You said, we did

• A specific staff intranet would improve communications. 
  

  • We developed and launched dedicated websites for staff and students in September 2011, to provide an improved and accessible source of information and reduce email traffic. Forthcoming events and daily announcements are posted up as appropriate on both websites.

• You did not know where to find information about important decisions.
  • We made summaries of key meetings such as Academic Board available on the staff website – these are also flagged up in the weekly bulletin.
  • We are publishing profiles of individual staff and teams on our staff website and in our staff magazine to promote awareness of what people do around our University and who to go to for specific services, particularly where restructuring has occurred and new teams have been formed. For example, we profiled the members of our Corporate Management Team (CMT); and the renamed Access & Widening Participation team.
• More could be done to help staff prepare for and cope with change.
  • We have incorporated training on managing change and effective communication into the Managers’ Toolkit and offered opportunities for coaching to staff undergoing change or restructuring, to enable them to respond positively.
  • We are encouraging staff throughout our University to get involved with the staff magazine LS126. This magazine is for, about and by staff! We have included articles on change management, communication and wellbeing in response to issues identified for improvement in the staff surveys.
• You wanted more streamlined communication to avoid duplication and confusion.
  • We held a Support Staff Development Day on effective communication in January 2012; feedback from this will feed into our University’s internal communications strategy, which is currently in development. We also posted a video of the keynote speech on the staff website for those who were unable to attend. Feedback from participants was very positive.
  • We are supporting Faculties and services areas in the publication of regular e-bulletins and printed newsletters for internal communication, and developing more effective and user-friendly templates for e-bulletins.
  • To help staff improve communication with students during student survey season (and thus increase completion rates), we have provided resources for staff and weekly updates on completion rates for each Faculty on our internal website.
• You wanted a weekly summary email with links to full information.
  • The weekly email Bulletin provides a concise update on forthcoming events around the University, with links to further information.

Libraries and Learning Innovation presents a challenge in terms of the balance between providing a frontline service that’s open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and including all our staff in communication. For instance, we can never have an all-staff awayday because we never close! A large proportion of our staff are part-time – some working with us for only six hours a week – and they told us it’s difficult to catch up with information as they tend not to hear it by word of mouth. So we have to find creative ways of including people in our communications.

We introduced a weekly e-bulletin as our central reference point for information: if there is any important news, it’ll be there. We encourage all staff to contribute to it, and encourage team leaders to use it in team meetings as a framework for discussion, so that we can use it to prompt staff feedback and two-way communication too. We have found that the bulletin has reduced the over-use of email, which a lot of our part-time staff prefer. We have also improved the targeting and signposting of emails so that it’s clear what they are for, who they are for and what the recipients are supposed to do with them.

For more strategic communications we have an information cascade system. Updates from our University’s Corporate Management Team are provided at our weekly Leadership Team meetings and then disseminated onward to team meetings; people are also asked to report back in their team meetings on any other groups at which they represent our service, so that information can be widely shared.

Once a month our Director Jo Norry holds an open door meeting at each campus, at which she talks about developments in our University, and their possible impact on our service (for example, flexible delivery). Any member of LLI staff can attend these. Jo also invites all new starters for coffee so that she can meet them personally and talk about the service and so they can meet each other.

We have staff suggestion boxes at each campus. We consider all suggestions (which can be anonymous) at our monthly Management Team meetings, and usually the manager of the service area is tasked to give feedback to the sender on what action has been taken (or why it hasn’t). Summaries of suggestions received are also included in the Management Team minutes, which are available to everyone, and we award a small prize at the end of the year to someone who’s sent a suggestion, chosen at random.

Similarly, we try to involve all our colleagues in our planning process. We gather everyone’s ideas around the key themes for the year. This year we ran several planning sessions so that part-time staff could contribute, including some held via Elluminate e-conferencing, and used paper tablecloths and an online noticeboard to collect ideas.”

• You did not feel that communication between senior management and staff is effective.

Case study: Lorraine Foster, Operations & Training Manager

“We have had to be imaginative in how we communicate because of our diverse workforce, and because we are trying to deliver a service and ensure a consistent message is being conveyed. We have organised a number of meetings and one-to-ones to support staff, to ensure they are aware of what’s happening in CARES and also around the wider University.

To support this we hold monthly Leadership Team meetings which include the CARES Managers, and also representatives who support our area from Finance and Human Resources. These meetings are to discuss planning, finance, human resources issues, updates from managers and health and safety. We also have weekly operational meetings for different areas of our service, at which, for example, we may discuss plans for equipment and updates on operational issues.

To ensure that staff are aware of what is happening across CARES and the whole of the University we also hold bi-monthly team meetings within Campus Services, Food Services and Security which are arranged around working patterns. These meetings discuss items such as the Vice Chancellor’s newsletter, operational issues, training and feedback from staff. We also use part of the meeting for ‘bite-sized’ training sessions tailored for our staff in areas from Equality and Diversity, Wellbeing, and Dignity and Respect to COSHH and HACCP (Food Hygiene). In other areas of CARES, for example, Accommodation, Conferencing and the Helpdesk area have operational meetings to support their areas and provide feedback from the leadership and operational meetings.

Most of our Campus Services teams do not have PC access and don’t use the internet, so we use the bi-monthly meetings to update everyone on matters such as stress management, wellbeing and staff benefits, and we invite staff from other areas of the University to make presentations. We also make arrangements for staff training to be co-ordinated through their managers/supervisors and the Operations and Training Manager co-ordinates the training sessions.

We provide feedback from our customers which is disseminated back to staff through the bi-monthly meetings and the quarterly one-to-one meetings staff have with their supervisor. We encourage staff to come up with their own ideas for improving our service: for example one of our Food Services team at City Campus came up with some fantastic ideas about providing healthy food options.”

• You did not think communication between senior management and staff is effective.
  You did not think that on the whole communication in our University is effective.
  • As part of the undergraduate curriculum refocus, briefing and discussion meetings were set up for all staff in the Faculty including both academic and support staff. These open meetings provided opportunities to meet with senior staff including the DVC Student Experience, the Dean, Associate Deans and Heads of School to discuss issues related to the project.
  • The Faculty Portfolio Development Working Group consists of representatives from each School, the Faculty Quality team, student administration marketing, the Careers Service, the Academic Librarians, Student Academic Representatives (STARs) and a representative from the Centre for Learning and Teaching. The working group keeps an oversight of the refocus of the undergraduate curriculum and planning for the Faculty’s portfolio of academic provision. The meetings include space for discussion of issues raised in Schools and courses which can be taken up by the Associate Dean. Members of the group feedback on actions, agreements and information to their School and work team.
  • We publish regular Faculty newsletters for staff, students and external partners.

• The amount of information I receive makes it difficult to get on with my job.
  • We introduced a weekly opportunity for colleagues to meet with the Dean for coffee for an hour. An email is sent out inviting staff to request to attend (up to five people can attend each month).
  • The Dean sends out an update of news in brief via e-mail and the frequency of this has been informed by feedback from colleagues. She has asked staff to vote as to whether or not they find this update useful.
  • Our Faculty e-news is published monthly and a printable version is planned soon.
  • We held a series of Away Days In October, November and in December 2011.
  • Every School and team planned to have both team and individual staff development plans in place by March 2012 and we are investing in a wide range of staff development to support professional and skills development. Our new faculty staff development policy provides information on our priorities.
  • Information from CMT and key papers are available on our Faculty H drive.

• You did not feel that recent changes have been well communicated.
  You did not feel that generally change within the Faculty is managed well.
  You wanted to be kept abreast of developments and good news stories, without being overwhelmed by information.
  You wanted clear channels of communication with the senior team and the chance to provide them with regular feedback.

Case study: Marie-Odile Leconte, Associate Dean, Carnegie Faculty

“Two areas we have been concentrating on are change management and making communications more effective.

We needed to provide clarity about the Faculty restructuring into Schools, to engage staff in the process and to give them the assurance that they had some say in it. We consulted all staff concerned about the restructure in a series of meetings from April to June, culminating in a paper presenting the consultation outcomes, which helped to smooth the path for the new structure. We produced clear role descriptions for all Principal Lecturers and asked them to send expressions of interest in roles in each of the new Schools. After all, we’re asking them to lead, so they have to have a sense that they’re personally contributing to the future of the Schools. Finally we produced a document that sets out clearly who the key contacts in the Faculty are, as well as the names of all representatives on teams, groups and committees at University level so that communication can be clearly established and monitored.

We have also established a series of Q&A sessions with Schools and meet with colleagues in HR and Marketing to understand their roles and responsibilities.

To address issues raised by staff about internal communications we’re road-testing a pilot Faculty intranet. Based on the outcomes of the last staff survey, we discontinued our e-bulletin and instead are trying to place links to all documents and information specific to the Faculty in one easily accessible place on the intranet, as well as staff news and ‘human interest’ items. For other information we’re trying to drive traffic to the University staff website and weekly e-bulletin. In the future we hope to introduce an online staff discussion forum.”

• You did not feel that there are effective channels for staff to feed their views upwards in our University.
  You did not feel that communication between senior management and staff is effective.
  • We publish a monthly e-news bulletin.
  • We introduced a Course Leaders’ forum.
  • Roles and responsibilities have been clarified and consultation has taken place with all colleagues on the development of the Faculty plan.
  • We held a Faculty Away Day in July 2011.
  • We have a bimonthly Readers and Professors meeting.
  • Faculty Leadership Team meetings start with good news to record staff achievements.

• You did not feel that there are effective channels for staff to feed their views upwards in our University.
  • We held Away Days in June and December 2011 for the purpose of actively involving our staff in planning and cross team working.
  • All HR staff were invited to attend focus groups to discuss the issues raised by the staff survey and suggest actions for improvement.
  • Our HR Director holds a monthly office brief for all staff to provide an update on developments across our University and within HR. Colleagues are able to submit questions in advance if there is something that they don’t want to ask in person.
  • All of the teams in HR have team meetings at least monthly which are intended to provide opportunities for two way communication and feedback/ideas to be fed back to our HR Management Team.

• You did not feel that on the whole, the different parts of our University communicate effectively with each other.
  You did not feel that recent changes have been well communicated.
  • We hosted Learning Lunches to promote better understanding of teams around our University and explore ways to work effectively with them.
  • We developed a new framework of meetings for information sharing, including team leaders’ meetings chaired by the Director of Marketing for upward feedback.
  • We hold a quarterly all-service Away Day at which we discuss planning and inter-team working.
  • All staff receive summaries of CMT meetings.
• You did not feel that generally change within our University is managed well.
  You did not feel that generally change within your service is managed well.
  • To support staff new in their roles we produced a training matrix for our staff and actively support managers to undertake training such as the Managers’ Toolkit. We also encourage staff to take up opportunities through HR for coaching or mentoring