Is there any saving “the meeting?” Well, maybe!

Yes, they are a pain. But John Cleese is right: colleges (from the department level to the committee level), like any organizations, can’t function without them.  As well, collaborative group projects for students can be a high-impact learning opportunity — but students like meetings about as much as we do.

I appreciate finding tips that make collaborative work easier — figured you would, too. So, here’s a piece from today’s online Chronicle on how working groups can hack their own organizational dynamics not only to improve performance, but to enhance buy-in from members as well.

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April 21, 2014

Regrouping the Group Meeting

They’re often a colossal waste of time. So how do we make them useful?

Mark Shaver for The Chronicle

By Jeffrey C. Grossman

How often do you hear a colleague say, “I’m so excited to attend today’s group meeting,” or a student remark, “How is it possible that my group meetings are so stimulating and engaging?”

What’s that? You’ve never heard anyone say those things? Me neither. I dread meetings for the same reason that everyone does: They’re usually a waste of time.

Most often, a meeting consists of a group of people who gather to discuss a particular
topic, to make or move toward a decision, or to (dare I use the b-word?) brainstorm. These well-intentioned discussions too frequently involve only a few of the many present. The decision would usually be more efficiently made online. And as for brainstorming, the idea seems to work better in theory than in practice.

All across the country on a weekly basis we suffer in meetings. We waste time, we snooze. More and more, we don’t even pretend we’re engaged. People go to meetings with their phones purposefully juiced up, ready to send texts, check email, or play Fruit Ninja.

And that colossal waste of time occurs on a wide scale. Take research groups: According to the National Science Foundation, in the United States for the disciplines of science, engineering, and health combined, there were 62,947 postdoctoral researchers and 626,820 graduate students in 2011. At a rate of one two-hour group meeting a week, that amounts to roughly 69 million hours of their time spent each year in a typical research meeting—and that doesn’t count undergraduates, faculty members, or staff members. Out of those 69 million hours, we probably squeeze, at most, a million hours of true productivity.

It was that huge loss of potential that led me to seek a solution to my own research group’s weekly meetings.

Where does the time go? TAWKS might know…

A number of my colleagues, especially those involved in significant service commitments, have recently observed how the looming end of the academic year feels like such a time crunch: not only are we continuing our ongoing work in teaching, meetings and research (when we can fit it in), but the “needs doing by the end of year” deadline for bigger projects looms large, putting pressure on everyone. This is just one of the more salient moments that feature a plaintive refrain of all academic professionals — where does the time go?

Some new research on this issue at Boise State University was recently featured in Inside Higher Ed. Consider the findings of TAWKS: does this profile of faculty work-time feel familiar? How different might it be at a different sort of institution (say, a residential liberal arts college like mine)? What patterns are familiar?

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So Much to Do, So Little Time

April 9, 2014

By

Colleen Flaherty

Professors work long days, on weekends, on and off campus, and largely alone. Responsible for a growing number of administrative tasks, they also do research more on their own time than during the traditional work week. The biggest chunk of their time is spent teaching.

Those are the preliminary findings of an ongoing study at Boise State University — a public doctoral institution — of faculty workload allocation, which stamps out old notions of professors engaged primarily in their own research and esoteric discussions with fellow scholars.

“The ivory tower is a beacon — not a One World Trade Center, but an ancient reflection of a bygone era — a quasar,” John Ziker, chair of the anthropology department at Boise State University, says in a new scholarly blog post in which he discusses his faculty workload findings. “In today’s competitive higher-education environment, traditional universities and their faculty must necessarily do more and more, and show accomplishments by the numbers, whether it be the number of graduates, the number of peer-reviewed articles published or the grant dollars won.”

Ziker’s Blue Review post continues: “It is harder to count — and to account for — service and administrative duties. These are things we just do because of the institutional context of Homo academicus, and it’s hard to quantify the impact of these activities or the time spent, but they are exceedingly important for intellectual progress of the larger Homo clans.”

But of course just how professors spend their time has major implications for faculty, students and their institutions, he says – especially as Boise State has recently adopted a policy that professors should spend 60 percent of their time teaching. Hence the need for the Time Allocation Workload Knowledge Study, or “TAWKS.”

[more after the jump!]