Preface #

This documentation site started from a document Tim Roberts produced in 2019 about the teaching spreadsheet. A lot of hte original content was lifted from this document, but was adapted to reflect changes that happened since its publication, and added information on the various administrative tasks contributed by the members of staff who held these roles.

Original document introduction #

The Department of Physics has, for over a decade and a half, allocated and balanced the teaching and administrative workload for academic and research staff using an Excel spreadsheet – the Physics Workload Spreadsheet (hereafter the PWS). Within it, staff are allocated a target workload as a fraction of a nominal full load, where that fraction is determined by a number of factors (see Section 3). Each year the Director of Education (DoE) is tasked by the Head of Department (HoD) with allocating teaching and administrative jobs for the following academic year such that each member of staff has a load that approaches their nominal target for the year. This is done in consultation with all staff, and attempts to simultaneously produce balanced loads, where staff are given a range of jobs across different types of teaching and administration, and to optimise the programme such that the right people are allocated to each job (“round pegs for round holes”). This latter target is critical to providing the best possible teaching for undergraduates, in order to maximise student satisfaction. The PWS is by design a transparent and open document. In permitting all staff to see the teaching and administration workload of all other staff we are able to maintain a level of workload equity that is the envy of other departments, and we in general avoid much of the internecine trouble and dissatisfaction that accompanies opaque workload distribution. As such it is an excellent tool in our push to create a workplace that is compliant with best practice in Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity (EDI), and indeed the PWS has featured in our recent submissions for Athena Swan and Juno awards. We consciously exclude purely research activities from the PWS. However, this does not mean that we value teaching and administration above research. The PWS does in fact provide a valuable bulwark against research activities being marginalised for any member of staff. By allocating teaching and administration in a fair and equitable way, we explicitly leave a large proportion of each member of academic track staff’s time free to pursue their own research programmes1 . There is a risk that including research in the PWS would warp this relationship by forcing staff to account for and justify research time, eventually leading to a possible ghettoisation between teaching- and research-dominant staff. This would not be in the interest of maintaining an equitable department in which all staff contribute to and enrich all aspects of our programmes. The aims of the spreadsheet can therefore be summarised as:

The Physics Workload Spreadsheet is a transparent and open document that is used to allocate teaching and administrative jobs in an equitable fashion, taking into account the wishes and abilities of members of staff, and in doing so acts to protect the free research time of all academic staff.