ID249 Protected Lunch Hour - No Teaching or Meetings

The Idea

Keele University should implement a protected ‘lunch hour’ for all staff and students. During this, there should be no teaching scheduled, no academic staff office hours, and internal university meetings should be banned. From time to time it may be necessary for staff to attend meetings with external organisations within the protected hour, but no meetings should be scheduled which only involve Keele staff in this time. This would encourage all staff to have a full lunch break and prevent people working through their breaks due to having meetings at awkward times around lunch or only having short gaps between meetings or teaching. This would improve staff wellbeing and productivity by ensuring staff can take their lunch break and take time away from their desk. It would also show that the university is serious about creating a culture where working through your lunch is not the expectation or norm and is, in fact, strongly discouraged. There may be legitimate reasons for wanting to work through some or part of a lunch break on limited occasions, for example if a staff member needed to leave half an hour early and so only took a half hour lunch break. Some flexibility like this must still exist but the spirit of the proposal is that anything which allowed staff to work through a lunch break must be an exception and not part of business as usual. 

To encourage people to get away from their desk, any staff wellbeing or sports centre activities which currently run around a more nebulous concept of a lunch hour could be scheduled within this period. 

There should probably be some staff consultation around what would be the best time for this, as ‘lunch time’ could reasonably be anywhere between 12pm and 2pm depending on people’s preferences. There will have to be some compromise as it seems unlikely the university could protect more than 1 hour for this.

Why This Idea Should Be Considered

This would signal that the university is serious about staff wellbeing and protecting break times. It would also create a positive culture where working through your lunch is not an expectation. Implementing something like this might also be supported by the campus Trade Unions and could help improve relations there. 

It would also ensure students had some protected breaks throughout the day which might be important if this idea was considered alongside the ideas which have been submitted on condensing teaching into blocks across fewer days.

How We Would Implement This Idea

Promote the protected lunch hour to all staff and students. Update timetabling procedures to ensure no teaching is scheduled in this slot. Ensure there is some mechanism in place for monitoring internal meetings and whether they are still being scheduled in the designated lunch hour – can calendars have an hour blocked to prevent things being booked with internal attendees? Or could Directors or Heads of School/Service responsible for monitoring this within their areas and ensuring staff comply? 

What Success Would Look Like

No internal university meetings take place in the designated lunch hour (this should be monitored somehow but not sure how - can IDS pull stats from calendars to see if this slot is free or used each day?) 

No teaching or organised work activities take place in the designated lunch hour. 

All staff are empowered to take their full lunch break every day. Staff wellbeing increases and productivity improves.