves doing tasks from home, such as marking papers, preparing lesson plans or researching course content.
4Allow expansion on demand. The increasing popularity of so-called‘ summer-term’ semesters and short courses available outside of the regular class timetable is contributing to the rise of sessional workers. Workforce management systems need to be able to keep up with the rapid influx of teaching staff during such periods.
Software that uses a scalable, enterprise-grade environment can provide the necessary flexibility. Cloud-deployed applications are often highly configurable and let universities add and remove employees to databases easily, as needed.
More generally, the proportion and overall number of sessional staff at tertiary institutions is on the rise, so the need for easily scalable work management software systems is becoming paramount for institutions to get the most from their employees and make the most of teaching budgets.
With the right technology, the trend towards a sessional workforce presents education institutions with more opportunities than challenges. The right software and systems give academic organisations the mechanisms at their fingertips to make the most of the trend. ■
Leslie Tarnacki is vice-president of human resources and general manager of WFS Australia.
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