Staff Workload Policy

Modern academics often feel beleaguered with demands on their time, and find it hard to juggle competing demands on their time. Universities are educational or teaching institutions, but also possess a mandate to conduct and disseminate quality research.

How does a staff then balance such competing demands?

The University developed Academic Staff Workload Policy that seeks to help Head of Schools, Deans and the University ensure that staff are equitably treated in terms of their workload. The Policy also is intended to assist academic and resource planning, and to allow staff to perform in both research and teaching. There is flexibility in the Policy to allow sensible decisions to be made, for example, when assigning more teaching duties would be problematic because staff lacks specialist expertise. The University used the QoR in the first half of 2017 to reclassify staff based on their outputs and to then assign more or less teaching duties according to the Academic Staff Workload Policy.