Overall agreement with UCU draft position

Respondents were asked whether they agree with following statement regarding UCU’s position on the home working policy.

" The UCU branch Executive committee does not question the need for the policy altogether and if the issues are to do with legality insurance health and safety data protection etc then we already have policies that relate to working at home eg the requirement to encrypt all BU devices and the health and safety disclaimer and we can work with UET to develop a policy that will work within the spirit of Fusion "

A total of 75 out of 85 respondents replied “Yes”, 5 replied “No” and 5 respondents were uncertain“.

Level of agreement with other points raised.

Respondents were also asked whether they agreed with the following statements.

Q1: Academics have very different roles some cannot be fulfilled away from campus and some absolutely can t be done on campus working this out on a case by case basis is going to be a lot of work

Q2: Working parents colleagues with caring responsibilities colleagues requiring reasonable adjustments to working practices etc all benefit from remote working with technologies so this risks inclusive employment

Q3: Athena Swan award is supported by UCU and this policy will not help us in our endeavours

Q4: If BU wants to take research more seriously then it s simply a fact rightly or wrongly that established researchers we might want to recruit from elsewhere or new researchers on a REF trajectory are going to be put off by such a policy such staff often live a distance from BU and split the week

Q5: Being off campus and being at home are not necessarily the same a third category is travelling to external meetings networking fieldwork for research conferences etc and is not clearly accounted for

Q7: More working at home is in line with environmental policies and is a necessary aspect of the reduction in car parking space etc This policy gives less flexibility to respond to all the demands and deadlines many of us face

Q8: The policy is at odds with other BU desires to be agile to have more open plan work areas to produce quality research outputs to mark student work in fast turnaround time and to reward outputs

Q9: More unnecessary bureaucracy for HoDs This does not really let HoDs focus on stuff that is of value This could result in constant amendments to initial plans for working at home with no two weeks the same in reality so in a department a HoD could be responding to 30 50 forms a week

Q10: The up to 20 is simply an arbitrary figure that does not reflect the huge variety of roles academics have and how these change from semester to semester so for some they will not hit 20 others regularly need to surpass it in order to be productive **

The responses are shown below. The level of agreement was very high for all the statements, with the slight exception of uncertainty regarding Q3 which refers to Athena Swann.

Comments

Over 7000 words used to comment on the policy by the 85 respondents. In order to summarise the content the words used in the comments were subjected to sentiment analysis using the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon http://saifmohammad.com/WebPages/lexicons.html

The following table shows the number of words that correspond to each sentiment.

## 
##        anger anticipation      disgust         fear          joy 
##           60          150           34           70           62 
##     negative     positive      sadness     surprise        trust 
##          160          356           69           26          245

The following table shows the number of words that correspond to each sentiment.

Words expressing negative feelings

Words expressing positive sentiments.

Comments can ordered according to agreement with the overall statement regarding the UCU position using the dynamic table below.

A full text search box is provided in order to find key words.

Notice that some respondents who did not agree with UCU’s position felt that it did not go far enough.