Engaging with Leaders in Higher Education

www.lfhe.ac.uk INTRODUCTION Over the last decade the pressures in higher education in the UK have become greater than ever and this includes growth in student numbers, severe regulatory demands, and, more recently, explicit competition. The corollary of this has been a steady increase in the measures within universities to actively manage finances and quality. It could be anticipated that the above pressures will have had impacts on staff working within HE and, indeed, a recent large survey of the sector has shown that almost half of the respondents found their workloads unmanageable (Kinman and Jones, 2004). Against this background it would seem logical that the emphasis on finance and quality would be matched by similar attention to the allocation of workloads to staff, ie the issue of how best to utilise people's time, the single biggest resource available within universities.