Ambition at the cost of employee wellbeing
Pros
Good development opportunities at your own expense (if you are willing to sacrifice your life and find an additional 40 hrs a week on top of your 60 -70 hrs/week commitments. University has ambitious corporate plans but no clear implementation strategy. Functional level staff including academics suffer the most, everyone is so tired and overworked, while management (business school - SMM) is running like headless chickens, trying to tick boxes off their job performance review. Academic and administrative colleagues are very very supportive because we understand each others pain. Some of the students are excellent and they make the job worthwhile, but I wish I could say the same for the majority.
Cons
Where to start? I benefit a lot from reviews on Glassdoor and I always leave honest reviews so people can make an informed decision. Jobs can make or break your life hence I have left an honest reflection of how 99.9% of the employees feel at Coventry university business school. Some of the 5* feedback here raises my eyebrow as I do know how functional level staff feel, I doubt whether these reviews were written by students in temporary jobs? • Poor management and work culture. Iron fisted management that believes in fear tactics. You are always reminded how lucky you are to have a job and a ‘desk’ (not an office). • 50 people are put into an open plan space designated as ‘office’. Even the associate heads are made to sit with everyone else while everyone above and beyond gets large two bedroom sized offices. • No regard for employee wellbeing or development unless it directly benefits the management. • Every single step you put are measured and related to your job performance review. 95% student satisfaction ‘targets’ are given to academics per module, if you fail to achieve then you are in big trouble! • Regardless of your job title and position you are expected to contribute towards the corporate strategy including teaching, research, community engagement, internationalisation, quality, recruitment etc. Basically you need to be a jack of all trades but master of none. • Administrative support has been cut down to bone. Too much paperwork for academics to focus on their real job. • Workload is not transparent and you will easily end up working 60 -70 hrs on average while officially only 37 hrs are counted as per your contract. • Research is more of a commercial ploy to generate money for the university and gain some momentum in the ‘university ranking’. You are encouraged to publish with 7 – 8 co-authors regardless of quality, as long it accounts for REF you have ticked a box on your performance review. • Strict performance review that is more destructive than constructive. Everybody is so busy ticking boxes that they have lost their real passion for research or teaching. • High staff turn-over due to poor management tactics. • New staff becomes easy pray while old staff gets away without doing anything. • Poor compensation by industry standard. (low salary no benefit) Hope this was some sort of help.
