University staff deserves incentive, recognition

What makes a university great? Faculty, faculty, faculty.
First-rate faculty attract first-rate students, and the students
often end up becoming faculty in a self-perpetuating cycle of
excellence.

A research university is like a ship. Faculty are its captains,
administrators its engineers, students its passengers. But no ship
can function without hundreds of other crew members. At a national
university, these are the biggest chunk of employees collectively
dubbed “staff.”

They’re the unsung heroes who do everything from plumbing,
vending and garage services to the white-collar work of admissions,
institutional relations and financial management. Without them, the
metaphorical ship of academia would sink like the Titanic.

Yet they’re scarcely recognized, let alone rewarded. A
token nod in speeches is all they get. The popular press treats
them even worse. A recent 36-page Los Angeles Times commemorative
edition on 125 years of higher education in California, for
example, didn’t have a single sentence devoted to any campus
staff.

Such neglect is of course just one of the many discontents in
higher education today. Its symptoms are less known: high stress
and low morale. Both are arguably rooted in poor management
practices.

The public university is one of the most hierarchical,
command-and-control machines ever invented. It has two critical
features. First, at any given time, more employees are available
than are required to do productive work. And second, everybody is a
subordinate to somebody who determines what’s to be done and
how.

Overstaffing stifles promotion, besides making employees
replaceable cogs in a machine. The result is a high attrition rate
that should make administrators sit up and take notice.

But because UCLA is so large and diverse, there is no
centralized data on why many employees leave every year.
Dissatisfaction with work, unstimulating peers and autocratic
bosses are significant factors.

For the better part of the 20th century, management gurus warned
that tightly managed organizations appear to be the source of much
employee frustration ““ not to mention shame, humiliation,
contempt and anger. It’s little wonder that 54 percent of
employees in the U.S. are not actively engaged at work and 17
percent are actively disengaged, according to the latest figures
from the semi-annual Employment Engagement Index by the Gallup
Management Journal.

Clearly, when it comes to white-collar work, groups that more or
less manage themselves and share responsibility are a much better
alternative to the traditional top-down system of management. After
all, a number of private companies, especially in the high-tech
sector, have convincingly demonstrated that participation works
better than subordination.

That’s not to say something that approaches self-managing
groups doesn’t exist at UCLA. It does (in Capital Programs,
for example), but there’s a crying need for more of these
groups at a time when the imperatives of the marketplace are being
increasingly felt in higher education.

As a first step, the university should hire the most creative
and talented staff ““ just as the best possible faculty are
hired for research. One way to do this is to hire people whose
knowledge and skills are greater than the immediate demands of
their position, thereby offering an incentive for them to remain at
the university and move up the ladder.

Critics will point out that unlike corporations, the university
has no single bottom line, and that this makes it difficult to
establish “objective” standards of executive, faculty
or staff performance. But too often this is an excuse for inaction
or an attempt to maintain the status quo.

Singh is a senior writer with UCLA Marketing and
Communication Services. The views expressed in this article are his
own and not those of his department.