People and Culture

Following the presentation of the results to the Town Hall meeting, I have been working hard at cascading the findings to smaller local groups and identifying priorities for action.

The questions raised at the Town Hall have been themed into several topics, including:

• Sharing results, interpreting data and how we will measure outcomes.
• People development, and leadership & management.
• Working practices,
• PDR’s,
• Inclusivity and bullying, and
• Visiting staff and quality of services.

These questions are not always easy to answer and there are not always quick solutions, but we felt it was important to listen and explain how the University is responding. Responses can be found here.

The survey results indicates that there are several behaviours that we would like to see more of. You have said that you would like to see more activity that encourages active participation of staff, individual growth and development opportunities, genuine listening and involving people in decisions. You have told us that you would like to see how we demonstrate care and support to our people, how we can become more creative, and take considered risks that could result in improving our services.

You have told us that you would like to see less blame when things do not go according to plan, and you have said that at times mistakes are perceived to be punished or negative behaviours are perceived to be rewarded. You have also said that many of us are working long hours. We are very concerned about this.

Addressing your concerns

We have considered which priorities to be addressed university wide. These are:

Looking further at developing or streamlining our systems and processes, this includes workflow and developing the performance review objective setting.

We will be prioritising and investing in people development, including investing in academic development this year, leadership training, developing mandatory provisions, improving our delivery – our customer service, equality, diversity and inclusion education and developing how we demonstrate that we are living our Institutional values.

We have also committed to looking at how we can develop our communication channels further.  We want to ensure that we are hearing the right messages and we would like our people to be engaged and be part of our decision-making process.

I have been talking to my team about what we can do as a team to support the people and culture strategy.  I want us to be seen much more than a team that processes recruitment or advises on policy interpretation.  I will be working on creating an environment that develops an ethos of teamwork and quality in our day-to-day operations.  We want to create an atmosphere that fosters positive challenges, fun, where appropriate, and positive wellbeing in everything we do.

I hope that you will be able to see us developing best practices and adopting a proactive, caring attitude, respecting colleagues’ values that may be different to our own and accepting responsibility for promoting ethical conduct in our personal and professional practices. To reflect this change in style HR will re-brand as The People & Culture Team.

For these changes to happen and for us to make a positive move towards the culture we have said that we would like our University to operate in we all have a part to play. We have established a People & Culture Delivery Board to oversee our progress and action planning.  I will be inviting representatives from across Faculty and departments to join me on this Board shortly. I look forward to working with you over the coming months.