Defining academic productivity

At the end of Saturday’s post, I said that I would discuss productivity in a future post. I decided to write a short post about academic productivity today.

I found a useful definition of productivity at the following website, at least in terms of how it can be measured: http://www.investorwords.com/3876/productivity.html

‘The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital). There are many different ways of measuring productivity. For example, in a factory productivity might be measured based on the number of hours it takes to produce a good, while in the service sector productivity might be measured based on the revenue generated by an employee divided by his/her salary.’

Another definition comes from the Merriam Webster online dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/productive:

‘yielding results, benefits, or profits’.

There are difficulties in applying the first definition in its entirety to an academic researcher, because it is very difficult to directly measure a researcher’s economic productivity. The number of publications and grant funding (money given to the research organization where the academic works) are the standard ways of measuring an researcher’s productivity. A good number of publications often leads to more grant funding. And more grant funding in turn draws in more students. But all of this depends on the hierarchical level of the academic. It stands to reason that a staff scientist without a research group (students) cannot be as ‘productive’ as a professor with a large group of students around him or her. Can they even be compared? Yet they often are, especially when it comes to the numbers of publications produced. This is unfair, because in principle a large research group can produce many more publications than one scientist alone. Whether that is in fact true is another discussion. In any case, not all researchers get grants, which doesn’t mean that they are necessarily bad researchers. It simply means that they didn’t get funded this time around. But is that acceptable to the business administrators who control the research institutes and who insist on measuring productivity on an annual basis?

Most other research activities--e.g. advising, teaching, designing experiments, having meetings with students, and writing--don’t generate revenue. If a researcher/advisor spends several hours per week helping one graduate student who is clueless about how to proceed with his or her research article and data interpretation, how do we measure productivity in this situation? The advisor has invested time, energy and intellectual focus in these activities--meeting, advising, and discussing. What is the tangible product? Over time, the product may be (emphasis on the may) an article or two from a student. Or perhaps not, as this can depend on the whim of the involved student as to whether he or she will write those articles. There is no guarantee of a publishable article for all the hard work invested in the student. If graduate students aren’t productive and won't write articles, it can reflect poorly on the advisor because there will be no papers to publish unless the adviser ends up writing them himself. A lack of articles can lead to not getting grants. Published papers are proof that an academic is productive; proof that an academic has done his or her job, which is to do science and to train graduate students how to do science, as well as to write/help to write the articles resulting from research activity. But how many published articles are enough, and how many are too few? Is it quantity or quality that counts?

And what should be done about the academic researchers whose graduate students leave research for the greener pastures of the business world without finishing their PhD degrees? Who don’t stick around despite the huge investment of the researchers’ time and money for lab consumables, conferences and travel? Is this the fault of these researchers? Was it a waste of time and money to train them? The point is that these graduate students got valuable research training before leaving academia. It has to be accepted that whatever they do with that training afterwards is their business. If they leave the research world, well, then they leave it. No one can stop them from doing so. So here’s the rub. Should academic researchers’ productivity be measured by how many of the trained students go on to become academics themselves? If that is the case, it will take years before productivity can be assessed correctly.

The second definition talks about yielding results, benefits or profits. Research activities such as doing lab work, generating data, reading, advising, teaching and writing articles do yield results, but not necessarily profits, unless ideas are patentable, leading to collaborations with big business, e.g. pharmaceutical firms that can produce a profitable drug to treat a specific illness. But getting a patent approved can take many years. So it’s difficult for me to understand the emphasis on increasing academic productivity. I'm not sure what this really means. Again I ask, who will define this adequately, and will it be fair? It strikes me as rather naïve on the part of business administrators to not even make an attempt to understand the complexities of the academic research world, and yet this is the current situation—administrators who have no real idea of what academics do, yet who insist that academics increase their productivity so that the organizations for which they work can get their 'money’s worth' out of them. 

Changing jobs

So many people I know both here and in the USA are switching jobs or would like to. It’s not easy these days to get a new job in either country; there are usually hundreds of applicants for one position and the interview rate is abysmally low. Perhaps five people get called in to an interview out of fifty applicants; ten percent in other words. It may sound like a high percentage, but if you’re not one of the lucky five people, it doesn’t matter. I am so happy for the few people I know who have just found out that they will be starting new jobs and will be leaving my workplace. They deserve their new positions after years spent working hard and getting nowhere fast. Because my workplace does not really reward hard work and professional competence; it rewards other things—political savvy and a broad belief in the power of administrators and a balanced budget (a pipe dream). So again, if you’re not one of the lucky few who ‘makes’ it based on these characteristics, you don’t make it. I would need to write a book to explain why this is so; suffice it to say that if you are a doctor or a nurse or an administrator you are worth something to the hospital. If you are a scientific researcher, you are worth less these days simply because budgets have to be balanced and there is no direct ‘product’ from your work that can be measured in the same way as the hospital can measure the number of patients admitted, treated and released. The hospital wants numbers; scientists know that research takes time and that the results of research will be published eventually, but they have no control over how fast that process occurs. It can sometimes take two years to publish an article. This is not good for the bottom line of an accounting sheet. Why does it take so long? Because you can get an article rejected the first time around, also the second time around, and then perhaps it will be published on the third try. It can thus take up to one year to get an article accepted by a journal and another six months to a year before it is actually in print. Effective? No. Frustrating? Yes. Because the administrators want evidence of ‘production’ and it doesn’t go fast enough for them. We are not considered productive in the same way as a doctor or nurse would be. We are therefore expendable, and if it wasn’t for the fact that scientists working in the public sector are organized in this country, we would be the first to go, of that I have no doubt.

I know there is no such thing as the perfect job. But I know too that there are better workplaces than the one I work in; workplaces that are focused on their employees’ wellbeing, that want them to thrive and to succeed. Why is this important? Because these workplaces know that a happy motivated employee will do a good job for his or her workplace. It’s only to do the math. None of this is very complicated to figure out, and I’m surprised that more workplaces haven’t figured it out. I wish my workplace would figure it out. But I know they won’t and it’s time to just stop talking about it. I’m done, as one of my friends in New York often says. And she means it. I mean it too.

I know people in the USA who have been without a job for several years now. They have applied for food stamps in order to buy food and they ask family and friends for financial help. I know it’s not easy there to find a job or to keep it. I don’t know though if this is just the corporate world, or if this is true for the public sector as well. I don’t know how it is these days generally in the USA anymore where workplaces are concerned; I’ve been away from the country too long. I just know how it is here in Norway. A recent article stated that over fifty-five percent of workers want to retire when they are sixty-two years old. I am one of them. The article focused on the fact that most of these people are in for a shock when they find out how little their monthly pensions will actually be, and that they will find it difficult to live. I am taking steps to prepare myself for this eventuality. One of them is to sock away as much money each month as possible to make early retirement possible. Other possibilities include acknowledging that one may end up working part-time—two or three days a week. So many people tell me that I will be bored or that I will miss full-time work if I retire early. I already know that I won’t. I am looking forward to changing my life (and would love to change it now), to having time to do volunteer work, to read, to do consulting work, to write, and so many other things. I won’t be bored. Retirement could not be more boring than being stuck in a job where one is invisible, unused and unappreciated. Apparently fifty-five percent of all workers agree on one thing—by sixty-two they will have had enough of their workplaces. The problem of course is what they’re (we’re) all going to do with our newfound free time. As I said, I am making plans already. If plan A doesn’t work there will be plan B, and so forth. I am planning for retirement the way I never planned my career or my retirement investments when I was younger. But it’s never too late to start. And who knows, maybe I will be one of the lucky ones that ends my work life in a job that is fulfilling and that makes me happy--the way I felt ten to fifteen years ago about my job. Nothing beats that feeling of loving your work. But time changes things and the ways things are done, and you cannot hang onto the past or dwell there. It’s just to accept how the present is and plan from there.

Feeling useful

It’s been a while since I’ve done as much physical work as I did today and during the past two weeks. Our dining room renovations are finished for the most part (there are still some small jobs to do), so much of the physical work today involved hours of cleaning and vacuuming—floors, walls, furniture, books—anywhere where the fine white sand and dust from all the sanding and construction work had settled. As far as I can see, it seems to have settled everywhere! But today was amazingly effective, as was this past week. I have to emphasize that the efficiency is at home, not at work. That’s because I can plan the work at home as I like, no one is standing over me assessing my productivity and efficiency except me. I’m my own slave driver. I don’t need others to do that job. But the wonderful efficiency I experience at home is in stark contrast to the inefficiency I experience at present on a daily basis at work. How is it possible, is what I’m always asking myself? I’m still waiting for my budget problems to be corrected (going on two years now); I informed my superiors that my budgets were incorrect and they sent the message further and the mistake is still not corrected. I am having problems with one email account and don’t know who to talk to about having it fixed. I need to order supplies but the person who normally does that is on sick leave and has been for a while. The other day I went to make a telephone call out of Norway (work-related) and was interrupted by the operator who promptly told me that I needed permission from the accounting department and my superiors to make international calls. This was new to me and since I’m not sure who to talk to, it’s easier not to make any calls. The hospital is apparently in dire straits these days—no money---so they’re adopting desperate measures to reduce spending. All hiring has been stopped. It will be interesting though to see if the hospital will continue to hire administrators. It seems we cannot have too many of them and we cannot live without them. Here’s a joke (of my own creation)—how many administrators does it take to order, purchase and screw in a light bulb? At least six if not more—one has to look at the work order, another has to approve it, another has to order the bulb, another has to send the invoice to the accounting department, another has to pay the bill, and another has to file the paid invoice. And of course I forgot—the delivery department also has to get involved in order to deliver the bulb, and then someone has to install it.

I really enjoyed working hard and efficiently today. I felt useful—to my home, to myself, to my marriage, to my life and to my future. That is what I thrive on—feeling useful, feeling that the work I do is useful. Seeing the results, seeing the clean and organized home, seeing the finished renovations, the painted walls, the sanded and lacquered floors. 

I could start a consulting business to organize people’s homes. I think I would be good at it. I like the work—sorting through papers and files, categorizing things, seeing the neat results (literally). Hours pass in this way and it’s pleasant, at least to me. I know that a lot of people hate to clean and organize. But we grew up with the Catholic philosophy—“cleanliness is next to godliness”—it was talked about in school. Makes sense to me. It doesn’t mean that I have obsessive-compulsive disorder or that I have to clean on a daily basis. It’s enough to get the major stuff done and out of the way, and that can be a couple of times a year at most if it involves sorting and organizing. Getting things accomplished in this way clears the mental path for other projects on the waiting list. I hate procrastination above most things, and I knew too many procrastinators in my earlier years. It’s just to ignore them and keep on. I hope my work life goes back to being efficient. It was so efficient and streamlined for many years; then came the mergers and the efficiency and productivity got shot to hell. I hope the tide turns and we go back to a daily work life that makes sense and that makes me feel useful again.