Mark Townley (Head of Faculty Finance) and Susan Tallents (Senior HR Business Partner) have been leading on a faculty response to the recent wellbeing and staff engagement surveys HWB staff completed and they have kindly given us an update on what has been happening.

Thank you to those that attended the wellbeing focus groups which were set up to explore the emerging themes from the wellbeing and Hive survey results. 

Demands and change were the focus of these sessions.  We explored whether there were any tasks that we could stop doing and what tasks could be done in a different way to free up time.  One of the themes that emerged was the complexity of some of our processes and the extra work that this creates, we also discussed the use of emails as a communication channel.  The discussions on change focused on the justification and rationale for change and how this is communicated. We also discussed the importance of having an implementation plan for new processes. 

 We will discuss the emerging themes of the focus groups with Faculty Leadership Team on 24/7/19.  We are also reviewing ways to engage more colleagues with this work.  Our ideas include running a focus groups about a specific process, seeking feedback through existing meetings or over a lunch time webchat.  If anyone would like to get involved in any future activities please contact ! HWB Staff Engagement.

Finally you will have seen in the Vice Chancellor’s recent email that University task and finish groups have been set up to explore cross university priority areas.  We have two senior faculty members leading this work, Toni Schwarz will lead the group focused on Bullying and Harassment and Jon Wheat the group focused on Working Together.