“With hybrid work here to stay, universities need to rethink how they are using their space. Real estate is expensive. If they can optimize or shrink their facilities, they can spend more on benefits and opportunities for staff, and create a better learning environment for their students,” said Niraj Dangoria, Associate Dean, Facilities Planning and Management, Stanford University.
Dangoria was a speaker at the Marcus Evans University Leadership Summit 2023.
At the start of the pandemic, we transitioned quite immediately from five days at the office to five days at home. This was the case for higher education as well as many other industries. Six months into it, it looked like university staff were getting reasonably proficient at remote working and there was no real loss of productivity. People became very comfortable with the idea of working remotely, not wasting their time on commuting. But the one thing that was missing was the people connection, the feeling of a community. That was very clear to me. Pre-pandemic, I made sure to touch base with everyone in my team at least once a week. That was missing. I started thinking, what is behaviorally driving how we work? That led to my hypothesis that most white-collar jobs, especially in the university setting, fit into four buckets.
The first bucket is focused work, where we produce material or immerse in self-education. We know from past experience that this kind of work can happen anywhere. The second bucket is engagement, which can happen electronically but there are times when face-to-face engagement is important. The third bucket is service, whether it is for internal or external customers. While we have served our customers electronically for the last 2.5 years, we know that face-to-face interaction also makes a difference. The fourth bucket is community, where people come together and the ethos of the organization comes to be real.
Different jobs fill these buckets differently. So why have we historically given everyone the same kind of space to work in? Have we got this wrong all along? Sometimes 90 percent of space is dedicated for focused work, and the office kitchen becomes the community space. If that is the most important function of why people come together, why do we pay the least amount of attention to it? We redid our own workplace, doubling capacity. We assigned 36 people to a room of 18 desks. All the desks are now free use, but everyone has assigned storage and personal areas. We know that a maxi-mum of 10 staff come in every day. We compensated for this lack of ownership by creating more opportunities for social interaction. We reengineered our culture and leadership style to fit the hybrid work situation, and adapted to the new reality to hold on to our most valuable asset, our people.
People have become comfortable with how their quality of life has evolved and universities, more than other employers, have to respect that. We live in such a competitive environment, especially us in Silicon Valley. We cannot compete on salary alone. We will lose out to the tech industry every single day. So we have to provide a better quality of life. Forcing people to come in five days a week will have a terrible impact on staff morale and retention. People are exercising a degree of independence that was unusual prior to the pandemic. Hybrid work is here to stay, and university leaders have to take this into account.
Some smaller institutions are struggling, but campuses are going to continue to play an important role in the fabric of society. It is a place of transition in terms of education, intellectual growth and social growth. That is not going away anytime soon.
Technology has enabled education to reach tremendous masses, but at the same time, it has not replaced campus-es. Universities have expanded in the last 20 years. However, if we are smart, we can shrink the footprint for staff workspace, and reuse the footprint to better support students. That will only make for a better learning and academic environment. Instead of capital being spent on new buildings, it is always cheaper to repurpose them.
Find out more about the next University Leadership Summit