A study by the University of Oxford and the University of Birmingham that was published in Nature-Communications found that a person's willingness to work depends on the "fluctuating rhythm of fatigue".
A person continues to work as long as there is some expected value in the reward. However, as work-related tiredness increases, the value of reward declines to the point that the person sees no value in work and stops. The findings also claim that some rest from time to time refreshes and gradually brings back the willingness to work.
In the context of Malaysian universities, a study published in the Asian Journal of University Education by Janib and colleagues found that too much workload negatively influences academics' performance.
While factors like burnout, lack of motivation and decline in well-being have been widely known, the reduction in willingness to work is talked about less frequently.
The increased corporatisation of universities, continued reduction of funding, emphasis on income generation, as well as the race for better university rankings, have dramatically increased the amount and variety of work for the faculty.
Faculty members are expected to teach classes, prepare lectures, mark assignments, prepare reports, conduct research, secure grants, publish in top journals, attend conferences, make presentations, carry out community service, and participate in professional development activities.
Early career academics or those on contract are impacted the most compared with senior colleagues or the ones with permanent positions.
Semester breaks, which are supposed to give some respite from teaching duties, are now consumed by other responsibilities, making the breaks pointless. Universities have begun moving on to a three-semester system from the previous two-semester system, which takes away whatever little personal time they had with their family for travel or leisure.
An equitable workload policy seems to be the way forward to control the declining academic standards and lowering of productivity.
Drexel University in Philadelphia has implemented a unique policy of equitable and faculty-friendly workload policy.
Inspired by the belief that a well-thought-out workload plan can improve productivity, the workload is distributed among individual faculty members according to what they do best.
Thus, a senior faculty member who is no longer an active researcher gets more teaching load while members who are active in research and publication do more of such work and less teaching.
For tenure track faculty and faculty members aiming to get promoted based on requirements, which include both research and teaching, the policy allows them to choose the work they need to fulfil these.
A teaching faculty with less research and a research-oriented faculty with less teaching load is evaluated based on their work responsibilities.
The appraisal and reward system is then aligned with the allocated workload, ensuring an equitable performance evaluation of work that is based on what each faculty member does best.
The equitable workload initiative in Drexel University is significantly different from the present evaluation systems in most universities that continue to be based on a cumulative score of a variety of performance requirements, disregarding their strengths and preference.
A recent report from the American Council of Educators (ACE), Equity-minded Faculty Workload: What We Can And Should Do Now, also illustrates that the pandemic has resulted in the further widening of the inequitable workload in academia, where faculty members have been asked to "pick up" additional work without any recognition or reward.
It is about time universities acknowledged the problem of excessive workload and take concrete steps to ensure that academic staff have enough breaks to rest and refresh, and achieve a better work-life balance.
Creating a better, fairer, and equity-minded workload requires collective effort from all parties including university leaders and academics.
It also requires all to accept the fact that more workload is not always better for productivity; a sense of happiness among the faculty often does the trick.
E-Mail: nmohamma@kean.edu
The writer is Assistant Professor at the EDD Programme Coordinator – Wenzhou-Kean University, Wenzhou, China