Content of this page:

• Provisions of the central collective agreements Conditional agreement/Conditional agreement-T
• An annual cycle with up-to-date staff plans and performance appraisals
• Performance appraisals and follow-up
• Staff plans for teachers with annual working hours give them plenty of room for personal planning.
• Pre- and post-teaching work 
• Saved holidays affect staff planning
• Staff plans must be available at the faculty
• Holidays for teachers
• Compensation for evening and weekend teaching

Provisions in the central collective agreements General agreement/general agreement-T (Villkorsavtal/Villkorsavtal-T)

In the central collective agreements Villkorsavtal/Villkorsavtal-T, there are special provisions for certain employees at universities and colleges, stating that the distribution of annual working hours shall be determined in local agreements.

The employees covered by the agreement are the positions specified as teachers in the university's current employment regulations:

• professor 
• visiting professor 
• adjunct professor 
• senior lecturer 
• adjunct senior lecturer 
• associate senior lecturer 
• postdoctoral researcher 
• assistant professor
• adjunct university lecturer.

The working hours in the agreement also apply to the following positions (with the limitations specified in the agreement, the Higher Education Ordinance or in other legislation):

• teaching assistant
• clinical assistant 
• doctoral student.

The working time agreement for teachers regulates the distribution of work tasks, organisation of holidays, additional and overtime work, staff plans, etc. 

An annual cycle with up-to-date staff plans and appraisals 

In your role as an employer, you need to develop an annual cycle that follows the calendar year. The annual cycle includes drawing up staff plans and competence development plans and holding performance reviews with your teachers every year.

As a manager, you lead and distribute the work and are responsible for complying with the provisions of the working time agreement.

Performance appraisal and follow-up

The appraisal is a good basis for you as a manager to develop staff plans for your employees and is mandatory. The appraisal gives you an opportunity to have a dialogue about the employee's tasks (duties and how the annual working time is distributed) and the employee's workload, as well as the need for skills development.

It is good if you as a manager have some kind of follow-up at the end of the spring term, to get an up-to-date picture of the teacher's work situation. The follow-up also gives you the opportunity to check whether the personnel plan has worked and, if necessary, to adjust the personnel plan for the autumn term.

Remember that the plan should be collected according to the faculty's procedures, so that it is available if the employee organisations ask to see it.

Staff plans for teachers with annual working hours give them plenty of room for personal planning 

Annual working time gives individual teachers a great deal of freedom to carry out their work. With this freedom comes a responsibility to engage in dialogue with their manager if the staff plan needs to be revised.

It is also important to remind the teacher that they have a responsibility to inform their manager if tasks other than those planned are added or if a planned task disappears. This is necessary to ensure together that the work fits within the annual working hours.

It is part of your work environment responsibility as a manager with the role of employer to ensure that your employees have a reasonable workload. 

Pre- and post-teaching work 

A starting point when allocating teaching tasks is that one teaching hour (45 minutes), including preparation and follow-up work, should be converted to 2-7 clock hours.

For lectures or lessons, a factor of 4 is normally used, but at least a factor of 3. When examinations are involved, the minimum factor is 4. For the artistic field, another conversion factor may be used.

When it comes to determining which factor to use, an estimate of the actual need for preparatory and follow-up work needs to be made for the course or teaching task in question. The factor may vary for different courses and teaching tasks or for different teachers.

Circumstances that may affect the assessment may include the number of times the course has been taught by the teacher, the need to change and develop the content of the course, the need for study time, etc.

Saved holidays affect staff planning 

If a teacher wants to save holidays for a later year, the annual working time must be adjusted for the current year. A holiday day is 8 hours. This means, for example, that a teacher who wants to save five days of holiday from year 1 and use them in year 2 will have different annual working hours in year 1 and year 2: In year 1, 5x8 hours are saved = 40 hours, which must then be added to the annual working hours for year 1 in the staff plan. If the teacher has 1700 hours under contract, 1740 hours should be planned in year 1.

If the teacher takes his/her 5 saved holiday days in year 2, the annual working time should be reduced by 40 hours in the staff plan. If they have 1700 hours under contract, 1660 hours should be planned in year 2.

A teacher who wishes to save holidays must always notify their manager of their wish by 30 April of the same year. The staffing plan will be adjusted accordingly.

Staff plans must be available at the faculty

Before each new calendar year, new staff plans must be drawn up. If you have multi-year plans, the year's planning must be reviewed before the new year. Staff plans must be drawn up in good time before the start of the calendar year. Each faculty decides whether the staff plans should be collected at faculty level or at each department.

Once the plans have been finalised, a designated contact person at the faculty sends an email to the three trade unions informing them that the plans have been finalised and can be requested if necessary. The message should clearly state who the unions should contact to get access to the staff plans.

The plans become effective 10 working days after the notification is sent to the unions. If a teacher has factual and reasonable concerns about his/her staffing plan and feels that the employer has not taken these concerns into account, he/she should contact his/her union.

The Forms and Templates page provides a template for a staff plan. It is important that each teacher has their own personal plan and that they have access to it.

Go to the HR forms and templates page

Holidays for teachers

Holidays for teachers are also regulated by the working time agreement for teachers.

Read more about holidays for teachers

Compensation for evening and weekend teaching 

When a teacher is scheduled to teach in the evening or at the weekend, a special salary supplement of SEK 75 per clock hour is paid. Compensation is paid per established hour of lecture, teaching or exercise completed on Saturdays or Sundays or on another day at least half of which falls after 18:00. This is registered in Primula.

For more information, see the page on compensation for inconvenient working hours.