Following the launch of our Staff Engagement Survey on Wednesday 17 October, this is second in our SUSSED series about how the survey results can help our faculties and professional services.
This time we hear from Professor Diana Eccles, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.
What are you trying to achieve in your Faculty this year?
I would like us all to understand what collegiality means for ourselves and our colleagues, I want to develop a shared vision that will underpin a faculty-wide approach to delivering teaching and research and that will help us generate opportunities to support our best early career researchers.
How will the insight that you get from the Staff Engagement Survey help you move forward?
I hope we have a high response rate so that I can take account of responses when developing our future plans. I would like to understand what people believe are the best things and what are the main challenges of working in the Faculty of Medicine.
What would you say to your staff about the importance of filling the survey in?
I want to keep things that are good, recognise what needs to change and feel empowered to make changes where possible if there are solvable problems that emerge for a majority of staff.
Can you give some examples of what has happened in your Faculty since the last survey?
- Appraisal rates have doubled to nearly 100%.
- We’ve created a faculty engagement network and appointed engagement champions in each school (academic unit), with representation from all job families.
- Following feedback in the last survey about career pathways, we’ve held lots of presentations on the pathways and promotion avenues to clarify the processes.
- We’ve developed family friendly policies and held regular and frequent wellbeing events at work.
- There’s been more transparency around senior faculty meetings (minutes are available for everyone on SharePoint). There have been more networking meetings e.g. Faculty Operating Service (FOS) network meetings initiated by medicine.
- Finally, we’ve raised awareness around avenues for contacts and support for staff experiencing bullying and harassment at work.
The survey closes on Wednesday 7 November 2018.
More information can be found:
Staff Engagement SharePoint site.
