In our 2022 Benchmark Report on the state of research administration, we surveyed more than 1,000 individuals from 437 organizations. When asked about the most significant barriers they faced in the immediate future, staffing constraints stood out as the runaway choice above inefficient processes, limited budget, or time constraints. A whopping 69% of respondents feel they don’t have the right amount of staffing resources to manage their existing and planned research portfolio.
Clearly, staffing challenges are a problem that most research administration professionals face, and the talent shortage has only made the crunch on research institutions more intense. Against this backdrop, conducting accurate workload assessments to scope staffing needs is more important now than ever before.
Lacey Rhea (Duke University) and Maryellen O’Brien (Pennsylvania State University) presented at our 2022 Connect Conference on improving workload assessment and allocation for research administration offices. Their ideas were so insightful, we wanted to share them in writing so that other research administration teams might benefit. (For the latest insights from other industry experts, join our Connect Community for free.)
Read on to learn how we can embrace the imperfect reality of assessing workloads to better support research administration teams and the industry at large.
The state of research administration
The biggest challenge many research administration offices face can be summarized in a single word: recruitment. Many RA offices are constantly working to fill open positions, to the point that there seem to be more vacancies than people in the field to fill them.
In part, this is a culture problem. Research administration is a stressful profession where staff regularly work long hours (60+ hour work weeks are not uncommon) and face high expectations. While every institution wants to promote the size and scope of its research spend, this level of ambition is not always attached to the infrastructure needed to support it.
But the nature of the job isn’t the only cause of recent staffing challenges. Recruitment efforts tend to be lackluster; many students who graduate from research universities aren’t even aware that the RA office exists. In addition, skilled research administrators are starting to age out of the industry, taking significant knowledge and experience with them—and with a shortage of younger staff to train to take their place.
There are also no benchmarks or generalized standards for workload measurement, making it extremely difficult to estimate actual staffing needs based on anticipated workload. Faculty-to-staff ratios are typically not considered in a university’s budgeting process to determine how many RA staff are needed.
These challenges, when combined with the often-aggressive pursuit of research faculty, explain the long history of research administration offices doing more and more work with fewer and fewer resources.
Current workload assessment practices
Growing the research enterprise is a strategic priority. Every institution wants the bragging rights of high research expenditure, but the impact on research administration can be neglected during high-level planning discussions. As the backbone of an organization’s research agenda, there can be no research expenditure without RA; and yet, these offices are sometimes omitted from the list of strategic priorities.
The current method of estimating workload and staffing needs looks something like this:
- Prove a need for added staff with data
- List unit responsibilities
- Assign a value to each task (i.e., how much time it takes to complete)
- Review transaction-level metrics (i.e., define the volume of each transaction)
- Calculate how many FTEs are required (1 FTE = 1 human)
A note about data collection
During any data collection stage, ensure that your organization considers its structure. You may have a centralized setup, with most duties falling to the office of sponsored programs. Or, you might have a decentralized structure, where many of these duties are passed along to the specific colleges and departments.
When assessing workload and staffing needs at your institution, it’s essential to consider its structure. As a starting point, identify tasks and responsibilities central to research administration at your university and identify who does what.
Here’s an example of how duties might be allocated under a “standard” centralized structure:
Office of Sponsored Programs:
- Policy development
- Compliance and oversight
- Award negotiation and execution
- Subaward preparation and execution
- Review & submit proposals
- Signature Authority
- Prepare & approve waiver requests
- Submit docs to sponsors
- Manage grant & PI transfers
- Authorize sponsor requests
Colleges & Departments
- Pre-award: prepare all proposals, collect subaward info
- Post-award: expense approval, invoicing and financial reporting, preparing subaward requests, monitoring subrecipients
Research Accounting
- File FSRs
- Drawdown funds
- Close accounts
- Prepare standard invoices
- Account setup
- Initial budget load
- Budget revisions
- NCEs
- Authorize prior approval requests
Why traditional calculations are wrong—and how to fix them
Traditional staffing calculations use 2080 as the denominator by which to divide tasks and the amount of time they occupy. 2080 equals 40 hours a week multiplied by 52 weeks a year.
As you’ve likely guessed by that math, that denominator doesn’t take a wide range of realistic factors into account, including (but not limited to):
- Holidays
- Vacation time
- Sick leave
- Meetings and events
- Giving or receiving training
- Transition time between tasks
These are just a few examples of the cushion time often omitted from workload assessment calculations. Training in particular is almost constant for most RA staff, who are likely either learning a new skill or training others at any given moment.
Humans aren’t robots; we can’t switch tasks instantly, our productivity isn’t consistent day over day, and we get sick occasionally. It’s also crucial to factor in time off, continued education and events, meetings, and time for critical thinking about problems to be solved. Research administration is not purely paper-pushing, though that’s often an element of the job. Staff members need time to consider the best solutions to problems that need solving, to digest continued education information, and simply to take mental breaks.
How to measure individual output
In research administration, as in all other industries, staff are not all created equal in their transactional efficiency. One person often does not equal one FTE, as each person brings a different level of productivity to the table.
Some variables to consider include:
- Experience level: Where an entry-level staff member may take all afternoon to complete a task, a seasoned RA professional may only need an hour. Also, are staff dedicating lots of time to correcting errors made by new staff members? Have the different personalities of faculty in the portfolio been taken into account?
- Professional involvement: Are staff expected to engage in continued education, update processes based on regulation changes, etc.?
- Service to institution: Do staff members serve on committees? Are they beta-testing eRA systems? Factor all non-transactional work time into your total.
These are “extras” that are often expected of RA staff, but somehow never seem to show up in traditional FTE calculation models.
The traditional work assessment calculation method looks something like this:
Sum of (tasks * # of hours to complete tasks) / 2080 = required # of FTE
1 individual = 1.0 FTE
This calculation tends to result in unrealistic expectations and varying productivity output, so our panelists suggested another:
Updated work assessment calculation method:
Sum of (expanded tasks * # of hours to complete tasks) / 1536^ = required # of FTE
1 individual = x FTE (where x is an actual measure of an individual’s ability)
^1536 was derived from 2080 hours minus non-transactional time. “Expanded tasks” include things like sick time, vacation, transitional periods between tasks, etc. Using a more realistic denominator of ~1536 hours brings expectations for the output of each FTE to a far more realistic level.
This updated model is far more sustainable. It may not look as good on paper, because it includes a healthy dose of reality—but it’s also more likely to support employee satisfaction and reduce turnover. On top of that, the traditional calculation model simply isn’t working. Even when offices are fully staffed, they are still overwhelmed by the amount of work their institutions expect.
Measuring transactional productivity
There is also the question of transactional productivity, which will vary based on individual experience. For example, a seasoned professional with 5+ years in the job they currently hold may have the output of 1.5 FTE, because they know their role well and have become more efficient at it over time. By contrast, a brand-new employee who is just learning their way around the RA profession at large may have an output of .5 FTE.
When viewed through this lens, simply looking at the number of individuals when calculating the number of FTE required on staff is not sufficient. If most of the staff are new to the office or the field, their output will be lower than a team of confident professionals with years of experience. These nuances must be taken into account when staffing an office, as they impact the “real” number of FTE dramatically.
While both panelists acknowledged the imperfect reality of assessing RA workloads—and the difficulty of getting HR buy-in on increased staffing needs—they expressed the hope that improved workload assessments can serve as a starting point. Ideally, conversations like these will be the catalyst that propels organizations forward into more mindful staffing models that better support RA offices in their important work.
