43 pages

The new draft Code of Conduct  was shared with employees on 26 November for consultation. I was pleased that staff members are consulted on this important matter. However, when I opened the document I saw it was 43 pages long. This shocked me. I’m already impressed when people read my column from start to finish. My next thought was that the questionnaire may have been designed in a way that is does not require you to read the whole thing. But unfortunately this was not the case. You are asked to indicate the degree of agreement with certain statements and if you recognise the examples given. In short, please read all 43 pages as we consider your opinion very important!

The engineer or consultant in me wants to clarify what this means. While the PDF format makes it hard to do a word count, I estimate it being 10,000 words (about 250 words per page on roughly 40 written pages). The average adult reads about 200 to 250 words per minute (WPM). This rate could be higher for people with a university education (while that may be less for those in the hard sciences) and could be less for tough policy documents. But let’s just assume 250 WPM. This means that carefully reading the Code will take about 40 minutes, and scanning it about 20 minutes. Then you still need to fill in the questionnaire, which will take about 10 minutes. My conservative estimate is that each person will need half an hour to read the document and reply to the questionnaire. About 8,000 people work at TU Delft. Say you want a response rate of 30% this will be 2,400 colleagues who spend half an hour on it. This amounts to 30 weeks of the effective working time of 1 FTE. And we’re not even looking at the 28,000 students. Thinking about the budget cuts, the costs in euros would also be of interest. But I’ll leave that aside for now as we have undoubtedly incurred enough expenses through outsourcing this process.

Total costs: 30 weeks of effective working time

Given the high workloads, this is an undesirable request. So, either you expect people not to participate which gives me  the feeling that the consultation is for show– or you expect that they do so in the evening while relaxing on the sofa. But it is not really a relaxing read.

And another point. The Code says: ‘We (TU Delft employees, Eds.) avoid assumptions about what is “normal”.’ It may be normal for consultants and policy officers like myself to quickly absorb texts of 43 pages, but for the average engineer – of which we have plenty at TU Delft – this is definitely not the case. The Code is thus making a potentially wrong assumption about what is normal and contradicts itself.

The last question in the questionnaire is about making suggestions to help the Code of Conduct take root in the organization. My answer: shorten it!