After enduring since the Middle Ages, the traditional academic environment could have reached its limit. The changing nature of collaboration, financials, and work habits of individuals are rendering traditional workplace structures not sustainable. One of the major issues has been the division of the workplace in academic buildings, across campuses even outside them. This has hampered collaboration and collaboration among faculty and staff as campuses are crowded with more unutilized spaces.
The new solutions can cut down on waste, improve the community, and improve how faculty and staff are requesting to work.
What’s Happening in Universities
Collaboration
University research is becoming more co-operative over time. The average number of coauthors for a peer-reviewed journal more than doubled between 1980 and 2016. The demand for multidisciplinary research and education is also increasing. On the staff part, headcounts have ballooned because new support functions and the connections they require have increased. Physically connecting people isn’t easy. In the face of expanding and new roles, many universities have taken a different direction of relocating entire groups off campus, far from the community and culture they serve.
Finances
The university’s finances are becoming less reliable. Two of the major sources of funding — federal R&D and the state-appropriated funds for public universities are less than they were 15 years ago. Some revenue sources are increasing, such as degree programs online and enrollment of foreign students; however, the flow of foreign students is under threat from global instability, and online education is likely to be challenged by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and boot camps. All of this uncertainty demands greater operational flexibility and efficiency.
Flexibility
Like other businesses that are subject to change, universities are experiencing the need for more flexible work. Based on our surveys of clients, employees were the ones who benefited most from working remotely during the time of the pandemic as their satisfaction and perception of efficiency were significantly greater. However, faculty members who had a difficult time connecting with their students were limited at the peak of the pandemic. They reported high contentment with working remotely in general. Indeed, during our surveys conducted at three universities in both 2021 and 2020, both staff as well as faculty members said, on average, they’d prefer to be able to work 3.3 or 2.3 days per week from home following the outbreak, an increase of a substantial amount from before the outbreak norms.
Problems With Traditional Academic Workplaces
As universities are increasingly in need of flexibility, agility, and connectivity, traditional working practices hold them behind.
Labyrinths
Universities, as opposed to other types of workplaces, are typically defined by hallways. A famous example is the 825-foot-long “infinite corridor” at MIT. In older buildings, hallways could serve as a structural element. In modern structures, they’re just a relic of the old methods of planning. Hallways can be the sole places for people to gather in the buildings, but they typically turn into labyrinths, which tend to disperse and divert rather than connect.
The infinite corridor at MIT. Photo courtesy Gensler
One-size-fits-all
The first university buildings resembled monasteries and were able to allocate rooms to professors to write and mentor. Similar cellular structures are found in many contemporary academic workplaces with offices as the main element of space. If space is constrained or is not required for tasks such as mentoring or writing, office spaces are typically allocated to a couple of individuals or converted into suites. Although it is convenient from a planning standpoint, making the office the main element of space limits its functionality and increases segmentation, which can lead to the creation of labyrinths.
Territoriality
An enactment in many universities is giving departments the ability to decide how they utilize their spaces. While this may allow for a more easy alignment of the workplace’s needs with those of the local community but it also leads to the re-use of resources. Conference rooms are an excellent instance. Every department, regardless of size, usually has a space to hold staff and faculty. Though the majority of these rooms are empty at any given time however, finding meeting spaces is often a huge challenge due to the fact that staff and faculty have limited or no access that are not part of their group.
Allocation based on status
The status of a person’s professional and tenure has significant influence on the way space is allocated at most universities, as they determine the dimensions and locations of offices as well as the manner in which they are allocated. In illustrating the gap between need and status, We found in the latest client surveys that the more space a person has and the smaller their space, the less they utilize it on a regular basis. Apart from creating waste by distributing space according to status could also cause inequality, such as when basic requirements, such as the ability to have natural light, are not met in a specific way.
How to Build a Better Academic Workplace
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to solve all workplace issues at universities. However, here are three design solutions that could be helpful:
Give more variety and choices.
Instead of attempting to accommodate all the activities that staff and faculty perform in one space, universities should consider to meet a wide range of needs by providing a greater selection of spaces. To benefit from the variety, Universities must also promote an environment that is shared, which replaces individual rights with group ownership. It doesn’t mean that space should never be allocated or managed, but the more space gets shared out, the better an institution will be capable of coordinating it with the needs of their entire community.
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Northwestern University, 1603 Orrington, Evanston, Ill. Photo (c) Tom Harris, courtesy Gensler
Design on a local scale.
Another approach to creating an academic environment that is more productive is to arrange areas into clearly defined neighborhood-scaled clusters. Clustering can help foster a sense of identity and community, something that is a problem in a lot of work environments in universities currently. The provision of a space in which norms of the group and a sense of accountability shared by all can be established, it helps groups to manage sharing naturally. While the neighborhood-scaled clusters typically be a bit isolated however, we’ve found that clustering multiple clusters based on other sources (like larger spaces for meetings or cafes) can trigger serendipitous interactions between these clusters, creating community across multiple levels.
The approach changes slowly.
The transition away from the old standards will require a major behavioral and mental change. Faculty and staff must participate in the process. How they operate and what is driving their successes must be analyzed and recognized. The new solutions should be evaluated and tested before being adopted as a standard. Implementing large-scale changes based on non-academic (e.g., corporate) models that are not based on local research could result in big-scale issues. Small-scale, smaller-scale pilots allow change to be easier to track and manage and let more focus be devoted to helping users to adapt. Once they have been refined and verified, the results will serve as an ideal basis for further deployments.