When making decisions about whether employees’ jobs could be done remotely or under a hybrid arrangement, college and university officials may not realize that most students don’t expect or feel they need in-person staff. Although many campus departments managed to function fully remotely during the unprecedented medical emergency in spring 2020, “now we’re mainly sort of in this post-COVID period,” Stephens says. An estimated 60 to 70 percent of his unit’s employees are hybrid or fully remote now; “pre-COVID, that was zero. We didn’t even think about it.”
