In the sixth and final article about the Staff Engagement Survey, Professor Jane Falkingham, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) shares her views about the value of filling our survey in.
What are you trying to achieve in your Faculty this year?
In FSS we are focusing on bringing the Faulty together to maximise the synergies between disciplines, enhancing opportunities for both staff and students. We are also working hard to share best practices from each of the five Schools that make up FSS, sharing knowledge and understanding of our diverse, but cognate academic disciplines to improve our excellent education, research and enterprise together and driving up the student experience and staff engagement. As we come together as a new, large group of like-minded people, we can develop new relationships and networks that allow us to develop a positive sense of community and collegiality, making us all best able to contribute to the University’s strategy.
How will the insight that you get from the Staff Engagement Survey help you move forward?
The last Staff Engagement Survey in 2016 was extremely useful for the (old) FSHMS leadership team, allowing us to identify both the challenges faced by staff working in the Faculty, but also what we were doing well. The results were widely discussed in Faculty and School forums, with each School developing an action plan tailored to address local issues.
This year’s survey is extremely timely for the new Faculty of Social Sciences, with Schools coming together from different parts of the University. The results will help us to understand where we need to better support our staff to achieve their personal ambitions – and feel well supported in their responsibilities. As we reflect on how we contribute to the University’s strategy, we will not achieve our ambitions without ensuring our colleagues feel empowered and able to contribute to the best of their ability. If there are things that are stopping this, we want to work together to understand and address them. This survey will allow us to focus on the matters that colleagues identify as being their greatest areas of concern.
What would you say to your staff about the importance of filling the survey in?
Running the Staff Engagement Survey now provides a great opportunity to understand the concerns of staff in each of the Schools that have come together. I would encourage everyone to participate and provide comments so that we can shape our community going forward and provide a working environment that facilitates everyone to deliver to their best whilst maximising wellbeing. Without understanding how people feel about their working environment, we risk not realising where and how we can make things better for colleagues, or indeed making changes we might think necessary that are not.
The Faculty is new, and so most of us are still early in our understanding of how the wide range of activity we undertake works and how we can make a difference. This survey result will help us understand how and where we can make our University a more positive place to work. If people do not complete it, we risk making decisions without enough information to achieve positive change. This is the opportunity to tell us what you think – and it will be listened to. I look forward to discussing the survey data with all of you as we work towards building the new FSS community together.
The survey closes this Wednesday 7 November 2018.
More information can be found:
Staff Engagement SharePoint site.
All our Deans and our Chief Operating Officer have now shared their views about the importance of the Staff Engagement Survey. You can read their articles below:
Professor Paul Whittaker – Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Professor Diana Eccles – Faculty of Medicine
Professor Rachel Mills – Faculty of Environmental and Life Sciences
Professor Bashir Al-Hashimi CBE, Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences
Ian Dunn, Professional Services
