Academic Workplace Evolution: How Universities Are Rethinking Spaces for Faculty and Staff

Colleges and universities are rethinking their workplaces to align their space with how people work today and to use space to achieve their strategic goals. Beyond macro forces reshaping higher education in terms of access, accountability, and financial stability, there is a confluence of financial, environmental, technological, and cultural factors prompting this change, including increasing numbers of administrative staff and a growing disengagement among faculty and staff.

According to Gallup, only 33 percent of university faculty and staff are engaged at work—“involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and workplace.” At the same time, office space on a per-student basis has increased 153 percent since 1974, according to the Education Advisory Board's "Recalibrating Allocation and Size of Faculty Offices" 2016 Facilities Forum report. This is not surprising, since professional administrative staff at colleges and universities increased 38 percent from 1990 to 2012 at public universities and 42 percent at private, non-profit universities, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Based on all of these factors, institutions are rethinking their workplaces to achieve at least seven different goals.

1. Achieving the highest and best use of space: Colleges and universities recognize that spaces at the center of campus are often their most valuable, and that the value of physical space is to enable collaboration, foster interaction, and build relationships. So, many are moving groups with little or no contact with students and faculty—such as HR, advancement, purchasing, and facilities—to the periphery or off-campus. This frees up space for classrooms, study areas, student services, and research labs.
2. Responding to new work patterns: Most academic workplaces are primarily individual desks and offices for individual work. But people are working more collaboratively in teams; have flexible schedules; and are more mobile, working wherever they are, including at home, rather than just at their desk. This increase in collaboration has borne tangible results: The average number of authors per paper grew 38 percent, from 3.2 to 4.4, from 1996 to 2015, according to The Economist. So, more collaborative and flexible spaces are needed.
3. Increasing campus space utilization: When colleges and universities invest in their campus, they want to ensure their assets are fully utilized and meeting the needs of their students, faculty, and staff. Low utilization can be an indicator of a poor-quality space, a surplus of space, or both. Office space is among the least utilized and unfortunately the least scrutinized. Most assigned offices are occupied only 30 to 40 percent of the time during a typical workday and often cannot be used by other people when its occupant is out—teaching a class, working in a lab, in a meeting, traveling, or working from home.
4. Increasing financial feasibility: While people costs far outweigh space costs, space is expensive to build, operate, and change, particularly when factoring how much it is used. According to a metric developed by brightspot strategy to determine “cost per person per hour utilized,” a 140-sf office with 30 percent utilization by one person is 9.4 times more expensive than a typical classroom with 25 sf for each person and 65 percent utilization. (Input on the calculation was provided by Sally Grans-Korsh, FAIA, director of facilities management and environmental policy at the National Association of College & University Business Officers; and Jeff Ziebarth, principal at Perkins+Will.)
5. Achieving environmental sustainability: Colleges and universities want their spaces to not only be well utilized and financially feasible, but environmentally sustainable, as well. Buildings in the U.S. account for 39 percent of our carbon footprint. New kinds of work environments with more shared space and more open space require less space per person, which is more sustainable. While more efficient spaces that are used more intensively may consume more energy per square foot, this is offset by the ability to build a smaller facility.
6. Promoting student/faculty interaction: Contact out of the classroom between students and faculty is a critical driver of student engagement, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), but only 40 percent of freshman have had such an experience. This is in part because faculty offices can be isolated, inaccessible, or intimidating for students—institutions wonder why students don’t go into something called a “faculty office building.” So, colleges and universities are rethinking faculty offices to allow faculty to get their work done while also being accessible to students.
7. Enabling concentration at work: In many cases, the primary rationale for an office—having a private, enclosed space that enables quiet, focused work—is undermined in practice because colleagues, staff, and students visit and interrupt, anyway. In fact, many universities have an open door policy to ensure faculty and staff are accessible to students. In effect, many people have an office with a door so that they can keep it open. Hundreds of conversations with faculty and staff have revealed that they actually do their focused work at home, in a coffee shop, or in the library to avoid these interruptions.

What is the Range of Workplace Innovation Taking Place?

One way of thinking about how the workplace has changed is to see that the same set of ideas is diffusing across sectors at different rates, depending on the applicability of the forces for change and how resistant an industry is to change. More than 20 years ago, consulting organizations moved from assigned offices to a variety of unassigned spaces in response to how little time people spent at the office and how much of their work happened in teams. These strategies have long since been adopted in sales organizations, financial services, and pharmaceuticals, and are just now hitting law firms; for instance, Minter Ellison, an Australian firm, moved to an unassigned, activity-based work environment. Higher education is clearly next.

Likewise, within higher education, there is a similar segmentation of different user populations that determine how quickly new workplace concepts are adopted. Administrative staff are often the first to adopt, because they follow their corporate counterparts most closely and are subject to institutional hierarchy. The next tier includes adjunct, part-time, and clinical faculty, who are on campus less, more mobile, and lower in the pecking order. They also may openly acknowledge the need for a new model based on their work patterns, such as clinical faculty members in a medical school who spend most of their time seeing patients and teaching courses. Full-time tenure-track faculty are the slowest to adopt or the most resistant to change, due to a lack of hierarchy, a more traditional orientation, and need for spaces that accommodate both focus and private conversations.

There is also a spectrum of workplace changes that ranges from easy to hard to implement. The easier end of the spectrum is to provide smaller, enclosed offices complemented by shared meeting spaces to recognize how much more work happens in teams. For instance, Gensler’s 2016 global workplace survey showed that among corporate workers, people spend 47 to 54 percent of their time collaborating, but a typical university will allocate 64-sf desks and 120- to 240-sf offices, but only 15 to 20 percent of their space for meetings. Even though collaborative work often takes less space per person than individual work, these proportions are off if people are spending about 50 percent of their time in 20 percent of their space. The next tier of change is moving from assigning enclosed offices to an open plan, with groups of desks within larger shared open spaces that are complemented by a variety of enclosed spaces for private calls, meetings, and events. The next and most difficult tier of workplace change is moving from assigning spaces to specific people to instead giving people the flexibility and choice to work where, how, and when they want—often called an “activity-based workplace” or perhaps more coarsely as “hoteling.”

What are the Best Examples of Academic Workplace Innovation?

To understand the changing landscape of academic workplaces, we can take these two factors—who the workplace is for and the degree to which it is changing—as axes on a grid. In the first grid below, we have illustrated the concepts with examples. The second grid lists examples in each category that brightspot has been involved with or that they’ve been able to identify in their research. While not comprehensive, this provides a sense of which strategies have been employed where and for whom; brightspot is continuing to study the transformation of workplace innovation, and welcomes comments, additions, and clarifications to this evolving list.