Rethinking the Campus Experience for Students and Academics
The ‘work from home’ government edicts over the past 20 months have proved to the Higher Education sector that remote working can and does, work. This is even despite them not necessarily having the right systems in place yet to offer an optimal employee experience. With modernising their core systems, the efficiency gains will be even more pronounced.
Universities were able to free up some of their real estate, previously used by admin and IT staff, in order to provide extra lecture space within social distancing rules. People are used to this now and it’s unlikely the tide will turn the other way. It’s a bit like the restaurants investing money to create these great outside spaces for customers. Once social distancing is no longer in force, al fresco dining will already be more embedded in our culture. It’s becoming the norm and is here to stay. In the same vein, universities are unlikely to try and reclaim any space that’s recently been repurposed for students.
A CIO from a top University in London recently shared with me their plans to start moving the admin and IT teams fully off-campus. From my discussions with many other universities, I anticipate this will become a UK-wide trend, along with the rise in ‘hybrid working’ policies that blend on-campus and working from home.
A few years ago, one far-sighted UK university moved its entire IT department from London to Cornwall to cut costs and increase efficiencies. We’ve seen this shift a lot in the private sector, where India, Romania, even Ireland are popular locations for sourcing IT support because they have the right skills and also offer better value. In fact, a large part of SAP’s UK & Ireland workforce is now located in Ireland for those very reasons.
Facilitating flexible and/or home-working for employees also supports a university’s inclusion and diversity policies by making it possible for their staff to fit work around their caring responsibilities, disabilities or other lifestyle requirements. It can also widen the potential talent pool as geographic location no longer needs to limit where a university can recruit its staff from.
If you’re paying thousands of pounds a year as a student, you want to be on campus as much as is possible. Interacting with other bright young things, sharing ideas and having the chance to bond socially in one of the bars or cafés on campus is a crucial part of the university experience.
Many universities have the view now that campuses should become places predominantly for students and academics. They want to revive the campus experience as a hotbed of learning, a place where students can socialise and collaborate with their peers. IT and admin staff don’t really need to be on-site, and it is so much more cost-effective to have them work from home, or perhaps a hybrid mix of home and hot-desking.
Freeing up prime campus space makes it possible to create better learning and research environments. Moving admin and IT staff to more permanent remote and/or hybrid working models can help to free up the budget which educational establishments could then put into attracting students and providing them with a better experience.
The current question then for the HE sector is how to then upgrade their legacy systems to give all the different roles and generations within their workforce an intuitive, easy-to-use experience whichever systems they need to engage with. Of course, having a dispersed workforce in multiple locations means adopting a Cloud policy. I believe it is also crucial to get all your core systems delivered and managed by the same software provider because everything needs to integrate well with everything else your employees use. I’ve seen a few instances where a university tries to improve certain aspects of their systems by adding on niche products to their core ERP but that can lead to a proliferation of point solutions which, over time, will become a nightmare to manage.
So, our advice to universities is to avoid the temptation to stick with the old system and try to retrofit it with pretty UX and apps focused only on specific elements. Go with a technology supplier who can supply everything end-to-end. Who has experience in, and specific understanding of, the core operations within the Higher Education sector and can offer deep functionality in all areas, from Finance, HR, Payroll, Students through to Customer and Student Experience systems.