Does an associate professor work in the laboratory on a daily basis? I got a position as an associate professor at new university. I observe my colleagues that they do not work in the lab normally which is quite strange for me. In my previous job as assistant professor I needed to work hard myself in the lab to produce the results, then describe them and publish. Here I am generally ''forced'' to sit in front of computer but without going to the lab and work physically I do not produce any results and no publications... How it looks at your university? Life science field.
In my experience in (neuro)biology this is largely a function of the size of the lab, particularly the number of students.
The tasks of writing papers and enough grant applications to support the lab (along with all the other tasks professors do: on administrative committees, reviewing grants and papers written by others, teaching responsibilities) take up a lot of a professor's research time, at any level.
The larger the lab, the more time moves from &quot;bench time&quot; to &quot;supervising time&quot;. This is the delegation of responsibilities problem experienced by managers of all types, and also applies to professors.
It is more common for early-career professors to spend more time on the bench because they will have few students/postdocs and those students will be new students as well. As a lab matures, not only are more of the bench tasks done by students, but there are more senior students and postdocs that are familiar with work in the lab and can begin to mentor others on their bench skills.
I've also seen a lot of senior professors, who may be wary of taking on students as they approach retirement and have less career pressure, migrate back to their labs.
If your lab isn't productive without you in it, then you need to get back to the lab, regardless of how your colleagues' time is allocated. Probably more importantly, if you don't have students and postdocs in your lab that you are supervising, you're missing out on a big chunk of your job which is to train the next generation of scientists.