Shifting Sands: Observing Academic Workloads Over Time

Individually, academics have seen significant changes to their traditional workload, for example, heavier teaching loads, larger class sizes, greater administrative responsibilities, increased competition for research grants and the loss of academic autonomy through increased day-to-day management and accountability (Houston et al., 2006). As a result, academics feel they have three full time jobs at once and daily must manage the multiple and changing roles associated with today's academic workload (Santoro and Snead, 2012). Such changes, over the last two decades, have highlighted the need to investigate workload issues (for example, McInnes, 2000; Santoro and Snead, 2012). This paper reports the long-term efforts of two city-based Australian universities to achieve equity outcomes by observing individual workloads and reflects on the impact of those workloads on internal academic promotion. The reliance on actual workloads, across five years, makes this research distinctly different from other studies that have relied on aggregate workload data (e.g. Lafferty and Fleming, 2000) or self-reported survey and focus group data (e.g. Probert, 2005) or considers satisfaction using longitudinal data (for example, Bentley, Coates, Dobson, Geodegebuure and Meek, 2013).