There is a now well known study out of Stanford getting cited by a lot of higher ed leaders. In some cases, these leaders are lifting entire phrases from the report and dropping them into university job postings to explain why certain positions aren't remote or hybrid. This feels kind of greasy to me because the study didn't consider fully remote workers, it only compared employees at one company (Trip.com) who worked five days in the office against those who worked three days in-office and two from home. Yeah, that's it. Kind of disingenuous, right?
It's quite easy to find examples of the misappropriation of the Stanford study negatively impacting university staff. On some campus, you can look no further than the teams whose only jobs are developing and supporting online programs and serving online students. Yup, require the staff and teams who support fully remote students to swipe a badge five days a week, and justify it by citing a study about a travel agency.
The issue I have with these decisions and the subsequent return-to-office (RTO) mandates is that they are devoid of metrics, but full of dried over marketing vomit and listless leadership buzzwords about how uniquely different organizations doing entrepreneurial things require people to bump into each other in the hallway and organically begin creating something special. The claim is that real productivity then follows from these physical encounters. The assumption is, of course, that productivity isn't already optimized with staff working on remote or hybrid schedules. But every online facing unit in higher ed has their productivity numbers (enrollment velocity. persistence rates, retention rates, response times, course completions, etc.) sitting in front of them. And it's incredibly naive and shortsighted to believe that any of those numbers will improve because an advisor bumped into an operations specialist in front of the bathroom Tuesday.
In my humble but reasonably informed opinion, the RTO thing is more about the individual leader than it is about the institution. There's a growing list of research making the point that RTO mandates correlate less with productivity concerns and more with a leader's discomfort at not being able to see people. It's a modern version of management control dressed up as culture, where visibility gets mistaken for value. Frankly, I find leaders who resist remote work quire narcissistic. At the very least, they're expressing a type of weakness that ultimately compromises their ability to lead at all.
If higher education leaders are serious about improving outputs (as distinct from productivity), they should be creating the conditions necessary for their teams to excel. That's it. When they impose in-office mandates on the staff and teams that have already figured out how to serve a remote population well, it's worth asking what problem is actually being solved.
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