By Adam Wilkinson
It’s a usual afternoon in the office, nothing spectacular. Linda Mason appears at the end of our bank of desks and asks if any of us have volunteered yet to be a staff rep for the LICC? Silence endures, time to make a coffee? Then I remembered listening to Sohil from Finance speaking enthusiastically at a previous Finance & Planning team meeting about his time as a staff rep, and I thought why not! So I ‘volunteered’, alongside Kathryn Roughton and Iain Burton. The 3 amigos from planning.
Finance was a little more competitive, with 4 volunteers a ballot was required to select 3. Lorna Pettifer, Liz Windle and Elouise Hearnshaw finalised the line-up and we became the 6 Finance and Planning LICC staff reps.
We all attended an LICC staff rep training session facilitated by Lorna in April, this gave us all a great insight to what’s expected of us, tips on how we can fulfil the role and gave us the opportunity to get to know each other. I remember shields, Thailand and Take That!
A week later we met up to think about what exactly we were going to do!
First we decided to schedule staff forums as a way of enabling staff to voice their views on the directorate. We have planned these to occur a few weeks before the LICC so anything raised at them should still be current when they are discussed at the LICC. We decided to not call them coffee mornings and instead moved to using ‘Forum’. The format would be more interactive than the previous coffee mornings using white boards to capture thoughts so people can drop in at any time during the 2hrs and see what’s been discussed. We were hoping the white boards would also act as a bit of a refresher & point of continuity for staff who joined the Forum a bit later on in the morning.
We decided to have a different deputy chair for each LICC since there are 6 of us and all of us were eager to experience the role. The deputy chair is the contact person for the LICC and will coordinate capturing the points raised at the staff forum, ensuring the LICC have sight and time to comment and lead discussions at the LICC on behalf of the other staff reps. Kathryn volunteered to take on this role for the first one.
Our first staff Forum was held on 23rd May 2018….armed with Jaffa Cakes, mini milky ways, cordial and fizzy pop.
The main points of discussion centred around PSOM and the changes happening at the moment – as a small part of the directorate (a part of Planning) is in scope at the moment as well as many of the teams and individuals that we interact with on a daily basis. Much of the discussion was also around concerns for when the rest of the directorate are looked at from September. The other subjects that we chatted around centred on building issues (heating etc.) and security around the building in the light of the many incidents of anti-social behaviour nearby (dodgy furniture shop and stab alley).
Attached are a few pictures of the comments captured on whiteboards from the F&P Forum.
Click to view larger
Click to view larger
A couple of weeks later, it was time for our first LICC meeting, we came equipped with all of the staff questions and feedback from the Forum and from chats we have had in & around the office. For the majority of the meeting we chatted through the content of this and spoke about how to address concerns (e.g. better comms for PSOM – or as much as we could control!) Deborah gave a quick update on the University’s finances and there was also an update from Emma, Simon and Tom Russell (on Linda’s behalf) on each of their areas.
The issues about security seemed to have some quite positive outcomes as the Magnalock is now fixed, there are some plans for Esperanto Place to be redeveloped and an engineer is coming to have a look at the air con system.
There are a few things that we feel could have gone better with the Forum, so we are looking to make improvements for the next round of meetings, such as providing rough timescales on what we will be discussing and when in the Forum. However, overall, it has been a very positive first experience as an LICC staff rep and I am looking forward to catching up with you all around the office and in the next staff Forum (22nd August).
If you have a pressing concern that can’t wait until the next Forum, or you are unable to attend, don’t forget you can speak to any of your staff reps either face to face, email/telephone them directly or contact us via the inbox ! Finance and Planning LICC.
