Following a request to comment on a future university-wide workload management scheme, I thought it useful to put my comments in a public place, as these schemes are proliferating.
Simple questions that should be answered before any effort is put into devising and implementing such a scheme:
1. The motivation question
What is it for and who benefits?
The answer to the first is ‘fairness’, and, therefore, the beneficiaries are the employees. That is, such schemes will ensure that activity and productivity are quantified, so Bloggs, a well-known skiver, will be found out, and made to contribute to teaching and research. People buy into this, without critically examining the evidence: is Bloggs actually skiving? If Bloggs is not putting in a decent shift, perhaps there are good reasons for this, such burn out. In any event, do we need a detailed workload scheme to manage Bloggs? The answer is no, it is perfectly possible to manage Bloggs without such a scheme, as long as a Head of Department has some simple information: is Bloggs producing papers and is Bloggs teaching? If productivity on the first count is low, then Bloggs can pick up more teaching.
What the workload system does create is a hierarchy, a value system, which equates to a class system. So some colleagues are upper class, others middle class and yet others lower class. It not surprising that class ridden Anglo cultures that have never had a revolution in the modern (1789) sense love workload systems. This does nothing for fairness and poisons the workplace, reducing collegiality. The importance of a class system is evident from the tone and content of presentations by senior management. It also provides senior management with an ‘achievement’, so justifying what Piketty termed ‘super manager salaries’ that have spread from the private sector to the upper echelons of universities. As Piketty points out, the success of this new breed of managers is down to luck, not skill.
2. The dimensional analysis question
Is this measurable and what are the units?
Another simple question, which should be the first posed by a scientist, yet is rarely is. The answers have always been poor, unlikely to gain a pass mark.
Any workload management scheme needs quantitative measurements: teaching, administration and research activity are given values. These must have some sort of unit. One can argue that this is possible for the first two, in that qualitatively they can be measured in a unit of time. This can only be qualitative, particularly in the instance of small group teaching, since individual students are extremely variable in their needs, a simple consequence of humans being an outbred animal. For research, there are different units, and likely more than one. Reading could be given a time unit, writing not so. I challenge anyone to come up for a singular unit for supervision and training of research staff, since this is dependent on the individual and the project. Acquisition of resources is often simply measured in cash terms, nice and simple. But who gets the credit? PI? Co-I?. And how about Bloggs, who isn’t on the grant, but asked a key question that sparked the entire idea? Again we come back to the importance of collegiality. Damage that and you damage the entire teaching and research enterprise.
A workload scheme represents a metrification of employee activity. As such it is the cornerstone of lazy management, where rather than putting in the effort to make a professional judgement, an individual’s activities are boiled down to a score. This will fail to increase productivity or to make workloads fairer. I say that with confidence, because our own School/Institute scheme has failed on both counts. Reading a colleague’s papers on the other hand provides a rather different view, but that is something that senior management could not contemplate, because it takes them out of the decision -making loop.
I would recommend a read of this article on the failure of metrification to achieve its aims.
Finally, can anyone provide evidence that a workload management scheme increased teaching quality and the research productivity of an institutions? Any such evidence has to have the effects of new hires stripped out.
Ferniglab Blog 
Totally agree David, a workload management scheme is nothing short of trying to solve poor management practice with a policy driven tool. At our corporate clients we put in place a structured 12 minute monthly face-to-face. So that even if you have 10 reports, in one morning per month everyone knows where they stand, performance wise. I don’t see why Universities should be any different, do you?
Hi Clement, long time no see, didn’t know you were lurking there in the background :).
It is perhaps more complex in our case, in that there is such a variety of outputs, which are not easily comparable, and all of which will be describing someone new to humanity – an issue that arises, but probably shouldn’t, is how ‘new’ or how ‘important’ the work is. The reason it is false to try to qualify the discovery is that only time can really tell. In defence of universities, such face-to-face meetings occur, and have done so for a very long time. Workload schemes have been placed on top of such face-to-face meetings. To add a little dash of cynicism, from someone who works extensively with the private sector, workload schemes have a smell of something thought up in the public sector because they feel it looks like it is what might happen in the private sector (note my comment on ‘super managers’). It doesn’t, as we both know!