Work task plans

Questions and answers on work task plans.

Central collective agreement

The central collective agreement (Swedish: Villkorsavtal-T) between the Swedish Agency for Government Employers and Saco-S states that the planning of the annual working hours must be done in consultation with the teacher concerned. The agreement states that the consultation should lead to a comprehensive plan of the scope and placement of the teacher's duties, including teaching, supervision, research or artistic development work, skills development and other work such as managing certain activities or collaboration with the surrounding community. The planning should be documented. It also states that before the employer announces a decision on the work task schedule/ plan, the relevant local employee organization must be notified.

Local collective agreements

In the local collective agreement (Teaching and working hours etc. for teachers), there are additional regulations for different teacher positions on how much time of the annual working hours can be devoted to, for example, administrative duties, research and teaching. For example, lecturers should normally have a teaching volume of no more than 70 % of the annual working hours, be given the time for research to about 20 % of the annual working hours and have time for administrative duties to an extent of about 10 % of the annual working hours.

A new regulation added to the local agreement is that work task plans for each teacher must be drawn up before the start of the planning period it refers to (see 2.3. Consultation with the individual teacher and decision on the work task schedule/ plan in the Local collective agreement on teaching and working hours etc. for teachers) .

A tool for planning

Work task plans are a planning tool, both for the individual employee but also for the employer, and act as a kind of protection for both parties. It is also a tool for retrospectively seeing how the semester/ school year's work has progressed and if there is something that needs to be addressed when planning ahead.

A complete work task plan needs to include:

• the employee's name
• position
• annual working hours

And the scheduled time for:

• teaching
• research/skills development
• administrative duties
• appointments (if applicable)

In terms of teaching, the time for each course, as well as the course's elements, should be reported in hours. All of this information is needed to be able to get an overall picture of the workload. In addition, some departments have drawn up the plans in a way that makes it possible to ensure that an individual teacher's workload is distributed over the semester, which is of course very good.

The Saco-S Association's work on the work task plans

A pilot project done by Saco-S at Uppsala University in 2018 showed major shortcomings at large parts of the University. In the autumn of 2019, work started to get work task plans in place at all departments. Some departments already have good a system and can provide us good answers to the questions we may have on individual employees' plans. Other departments have recently begun their work on establishing work task plans for their teachers. It will certainly be an enormous and tedious task in some places, but the aim is for us to be able to show how much we actually work.

The work task plans are a prerequisite for us to show that we have done what can be expected of us as teachers. The work task plans are also needed if we want to show the employer that we have taken on more than our annual working hours allow.