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We love being academics because we care deeply about our work as researchers and educators. This means that many of us work well beyond and in excess of normal working hours. In fact we may be encouraged to do so by our universities. If we then burn out or have too little time for our families who is responsible for this?
The management is responsible. The management often times look at the immediate and seldom think about the after effect on the long run. Also, it could be said they think less about the staff welfare. There had been cases where people slumped and died, some while driving home from the office had attack and are knocked down with stroke. These are visible effects. The non-visible effect could be the inadequate knowledge that may have been imparted on students. Medically, we are to sleep for 6 – 8 hours per day. Most academics hardly fulfill this. Most of us hardly have time for relaxation. This is not healthy.
Any work that cannot be completed during the assigned official hours if judiciously utilized is excess workload that need to be addressed by the management. The number of hours assigned to an activity can be used to calculate extra activity that would be added. This will be calculated as excess workload. But the management must have policy on the maximum of excess workload that should be assigned.
Thanks for this Juliet. Your answer is correct. But is it realistic in our climate, or is it just idealistic? In other words, do the management in our institutions as much as acknowledge that we are overstretched? To give an example, you have your scheduled lectures for the week as well as student consultation and other activities. Yet your head of department hands you a student project the close of work and urges you to finish looking at it so it might be ready to be sent out for external examination the following day or two. That means you should read it overnight, because you will attend to your regular duties the following day anyway. But would such a head of department accept this task as excess workload?
Moreover, academic staff in our system are not paid overtime allowance.
Even the so-called excess work is contested because it is calculated by the number of course units multiplied by the cred units of those courses, or something like that. So, reading a project or doing any other task is not considered as workload in this case. Yes Jerome, this is the ugly situation we are in because most university management/Deans/HoDs do not have idea about he harm where there is no workload planning. Therefore they are unaware of the harm that will come later in life when workload is not adequately analised. In my university we have a lot of impromptu assignments. We need to enlighten others.
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