A more hospitable airport lounge?

Airport Lounge (looks inviting, yet it's temporary)

I'm back, baby! (just picture me as Frank Constanza from Seinfeld 😂)

OK, dissertation done(ish)  [just waiting for final approvals], and oral defense passed.  So, I guess I have some more free time to blog, and MOOC [if a MOOC were to become available 😉].  It's been a rather...interesting 18 months.  I've been wanting to work fully remote for years and I got my wish.  I just wish that we didn't need to have a global pandemic as the reason for it.  This fall, we're slated to return to campus, and I am a bit apprehensive. More on that perhaps in future blog posts. For now, I wanted to write some thoughts that came by reading my friend Lance's most recent [unpublished] IHE piece.  You can read the entire piece, titled "Instructional Designers on Campuses" here.

There's no doubt that we've learned a lot during this pandemic. How much learning loss administrators and faculty experience, once the pandemic is over, is yet to be determined 😂. One thing is for certain, people actually understand me now when I tell them that I have a background in (and teach) Instructional Design! I don't have to explain what instructional design is as frequently! This is despite being an Instructional Designer and a trainer for over 13 years. When I worked for the instructional design department (10 years ago) I often had conversations with colleagues who didn't get why (1) we couldn't work from home - given what we did, and (2) why we didn't have more flexible hours - given the 18-hour-a-day rhythm of the university. We were 9-to-5, and from what I can tell my colleagues still are.

As Lance points out in his piece, "prior to the pandemic, most higher education institutions grounded hesitancy in remote work as a financial one:  they feared lost productivity (wasted time and money), with sometimes a veneer of equity (since not all positions on campus can be remote, none can)". While I agree with this, I feel like these are really the surface reasons for a denial in remote work.  This is just my observation from one campus (plus anecdotal stories from colleagues at other local campuses), but evidence seems to suggest that the reason why remote work has been denied over the years to employees is poor management. Since this is a rather large category, I'll break it down into two specific instances: (1) micromanagement and (2) managers who have never been trained (or empowered to) make those decisions.

In the case of micromanagers, they are not satisfied unless your butt is in a cubicle (or office) where they can keep a close eye on you and they can just walk in whenever they want.  Maybe it's a power trip, maybe it's about trust (who hurt you, man?😥), maybe it's a lack of confidence in their skills, or maybe it's a combination. Whatever the case may be, their management style can be described as the Eye of Sauron, which isn't really great for employee morale.  People tend to leave organizations that operate like that.  

Initech reference (for those not familiar with "Office Space"

The other aspect deals with the training of managers. I've had managers who only viewed things as equitable if everyone in the team could do the same.   Oftentimes the "team" included people with vastly different jobs.  An IDer's job can be done remotely.  The person who lays cat5 cable not so much.  Telling instructional designers that they can't work remotely because the dude who does cable-laying can't work remotely is deflecting managerial responsibility. These are the kinds of management attitudes I'd expect at Initech.

I do agree with Lance that when someone is invisible they are easier to get rid of.  Out of sight, out of mind -as the old saying goes. And, I suspect that people, in the pre-COVID times, have been laid off because they worked from home and people didn't understand the valuable stuff they brought to the organization with their labor.  However, just because you are visible doesn't mean that you're heard, or have a seat at the table, or are a valuable partner in decision-making. Those watercooler talks or pick-up conversations that Lance describes can only happen in environments that provide fertile grounds for this, and again - just because you're physically there, it doesn't mean that the ground is fertile. Being there can be an element to a serendipitous conversation, but these types of pockets of innovation do not necessarily help showcase the value of ID within a higher ed. organization at any scale Now, why is this?

Well, here's my short Fb reply from which I want to build on:

I think it comes down to organizational culture; and an organizational culture that is focused purely on cost-cutting (and to any extent micromanagement and control) will tend to alienate and create silos even when people are on-campus (it's worse when people are not forced to be physically cohabiting the same space since all interactions need to be intentional at that point). I've seen this in certain departments in certain campuses *cough*. On-campus innovation "will find a way" (to quote a certain fictional Chaos Theory character) due to serendipitous bumping-ins - even if they are few and far between. In remote contexts, this needs nurturing much (much) more. That said, my pondering: In academic departments where tenured/tenure-track folks don't stay for too long in the office (and adjuncts/non-tenure have to treat any campus like an airport lounge), where does this leave organizations? People in such positions have treated work as "remote" for at least a decade and only came to campus for very specific purposes (generally speaking meetings). So what can we learn from those colleagues in order to create a better functioning hybrid work environment?

About 10 years ago, I transitioned to working for an academic department.  I think that this transition has been instrumental in understanding the disconnect between Instructional Design offerings and faculty development. As an instructional technologist, I always wondered why professional development offerings were sparsely attended.  Working for an academic department helped answer those questions by doing the work of an (amateur) anthropologist and observing these academic communities. Now granted, my observations have been those of departments that are proximal to mine, and at a specific campus. I have a few stories collected from colleagues over the years, but those are short interludes in my overall observations.

My observations have been that there is a disconnect between how faculty are imagined to act, and how faculty actually act. In part, I blame Hollywood for this. Faculty are often pictured as having lush offices, brimming with books and other interesting realia. They are seen as ready to dispense a knowledge bomb that will blow your mind. All you have to do is just show up at their office! Some are like this, but that's not my experience of the average faculty member. In reality, most faculty I know don't work that way.  While they might have mandated office hours and use their offices for these, most people are academic nomads. This is true both for the tenured/tenure-track (TT) faculty and the adjunct (NTT) faculty.  Most faculty seem to come into the campus for meetings and class sessions, and other than the required office hours they tend to not be around.  TT folks enjoy a private oasis when they are on-campus. They usually have an office with a lock and key to leave their belongings in while they're away at meetings, and they have use of a computer.  NTT faculty might have such a private office, but they might not.  Some might use an empty cubicle or desk that's available because no one else is using it, or they might share an office with others NTT faculty.  Many adjuncts might just come in for their class and leave.  Maybe they'll stick around to print a few things, or hold office hours in a shared office or cube or hallway.  They aren't paid to do the emotional labor that comes with sticking around, so they don't. They are also not compensated for any professional development that they do, so why take up time doing it when they have greater needs? Some might be commuters and going to other schools to teach, so they need to use that time to get to their next gig.

Either way, the model I've seen is less that of an intellectual community that happens to be around a metaphorical camp-fire, engaging in various pursuits of knowledge in a physically colocated manner, and more like that of a WeWork setting (except, maybe, with worse amenities) or an airport lounge. Faculty are always on the move, and work is done both in the office and at home. I'd hazard a guess that most faculty do most of their work at home (unless they are faculty that need lab space). Given this reality, I don't think there is much value in having instructional designers being located only in the office on campus. Being located only on-campus serves to reinforce a 9-to-5 schedule which is already a problem when it comes to serving such a nomadic population. Even if an enterprising manager were to offer a staggered work schedule so that there is more coverage (in person), there is the internal issue of team cohesiveness and team morale when there is only one of you in the office. 

Patriot's Coach Bill Belichick

To wrap this up, here are some thoughts collected from the past few years of thinking about remote work and ID:

• The airport lounge isn't necessarily bad.  I am sure university admins who want to sell the image of a vibrant university with faculty and staff being available all the time don't see it this way, but it's unsustainable, and keeping a 9-to5 essentially privileges people who can make it to campus 9-5 to meet with folks who work 9-5. I think we should embrace the lounge by making it more equitable and more inviting.  At the same time, I think we need to be more international with our interactions, be they F2F, online, or both. We need to build better communities, and simply mandating that people come to campus doesn't build a community.
• Staff need to be appreciated for the seen (and unseen) work that they do. Even well-meaning faculty colleagues, pre-pandemic, had it in their mind that staff didn't work unless they were in the office. Maybe they didn't think of this consciously, but when requests for WFH were met with the reaction "well, yes, it's true that faculty aren't always in the office, but faculty work when they are not in the office" - the implication here is that staff don't work unless they are in the office.
• Related to this previous point, IDers need to be acknowledged as experts in their field, and as valuable colleagues by institutions and faculty. I've had instances where I've been acknowledged as an "online learning expert" but when it came to giving advice and IDing about teaching F2F I suddenly wasn't - even for fields where faculty taught topics that were unrelating to pedagogy.  So, my guess is that I am seen as an EdTech expert and not as an expert in the learning field.
• Managers need to do their job (not a football fan, but the Belichick "Do your job" meme fits here). Just because the pipe-fitter, network-cable-layer, or circulation person can't WFH, it doesn't mean that everyone can't work from home. It's about the nature of the job and doing it well rather than deflecting responsibility by claiming equity.
• IHEs need to embrace CPD (continuous professional development) as part of their DNA.  Both for staff and for faculty. To some extend we see this with faculty when it comes to their individual disciplines (e.g., attending discipline-specific conferences), but pedagogy gets left behind. What if we gave equal value to good pedagogy and devising means to help faculty grow as teachers and mentors? What if these things were required and not optional, and non-participation/completion meant the withholding of tenure or promotion? I am sure you're preparing your virtual pitchfork right about now but think about it. To go along with this, I propose that faculty be 12-month employees (not 9 month employees), with 2 months of paid PD and a month of paid vacation.
• Going along with my previous points about IDers being seen as experts: IDer (at least in my experience) are not part of the Faculty Development team.  They might be invited in to present on some things, but any faculty development is spearheaded by more senior faculty and, even with the best intentions, they probably end up replicating inequalities that existed "in their day." I think IDers need to be part of FacDev, and part of these broader conversations that are happening on campus around pedagogy.

That's all for now :-)  Thoughts? leave a comment!

~AK