Tag Archives: hybrid working

weeknotes

Snow time for regrets – Weeknote #306 – 10th January 2025

Leave a comment

Well first week back at work after the two week break for festivities. I nearly wrote first week back in the office, but with hybrid working, I suspect for some, this first day still means working from home. Also in various parts of the country the snow and flooding would make commuting challenging Personally I headed to our Bristol office. We still have a choice of where we can work with hybrid contracts, but I read yesterday about how many companies are now forcing or requiring staff to come into the office.

This was covered in a Guardian article, ‘It didn’t come as a surprise’: UK workers on being forced back into the office.

Some welcome cuts to hybrid working but others feel less productive and are considering change of job or country.

Many employers are mandating the return to the office, in this other piece on the Guardian website.

The post-festive return to work in the dark days of January is never easy, but this new year is shaping up to be tougher than usual for UK workers. Not only must they brave days of severe cold and ice, but many face the end of post-pandemic hybrid working.

The article continues…

Such orders are provoking fresh battles between employees and their bosses, who believe staff need to be brought together to foster collaboration, creativity and a sense of belonging.

The challenge I find with that, is with a geographically distributed team, even when you are in the office you are spending a lot of time on online calls and meetings. The value in being physically in the office is lost.

I expanded on this on one of my other blogs.

Image by Anja from Pixabay

Lots of snow this week, however, I didn’t see much mention of university closures compared to say fifteen years ago when we had some really bad snow. I wrote about this.

So this week we’ve had some snow, but I suspect the disruption is still there, but the response from the sector will be influenced by that covid experience, to the point where the disruption can be minimised.

Met with our new Head of Research this week.

Universities need new ways to make their research pay. An interesting opinion piece on the FT about York looking to diversify their research income by looking to industry to fill that gap.

Public and private funding are both vital for institutions such as the University of York as international student fees fall. But cracks have appeared in York’s financial foundations in the past couple of years. It suffered a £9mn deficit last financial year amid a fall in the number of higher-fee international students on whom it relies to support research and teaching of UK students. It shed 275 jobs, mainly among administrative staff, as part of an unpopular restructuring.

Attended our regular internal Consultancy Forum where the Collaboration for a sustainable future report was discussed and the opportunities therein for possible consultancy in this space.

Spent much of the week I felt filling in a survey for a workshop. The survey was about Jisc activity across various spaces and planned activity.

I finished and completed Lead at Jisc management and leadership course I have been doing since last April.

weeknotes

The E in NREN – Weeknote #299 – 22nd November 2024

Leave a comment
Fleet Street in London
Fleet Street in London

For the first time in an age I headed up to London for a meeting. I also did London in a day, which was a lot more exhausting than I remember it being. It was very cold, and though there was light snow on the way, I didn’t see the snow and disruption that others encountered.

The principal reason for heading to London was for an in-person discussion and workshop on planning some work around, what we are calling the Education in NREN. NREN stands for National Research and Education Network, in the UK that is Jisc, in the Netherlands it is SURF, whilst in Eire it is HEAnet. These are the national networks for educational providers. Though there are many similarities there are also marked differences between the various NRENs across Europe (and the rest of the world).

It was nice to work in the London office for a change. It’s never our busiest office, and that was even the case prior to the pandemic, but you do see and meet people there.

I had planned to head to the Bristol office on Wednesday, but when I tried to book a meeting room for my two online meetings, there were none available. Over the last year the Bristol office has got much busier, so meeting rooms get booked up very quickly. Part of this, is that not only do we still have a pattern of hybrid working, which means a lot more online meetings. The fact we are hybrid has also meant that are patterns of recruitment are less dependent geographically, which exacerbates the number of online meetings and calls that people are having. All this means that the number of calls in the office is higher than it was before the pandemic and there is increased demand on rooms for people to have online meetings in.

As well as the in-person meeting on the E in NREN, I had a fair number of meetings across the week, as I start to do more work in this area.

I am still continuing to work on the optimisation of operations and data following the publication fo the KPMG report I had been working on. I had a meeting about some collaboration with another agency on some next steps on some collaboration proposals.

In addition I wrote up some thoughts on next steps with KPMG report.

Across the sector there has been discussion about talk about the OfS report from last week. For example from WonkHE.

Last week’s update from the Office for Students (OfS) on the state of institutional finances for the HE sector in England brought any lingering sense of cheer from the recent announcement on the indexation of undergraduate fees to an abrupt halt. Based on the latest data available on student entry this autumn, OfS confirms that its warning in May that the sector’s recruitment forecasts had a degree of “optimism bias” has proved true.

It now appears the question of what will happen if a higher education institution fails, is less about if and more about when. The OfS requires all providers to have in place a student protection plan, to ensure a continuity of studying for students of a failing institution. The objective of these plans is to protect the students, however not the staff or the institution as a whole.

I do think that over the next year or so, we will see struggling universities merging and collaborating more closely, rather than waiting to fail. Though the independence mentality of the institution may mean that rather than merge, an institution will just keep cutting costs.

We live in interesting times.

video, weeknotes

Threads – Weeknote #186 – 23rd September 2022

Leave a comment

A shorter week this week down the bank holiday at the start of the week.

Attended a Sector Agency Widening Participation and Data Working Groups Workshop. This was an in-person workshop in Cheltenham. This was a really engaging workshop with UCAS, HESA, and Advance HE. QAA were unable to attend. We looked at the student journey and where the different organisations are working in the widening participation space. As you might expect UCAS are focussed on the pre-application and application stages of the student journey. Whereas Jisc, HESA and Advance HE are working in the “at university” stage. Agreed we would put proposals to the Heads of Sector Agency for collaboration going forward. In addition, we may want to reflect on the widening participation and inclusion agenda on the products and services we provide for the sector.

One of the interesting discussions was on the deficit model that many universities and organisations use when it comes to the widening participation agenda. So, services, systems, and processes are designed for the “standard” student and then things are added to widen participation. The result is often those students who are in need of support are required to find or register for that support. A more inclusive approach to widening participation, is by ensuring services, systems, and processes are designed to be inclusive from the design stage.

We had a tour of the UCAS Building, it was interesting to see how UCAS had already changed their offices to reflect their hybrid mode of working with new spaces.

Also, interesting to see that they have built a fully functioning TV studio for the creation of video content and more engaging and professional live streaming content.

Over the last few months, I have been working on an idea that Jisc should have a TV studio, now seeing this, I think we should accelerate this idea. Was interesting to see an organisation that had done this.

group
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I enjoyed this article on Wonkhe: Imagined universities and blank spaces for dreams.

Eileen Pollard and Stephanie Aldred ask if “sticky campus” directives are based on collective conceptions of campus communities that no longer exist? University tactics for keeping students stuck range from threats, surveillance, and persuasion, to outright bribery because (as we explain to both them and ourselves) students who come to class and interact with us and their peers get higher marks.

I like how the article says that the point of university is not to be in a physical space, but a place where we can realise our dreams, be that a physical space or an online space. I was reminded of how work is not somewhere we go, but something we do by Lawrie.

The web affords us new ways of working, new opportunities to connect.  It furthermore allows for a richer experience of work and life, rather than forcing us to segregate our time from ourselves via physical location, allowing us to choose when and where we are most productive, and how to conserve our face to face energy for those times that truly require it.

In another story on working, the BBC reported how firms in four-day week trial have decided to make it permanent.

Many UK firms taking part in a four-day working week trial have said they will keep it in place after the pilot ends. More than 70 firms are taking part in the scheme where employees get 100% pay for 80% of their normal hours worked. At the halfway point in a six-month trial, data shows that productivity has been maintained or improved at the majority of firms.

I think this practice could be tricky, politically, in the education world, but certainly something to keep an eye on.

Spent some time planning a presentation I am giving next week in London, looking at learning analytics and student support.

This week 38 years ago, The BBC broadcast Threads, a documentary drama about a nuclear attack on the UK, with a focus on Sheffield.

I remember watching it at the time, and was scared, chilled and having a feeling of total helplessness in the face of, what the time, felt like something that could quite easily happen. Though that threat is still here, it did feel in the 1990s and 2000s that it wasn’t so imminent or probable.

This week, not so much.

The EU must take Vladimir Putin’s threats he could use nuclear weapons in the conflict in Ukraine seriously, the bloc’s foreign policy chief has said.

My top tweet this week was this one.

weeknotes

Making the time – Weeknote #134 – 24th September 2021

Leave a comment

Like last week, most of the week was spent reading, analysing and writing.

I keep having conversations about hybrid teaching and in some cases hybrid working. Having partaken in hybrid meetings (a lot) before the pandemic, my overall opinion is to avoid them. Just have everyone in the room, or have everyone online. Avoid going hybrid with a mix if you can.

With the BBC reporting that new staff are to gain day one right to request flexible working many universities I am talking to are talking about flexible hybrid working.

Hybrid flexible working sounds all right in practice, but unless challenged and planned, what you may find is that all your staff want to work from home on Mondays and Fridays and come onto campus for the middle three days. As a result your campus is dead quiet at the ends of the week, with loads of room and free spaces, whilst it becomes more cramped and busy in the middle three days. Combine that with possible thinking, well as staff are only in 60% of the week we can sell off 40% of our office space and you start to realise that flexible, doesn’t necessarily mean a free for all.

Finished and published this week was the report from a workshop I worked on with the University of Cumbria and Advance HE.

Supporting Student Transitions into HE was an excellent event in which many generously shared viewpoints and challenges and having such a variety of institutions and roles added to the richness of the content. A little later than expected, we have published a resource pack we have created as an output from the event. We hope you find is useful in drawing up plans for the new start of term in September and/or January.

The pandemic forced a swift move to online learning in March 2020 which for many was the first experience of teaching and/or learning in the virtual environment. The sector news focussed in the educational aspect of the move in that initial phase reporting on concerns of quality, parity and applauding the pace of change with the digital skills agenda. The announcement of further lockdowns meant the initial, emergency, move now needed to be re-shaped into a more considered response that would potentially lead to sustained change across the sector.

watch
Image by Yogendra Singh from Pixabay

Wrote a blog post about time and online delivery.

When it comes to designing an online module or an in-person module with online elements, we can design the online aspects without the physical, geographical and chronological constraints of an in-person session.

My top tweet this week was this one.