Almost all staff and faculty can work and prefer to work remotely, a summer Workplace Preferences survey revealed.
According to the survey, 97 per cent of 4,878 UBC staff and faculty said they can do some or all of their work remotely during COVID-19. 93 per cent of those surveyed also reported that they would prefer to work remotely.
However, survey results point to differences in perceptions of how well they adapt, with 87 per cent of staff reportedly adapting to remote work, compared to only 68 per cent of faculty. Faculty also reported lower rates of agreement compared to staff when asked if they felt that UBC was offering adequate mental health support during COVID-19. Faculty reported 51 per cent agreement to adequate mental health support, while staff reported 70 per cent agreement.
These results are consistent with previous preliminary survey results on tenure-track faculty, in which respondents reported increases in workloads and decreases in research output and overall ability to work.
With only a 41 per cent response rate to the optional survey, this may not reflect all UBC employees, but it provides insight for potential changes to workplace practices after the pandemic.
UBC Human Resources, who administered the survey, would not provide a comment until results are presented to the executives next spring.
Dr. Terri Griffith, Keith Beedie chair in innovation and entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business, focuses her research on virtual work and other workplace innovations and offered insight on the survey results.
“The transition for faculty may be difficult due to having different kinds of work, including research work, course design responsibilities [and] course presentation ... that needed to be changed immediately as part of a ‘crisis online format,’” Griffith said of the abrupt lockdown orders back in March.
As an upside, she said, “Everybody being sent home in March was a trigger for remote working that forced people who might have otherwise said ‘This job can’t be done online,’ see that it indeed could be done.”
Recorded lectures are one such example. Prior to COVID-19, UBC did not offer lecture recordings for most large undergraduate classes. Compared to other major Canadian universities like University of Toronto and McGill University, which have offered recorded lectures for years and have protocols in place to help professors do so, the transition demanded significant catch-up and flexibility from UBC professors.
Additionally, with only half of faculty surveyed reporting adequate mental health support, there may be a need for UBC to provide extra mental health support on top of online classroom support during the remote work transition.
“We are asking people to abruptly change how they work, hopefully with a lot of resources ... and not just the work resources, but mental health supports too,” said Griffith.
“Overall, faculty, staff and students need the resources and flexibility to do their work in whatever way is most effective for them and their colleagues.”