For research professionals around the world, each year brings new discoveries, obstacles, and opportunities that shape the landscape of science and medicine, as well as the field of research itself. That’s why Cayuse conducts an annual benchmark survey of over 1,100 global research professionals to gain deeper insight into their goals, practices, and challenges, outlined in the State of Research Administration Benchmark Report.
In this blog, we’ll examine the latest report’s findings, including new developments and stabilizing trends across the industry.
Stabilization and the “new normal”
Compared to previous benchmark surveys, this year’s results indicate a noticeable industry-wide stabilization across several research processes. Some of the most significant aspects of research that have become more entrenched in the past year include:
Hybrid and flexible work environments
As we approach the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, many workplaces have enough experience and data to inform which practices stemming from its immediate aftermath are worth keeping in place.
In particular, the move to hybrid, flexible, and even remote work environments seems to represent a “new normal” instead of a fleeting trend. While fewer respondents reported that they work remotely full-time—down to 19% from 22% in 2023—71% of respondents (up from 69%) report working in a hybrid environment, with 42% of those indicating optional or flexible in-person requirements. Overall, a mere 10% of respondents were required to work in the office full-time in 2024.
There are several likely reasons for this continued trend, from the cost of office spaces to the increasing ability of research teams to complete necessary work remotely thanks to centralized, digital management systems. Whatever the case, it does not appear that a majority of research professionals will return to a full-time office presence anytime soon.
Continued demand for growth
Once again, the most common organizational goal for respondents remains research growth, with 31% of participants listing “expanding research portfolios” as their team’s top priority for the next 12 to 18 months. This is to be expected; larger portfolios mean more funding, more institutional prestige, and, of course, more successful outcomes and results creating a positive impact on the world.
The next top two priorities are also unchanged from last year, with “improving processes” accounting for 25% of responses, followed by “improving team efficiency” with 10%. Notably, all three responses represent almost identical percentages as in the previous report (31%, 26%, and 10%, respectively).
However, the demand for continuous growth combined with several still-common obstacles hinted at by the second and third top priorities result in the next established trend:
Increased workloads
Perhaps unsurprisingly, continued demand for growth can easily lead to higher workloads for everyone involved in research, especially when organizational challenges create increased administrative burden.
In the 2023 Benchmark Survey, over 75% of participants indicated higher workloads since 2022, while 79% predicted an even larger workload increase in 2024. True to their prediction, the 2024 numbers are strikingly similar, with just over 75% reporting a higher workload in the past year and 79% predicting another increase in 2024, while only 12% expect workloads to stay the same.
This year, we took a closer look at the most time-intensive activities to help create a clearer picture of where participants experience higher workloads and why. Three activities stood out as requiring the most inordinate attention and time commitment:
- Reviewing documents: 25%
- Creating documents: 19%
- Communication and collaboration: 13%
When asked why these activities take longer than they reasonably should, the five most common responses were:
- Manual processes: 46%
- Lack of staff: 33%
- Lack of alignment across the organization: 27%
- Disparate systems: 26%
- Organizational silos: 25%
Examined as a whole, these answers expose the most prevalent obstacles for research teams and their causes: outdated, manual processes combined with staff shortages and inadequately integrated teams and systems lead to too many hours spent creating and reviewing the documents required to keep research moving forward.
How organizations can respond
Fortunately, there is an easy answer to the aforementioned challenges that can help organizations move forward with larger portfolios and increased research funding while reducing the administrative burden that keeps teams from optimal performance.
Today’s modern electronic research administration (eRA) software can provide stable, centralized infrastructure to support the full research lifecycle, helping to automate document creation and review and connecting teams across an organization through a single sign-on (SSO) platform that gives easy access to every step of a project, whether employees are working remotely or on-site.
Many organizations, however, are still hesitant to adopt full-lifecycle cloud-based research solutions, with 33% of survey participants reporting that their offices leverage a combination of cloud-based and homegrown (i.e. internally created and managed) software, another 7% indicating a mixture of homegrown software and manual processes, and a full 12% still relying entirely on manual processes.
While implementing a new full-lifecycle eRA system can seem daunting to administrators and leadership, the transition is necessary to ultimately reduce administrative burden and ensure teams can tackle larger portfolios without facing unwieldy workloads, burnout, and turnover.
