A non-stop workload of nine hours a day is taking a quantifiable toll on academics’ mental health, Australian researchers have found.
The survey conducted by academics at Federation and Victoria universities has revealed that teaching and research staff are performing around four hours of overtime for every five hours of paid work, on average.
pending its publication in a peer-reviewed health journal, the study uncovered an “adjusted annual workload” of 3,256 hours. This far exceeded the “standard” 1,824 hours – 38 hours a week for 48 weeks a year.
The finding suggests that academics work an average of eight hours and 55 minutes a day, 365 days a year. “Nine hours labour every day? You’d get less for manslaughter,” Tim Winkler, publisher of the Future Campus newsletter.
The report acknowledges that “selection bias” may have influenced the results from the online survey, which was made available to every Australian university and completed by 626 academic staff. Lead author Eliza Zentveld said previous research had also found that people tended to overestimate their efforts by about 10 per cent when they self-reported their working hours.
“But even being conservative and accounting for that, the hours are quite gruesome,” said Zentveld, professor of social justice at Federation University and a former chair of the institution’s academic board.
“We’ve got enough of a dataset to show…a pattern which correlates with anecdotal information that people are working into the night. Their annual leave is not separate; weekends are merged into the working week. That delineation point gets a bit murky.”
The survey found that one-quarter of academics experienced depression, compared?with one-sixth of the general community. One in four academics also suffered moderate to severe anxiety, against a community backdrop of one in 13. Workloads played a direct role, with every excess hour increasing the risk of anxiety or depression by between 0.01 and 0.02 percentage points.
Zentveld said these associations were based on accepted measures known as the Patient Health Questionnaire and Generalised Anxiety Disorder scales. “[Our] statistician…consistently found a correlation between working excess hours and having anxiety and depression levels above the clinical cut-off scores.”
She said?academic workloads had intensified since Covid-19, with staff constantly pushed to be more efficient while simultaneously being slugged with additional compliance, quality and student feedback duties.
Zentveld said professionals in other fields also experienced excessive workloads, and the issue in universities could have been exaggerated by academics’ propensity to research themselves. She said academia benefited from an unusual level of flexibility in working hours and locations.
But academics’ workloads “just can’t be done in the time frame”, leaving them a choice of giving away their time or doing their work badly. “This is leading to some poor ethical decisions by some academics, too, where they’re looking at cutting corners.”
She said that while academics’ working habits occasionally became “extreme”, excess hours were routine. “It’s the nature of the job. If you’re supervising PhD students, you want to be responsive to them. To just…disappear for several weeks can have its own set of problems.
“Often there’s very tight turnaround time. A research article might have been accepted, and they need you to proofread [it] in the next 24 hours. You can’t say, ‘I’ll get back to you in a few weeks’.”
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