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Making do with inadequate administrative support

Apr 10

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I suspect nearly all folks doing science in universities think that they are lacking the basic administrative support they need.

I’ve seen enough to know that people who have it relatively good are still thinking that things need a lot of improving. They might be right. After all, we are highly trained professionals who while generally are undercompensated, are earning a professional salary, and yet we end up spending much of our time on administrivial tasks that fall under the job descriptions of office staff and student assistants.

a TPS report from Initech, which is from the movie Office Space. Incidentally, one of the movies I could watch over, and over, and over.

This is a gross misappropriation of institutional resources, to take the time of a professor who was hired to research, teach, run a lab, mentor, etc., and instead, have them spend their time on paperwork. Yes, every job has paperwork. But I know from friends who are professionals outside universities that the professorial paperwork situation is next-level.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. In February, I went on an international research trip for a few weeks. Because I’m very used to all of the paperwork associated with such trips, I’m well familiar with everything I need to do get through the process as painlessly as possible. Nonetheless, it took about two entire days of my time - I’m talking maybe 16 hours or so, to do the paperwork associated with this one trip. I honestly could have finished a manuscript in that period of time, or fleshed out a grant, or developed a bunch of lessons for a new course, or fully trained a new student, or a lot of stuff that I’m supposed to be doing.

You might be wondering, how could it take so many hours to do the paperwork for this travel? Here’s an endnote¹ that spells it out.

Perhaps the worst part I am required to file this through my departmental admin coordinator. This person in my department is an amazing human being, supremely brilliant and competent, infinitely patient, and being able to work with them is a blessing. At better funded universities, the work of this person is literally being done by three or four people. This paperwork of mine is a burden to them, and I feel a responsibilty to make it as light on them as possible. Punishing them for the university’s underinvestment in staff wouldn’t help anybody, so I feel pressure to get this done as efficiently as possible on my end, to reduce the annoyance and work for them.

What’s the real solution to this problem? I think the most impactful stuff that happens is beyond our control, but is under the control of institutional leaders. One of the reasons that there is so much back-and-forth and nitpicking about minor areas of compliance is that there is an overarching fear in the workplace about getting caught doing something wrong. If the priorities are service, efficiency, and effectiveness, then the people processing paperwork in procurement, travel, HR, and so on wouldn’t be so keen on pushing off all of responsiblity for compliance to the faculty who are trying to get the paperwork to go through. For example, if a box need to be checked that wasn’t checked, they could just let me know they checked the box and moved on, rather than sending the form back to me and requiring me to check it myself. (I should also point out, for folks who know me or my institution well, that we have leadership who are pulling out all the stops to fix our long-standing post-award management problems, which will be implemented soon.)

While the big problem requires big leadership fixes, there are things I can do to get by in such an environment. The fact that I’m still deciding to submit proposals for external funding is evidence that I haven’t let this fully grind me down (even as I have colleagues who have stopped running external projects for this reason, and some how left in part because running grants was made so difficult.) What can I do to make it as easy on myself as possible when paperwork comes up? Here are some things that have made it less painful for me.

Before you submit a piece of paperwork that you suspect might end up being an adminstrative boondoggle, contact the person/office that you’re submitting it to in advance and ask them how it should be done. It’s possible that the instructions you you’ve been given previously no longer work. This also create a teensy weensy bit of a relationship with this person who might be inclined to provide you with a modicum of grace.
Escalate wisely. Your time is valuable. But if you complain up the chain of the command at the slightest whiff of bureaucratic inconvenience, then you become a prima donna who doesn’t value the time of others. On the other hand, if you end up getting pushed around doing an unreasonable amount of compliance, that harms not just you but the people who you support. When a situation requires escalation, you’ll need to have awareness about to whom escalation might make a functional difference, and also it should be done in a way that is designed to ease the burden of the person/process that is your obstacle. If someone is expecting something unreasonable of you, then it’s that person who is experiencing unreasonableness to be required to expect this of you. No friendly fire against underappreciated and underpaid staff members. There is nobody to throw under a bus, but you want help in changing the bus’s tires so it can moving again.
Hire someone? I’m not kidding, this might be cheapter than you are imagining. When you’re managing grants that amount up to 7 digits, then having a person who is part time or full time doing this kind of work makes sense. But that’s not most of us. What do you do if you have just a little grant here or there and you’d like a bit of administrative support? Odds are there is already someone on campus who regularly navigates these choppy waters as an experienced pilot, and there’s a chance you might be able to enlist their help. Maybe you could purchase 5% of a person’s salary to have access to 5% of their time? Maybe you could provide an admin support person with some auxiliary hours to work for your project? (In my university, staff can take on 25% extra time beyond their regular job, for example.) I’ve known folks to hire students but I think this often backfires, because you’ll have to spend more time training students than if you did it yourself. Ask around to see if there’s a staff member willing to take on a bit of work for a bit of cash if there’s space for it in your grant.
Know the procedure before you spend the money. Some things are reimbursable, some things are not.
Make avail of a paperwork savant. There are some people on your campus who know how to do this stuff in a way that sails through the system. If you can’t pay them to do it for you, perhaps they can answer your questions once in a while?
Get miles if if you can. It turns out that the path of least resistance for most of my purchases is simply to put it on my own personal credit card. (My university has a long history of not wanting to give purchasing cards to PIs. I’ve run a lot of substantially funded projects but never have been allowed to have a P-card.) I understand why a lot of people don’t want to do this, especially when turnaround times can take forever. My way of making lemonade out of this is to have a credit card that collects frequent flyer miles out of purchases. It would be much nicer to have a functional university that lets me use a p-card, but if I’m compelled to do it on a reimbursement basis, then at least I’m getting a little something out of this. And I can use these miles to cover for travel for students who need to travel for a conference or for research when the funding isn’t there for them.
When paying for students or others, do the reimbursement to yourself and not to them. I think it’s easier to get checks cut to myself then trying to get checks cut to students. If they’re eating out, staying in hotels, flying, etc., you can incur the cost and get reimbursed. Or you can ‘purchase’ the receipts from them by giving them cash or venmo or whatnot. This works for me at least and it prevents people working with me to have to go into debt or file for travel advances. Of course, the drawback is you have to have enough financial privilege to be able to afford to do this. But odds are that as the PI, you probably have more of this privilege than anybody else involved in the transaction, aside from the approval you might need from a dean or a head.
When all else fails, consider what is better for long-term well being: to pursue the chase or to suck up the loss. Let me give you a couple examples where I’ve chosen to pay out of pocket. On a recent trip, after I already made my rental car reservation, I was informed of a rule that I had to rent a car with the university-contracted company when possible. (I’ve had a ton of rental cars over the years, and this was a new one to me). I already had made my reservation with someone else, and it was a company I had status with and could do it express without any fuss at the desk, so I just sucked up the 150 bucks and never claimed the receipt. Another pricier example was when I had just gotten set up with a fancy set of spectrometers for the lab that required a PC to run them. I was in a hurry to start collecting data, and it turned out the process that the university required me to through to buy an approved laptop that met all campus compliance would take forever. Nobody was replying to emails, submitted forms would linger on someone’s desk, and so I just went to Office Max and bought a basic PC laptop out of pocket to run the equipment. Yes, I’m upset that I had to do this, but I would have been more upset waiting the apparent months it would take to buy the laptop through the campus itself. I realize that the amount of money I pay out of pocket to do research is probably on par with, or maybe even exceeds, the uncompensated costs incurred by public K-12 teachers who are just trying to deliver effective classrooms. And when it comes to undersupported lines of work, we’re seeing that being a professor at a regional public university isn’t higher up on any ladder. It is what it is.

Other than getting the heck of out higher ed and into an industry that has adequate levels of support staff (or to a high-endowment institution that doesn’t sweat the small stuff), any other suggestions? I’m all ears.

It’s a moving target. Because we undercompensate people who do this work, it’s a new person processing it every time on the other side. Their primary goal is compliance with an ever-growing list of guidelines, because if they get audited, then they’re the ones who get in trouble. Just because I did this earlier doesn’t mean I’m prepared for it this time.

-When you submit the travel request, they insist that you provide a detailed itinerary including which airports you’re transiting through, flight numbers, and the cost of the airline ticket. This is before they approve the travel. How can you tell them how much the ticket costs before you bought it, when approval takes at least several days and prices will change?

-If you stay in a hotel that charges a different rate on on different days (for example, weekends are more expensive), then you need to submit a separate written statement explaining why the daily rate of the place you’re staying changes.

-When you make purchases, they expect you to provide a calculation of the exchange rate that was made on the precise day that you made the purchase. So that if you’re traveling abroad for a few weeks, that means you need to provide on their paperwork a new exchange rate for every single day. Even if you provide to them a statement saying how much you were charged in US dollars, that’s not enough. They need an exchange rate for every day.

-Doing a transaction where they don’t provide a written or electronic receipt? Then you need to fill out a missing receipt form. Even if it’s just a dollar. Let’s say you have a bunch of these ‘missing receipts’ because food vendors and such aren’t providing them? Then you have to fill out an entire missing receipt form (a full page) for each of these receipts.

Those are just the first four annoying things that occurred to me. The number of additional hoops is absurd.

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