University employees in the United Kingdom are highly displeased with senior-management practices at their institutions.Credit: Larry Washburn/Getty

Almost nine out of ten academic faculty and staff members in the United Kingdom give a thumbs-down to their institution’s senior management team, finds a report published this January. They cite a lack of accountability, poor leadership and an over-reliance on performance metrics, among other factors.

Of 5,888 respondents to a national survey conducted across 78 UK institutions between January and May 2017, a mean of just 10.5% were satisfied with their university’s management team. The results, say study authors, are “a stark indictment of the current state of the UK higher-education culture”.

Mark Erickson, a social scientist at the University of Brighton, UK, and co-authors used the satisfaction scores to rank universities in a ‘league table’, similar to rankings for football teams in the UK Premier League. The University of Oxford led all contenders, with a satisfaction score of 37%. “Fair play to Oxford, but that’s still an appalling score,” Erickson says. Three universities — the University of Hull, the University of Chester and the University of Westminster in London — scored 0%. Some institutional scores were based on only a handful of responses, but Erickson says that a score of zero speaks loudly. “If I was a senior manager at one of those institutions, I’d be embarrassed,” he says.

Erickson notes that there were no discernible predictors of the satisfaction scores. The second-highest-scoring university behind Oxford was Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, which became a university in 1992. The lack of a pattern suggests that the management culture of any particular institution at least partly depends on the managers themselves, not on the institution’s history, ranking or internal structure, Erickson says. “The question is: do you have managers who are kind?”

Collection: Life in the lab

In addition to weighing in on their overall satisfaction, 2,400 respondents left comments on specific areas of concern, including excessive workloads, a lack of accountability among managers and mental-health difficulties resulting from toxic workplace environments and work overload.

Many respondents complained about pressure from managers to improve university scores on performance metrics such as the National Student Survey, an annual survey in which students score their universities on a variety of measures, including the quality of teaching and academic support. One respondent wrote, “University managers are playing fantasy football with the institution: they know nothing about how it actually works and spend their time obsessing about data that are poorly collected and badly interpreted.” Another wrote, “The senior managers I am sure work very hard in ways they perceive to generally be in the best interests of employees and the institution. I would not want their job. But I believe they ought to know more about what they are purporting to manage, and not rely on performance indicators.”

The push for universities to improve their metrics to attract more students has contributed to deteriorating working conditions and eroding levels of trust between academics and management, says Ria Deakin, a human-resources-management researcher who has studied workplace satisfaction at UK universities. “While there are certainly pockets of good practice and positive experiences across the UK HE sector, the findings of the study are not surprising,” she says. “University senior management need to recognize the value of their employees and the relationship between good staff working conditions and good student learning conditions.”

“The problem is systemic,” says Monica Franco-Santos, a management researcher at Cranfield University who conducts her own research on university governance and employee well-being. “Universities have adopted business-like management practices to improve their effectiveness and efficiency,” she says. “However, these practices are based on a set of assumptions that do not necessarily apply to the context of universities. We need to find a hybrid ‘governance’ approach that reconciles the tensions between the new business-like practices and the more traditional or stewardship-like practices.”

Erickson says that he and his colleagues conducted the survey and created the league table partly as a ‘stunt’ to draw attention to the working conditions at UK universities. It’s not his only form of protest: as a member of the University and College Union, which represents 120,000 employees at universities and other institutions across the United Kingdom, he participated in 14 days of walkouts on select days from 20 February to 13 March.

The union says that the walkouts are a response to universities’ failure to make significant improvements on pay, equality, ‘casualization’ and workloads. Erickson says that casualization, the practice of hiring more part-time employees and contractors and fewer full-time employees, is a particular point of contention.

Erickson adds that he has a lot of empathy for university managers. “If you talk to senior managers, they don’t want people to be unhappy,” he says. “They’re under a lot of pressure. They have people breathing down their necks.”