Are we the baddies?

[white_hart]

I spent most of my four days of work last week trying to work out how to manage the tension between the university being open and teaching going ahead in person and the government advice to "work from home if you can", when my team aren't completely back-office (we are responsible for teaching support, and also deal with general queries from academics and students which can be in-person as well as by email or phone) but most people's jobs can largely be done remotely (apart from dealing with in-person queries, though I think a lot of people don't necessarily see that as the core part of their jobs that I think it actually is). I ended up deciding that it didn't seem fair to try to pick and choose between people's jobs and say "this person supports teaching, and should come in; that one doesn't, and can work from home", especially as that would have ended up with the most junior people having to come in while more senior staff were able to work remotely, and have said that everyone should be in one or two days a week apart from the people who are clinically vulnerable. (I'm planning to be in three days, but might end up increasing that to four; I find it so much easier to focus in the office.) But I can't help worrying that that was the wrong decision, and I shouldn't be asking anyone to work on-site with case numbers as high as they are. And I miss last term when things had started to feel almost normal again. And mostly, I hate living through a pandemic and having to risk assess everything and make judgements I'm not remotely qualified to make. And I may have just had two and a bit weeks off, but after four days back I'm already utterly exhausted.

Comments

[redbird]

I think there's a meaningful difference between "some people have to come in, and the only way to be fair is to make everyone come in, whether or not that makes sense for their jobs" and spreading the burden of the X amount of work that really does benefit from being in person.

It sounds like what you're trying to avoid is the situation where Alice has to be in the office two days a week no matter what, so she gets stuck coming in every day to handle the in-person queries, while Bob's other work can be done remotely, so he doesn't have to do a share of the in-person stuff.

The only things I'm sure of are (a) if some people genuinely prefer working in the office, you don't have to send them home in the interests of abstract fairness, (b) you probably need a definition of "clinically vulnerable" that doesn't translate to "whoever complains loudest" or "whoever management likes." And that should probably be a university-wide guideline.

[white_hart]

Thank you; that's a helpful way of looking at it. There's also something about enabling at least a bit of in-person interaction between staff, particularly because we have a lot of really new people and trying to learn a job remotely is hard.

I'm definitely happy for anyone who wants to be in the office more (or simply can't work from their homes) to be in as many days as they want. And there are actually national guidelines on who counts as "clinically vulnerable", based on who was advised to shield in earlier stages of the pandemic - in our case, one person who finished cancer treatment last year and one with a blood clotting disorder. I had someone else who lives with elderly parents but as far as I know none of them have particular vulnerabilities, so I've told them that they do need to come in but we can move them to a single office if that would help.