HR STRATEGY 2008 - 2010
DEVELOPING AND SUSTAINING A CULTURE OF STAFF ENGAGEMENT AND ACHIEVEMENT
Where high quality professional standards and levels of service to students and staff are the norm, where
staff are encouraged to add value and the achievements of all colleagues are recognised and celebrated.
Contents
Part One:
HR Strategy for 2008 - 2010 3
HR Strategy for 2011 – 2013 5
UEL and the Sector 5
Part Two:
A. Staff Recruitment and Retention 6
B. Staff and Management Development 10
(a) Project Management Skills 12
(b) Leadership and Management 12
(c) Customer Care 13
(d) Leadership Foundation 13
(e) ECDL 14
(f) Teaching and Research fellowships 14
(g) Health and Safety 14
(h) Job shadowing & short term secondments 15
(i) Staff Development Information 15
(j) Staff Induction 15
C. Equality and Diversity 16
1. Equal pay for work of equal value 17
(a) Job Evaluation 17
(b) Market Pay 18
(c) Equal Pay Audits 18
2. Disability Equality Scheme 19
3. Gender Equality Scheme 19
4. Equality and Diversity Action Plans 19
5. Staff targets 20
D. Regular reviews of staffing needs 24
E. Annual Performance reviews of all staff 24
(a) Competency Framework 25
(b) Staff Development and Reviews 26
F. Action to tackle poor performance 26
G. 24/7 working 27
H. Professional Standards Framework for
Teaching and supporting Learning 28
I. Research and Scholarly Strategy 29
J. Information Technology 31
K. Employment Policies 33
L. Staff Consultation and Managing Change 34
M. Investors in People 35
N. Charter Mark 36
O. Payroll 36
P. Health and Safety 37
Q. Key risks in our HR Strategy 41
Appendix 1 HEFCE’s Rewarding & Developing Staff Initiative 46
Appendix 2 2003 Framework Agreement 47
Appendix 3 Our current staff benefits 48
Appendix 4 Self Assessment Tool 49
HR Strategy 2008 – 2010 Action Plan 50
PART ONE: HR STRATEGY FOR 2008 - 2010
Background and Context
The University of East London has undergone radical change in recent years. We have focused our investment and innovation on the student experience, resulting in improved facilities and services for students and an estate capable of supporting 21st century learning and teaching. We have received glowing reports from the QAA for our institutional audit and our collaborative audit, as well as a successful QAA review of our support for postgraduate research students. We have been awarded whole-institution Investors in People recognition and the Chartermark for excellence in customer service, one of only three universities in the country to hold the award for all of its provision. Our students enjoy an employability rate of 94%, well above our benchmark and far higher than similar universities in the capital.
The most significant factors which have underpinned our success have been the competence, hard work and dedication of our staff and their commitment to UEL’s vision and values. Staff are our key asset and amount to over half our expenditure. Our HR Strategy 2008 -2010 aims to ensure we maximise their potential by ensuring UEL’s strategic priorities are fully integrated in all areas of their activities. In particular we intend to nurture a staff culture that encourages the full engagement of all staff and recognises, encourages and celebrates achievement, hence our HR Strategy’s key theme being ‘Staff Engagement and Achievement ’.
Our HR Strategy also incorporates the outcomes of the recent HEFCE Self- Assessment Tool (SAT) exercise. This is important, as wide staff consultation was an integral part of it. Therefore, we have reliable evidence that many of the initiatives contained in the HR Strategy are endorsed by a good representative sample of our staff community.
HR STRATEGY FOR 2008 – 10
Our 2008 - 2010 Strategic Aims
Our Strategy’s key aims in ‘Developing and sustaining a culture of staff engagement and achievement’ are:
1. With tuition fee charges in place since 2006/07, students will rightly expect their learning experience to be of the highest quality. Our corporate clients will also expect first rate standards of service. UEL will provide access to appropriate training and development opportunities to staff at all levels, ensuring that they are equipped with the range of skills and experience needed to satisfy our most demanding customers.
2. Our HR policies and initiatives will support a culture in which the value of diversity is fully recognised and embraced and where all members of our community act respectfully towards each other.
3. We will take measures to ensure greater flexibility in working patterns, so that we can develop a 24/7 culture and expand on our postgraduate, international, distance-learning and part-time provision. We recognise that our teaching provision is mainly during a traditional ‘9 to 5’ Monday to Friday semester-based schedule and is not fully engaging with evening, weekend and summer school demands from potential students. Equally our current international and part-time students need a wide range of our services during those times, so that they feel part of a vibrant, friendly and supportive community.
4. We will seek to ensure that all academic and relevant support staff are engaged in research and scholarly activity and knowledge exchange.
5. UEL has performance management at the heart of its strategy. Line managers will be recruited and further developed to take ownership of staffing and performance issues, with HR Services providing a professional advisory service designed to support the achievement of UEL priorities. This approach will follow the key principles of the HR ‘Business Partnering’ model which encourages greater involvement of HR Managers in core School / Service activities, including annual planning and staff engagement initiatives, particularly with management teams. We will ensure that all managers implement our value added HR policies fully, particularly in the areas of staff recruitment and selection, induction, probation and performance management, as there are variable standards in schools and services.
Our 2008 - 2010 Strategic Objectives
a) To fill UEL staff vacancies, preferably on first advertisement, in a highly competitive market.
b) To improve the management capacity of UEL at all levels, creating an entrepreneurial organisation capable of responding quickly to change in the internal or external environment or of seizing opportunities as they arise.
c) To continue to devise innovative methods of recognising, celebrating and sharing good practice across UEL.
d) To develop a highly trained and well motivated workforce with the mix of skills and experience required to deliver our core strategic aims.
e) To review employment practices regularly, ensuring that they are in keeping with changes to the law, sector best practice and are free from unfair bias, with decisions on appointment, progression and reward taken solely on merit.
f) To continue to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, to enhance our IT provision and to promote a customer-facing culture.
g) To ensure that pay and grading arrangements are applied in a way that supports our strategic aims.
h) To complete an equal pay audit.
HR STRATEGY FOR 2011-2013
Our ‘look forward’ to 2011 -2013 assumes that we are able to maintain our historic and current rate of progress. If so, the following aims will be met:
· That we recruit and retain high quality staff, acknowledging that the Olympics and Paralympics in 2012 present both opportunities and risks for our university. The opportunities are that significant research and consultancy opportunities will arise, but the risk is that we may face increased competition for staff with key skills.
· All our academic staff are engaged in productive research and scholarly activity and knowledge transfer, with significant numbers of staff engaged in paid consultancy activities and in developing ‘spin-off’ companies.
· We have real success in ‘growing our own’ staff, through long-term career development.
· We have a gender balance in all academic staff categories and at least 40% of management grade roles occupied by women.
· We have at least a quarter of academic staff in all categories from BME backgrounds and BME staff have a significant presence in management roles.
· We continue to exceed our sector’s benchmark of staff who are disabled at our university.
· Change is effectively managed and all staff are developed and consulted in order to achieve our vision.
· After our third staff survey we have been seen to listen and act and the great majority of staff view UEL as a fully consultative learning organisation that manages performance and is effective in managing change.
· All managers are competent and confident in performance management (objective setting linking the individual with school and service plans, encouraging entrepreneurship, monitoring performance, managing poor performance and sickness absence).
· Occupational Health and Safety standards are consistently high in all areas of our university.
· We will fulfil our corporate and social responsibilities and maximise our opportunities as a key player in the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics and the development of the Thames Gateway.
UEL AND THE SECTOR
To compare our progress in these objectives, we will benchmark ourselves against the 64 HEIs currently engaged with the DLA (Piper Rudnick Gray Cary) HR Benchmarker service. We will also use Tribal benchmarking services, ECC (Education Competencies Consortium) Ltd and the UCEA’s HR benchmarking services. We will also foster existing networking opportunities with Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Westminster, Greenwich and Oxford Brookes and pursue similar relations with other universities. External benchmarking outside the HE sector will also be important and we will concentrate on developing existing relationships with various organisations, e.g. Logica, The Home Office and Business in the Community, representing the private, public and ‘not for profit’ sectors. We have also completed a Self-Assessment Tool, as required by HEFCE (see appendix 4).
The Strategy has been devised by HR Services, and we will continue to consult our HR Strategy Group, our Corporate Management Team, their schools and services management teams and our trade union representatives about it.
PART TWO:
OUR HR STRATEGY ACTION PLAN
A. STAFF RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION
Where are we now?: Overall we have successfully recruited academic and support staff to vacancies during the period 2004 - 07 and we believe this is due in part to our growing reputation as a dynamic institution and in part due to our competitive pay. Nonetheless we have struggled to recruit staff to particular senior roles across our university (see below).
Where do we want to be by 2010?: To improve on this position, whilst recognising that we are operating in an increasingly competitive environment.
The UCEA’s report ‘Recruitment and Retention of staff in Higher Education in 2005’ indicated that nationally there were some difficulties in recruiting academic staff in law; business and management; economics; accounting; computing/IT and health subjects and teacher education; electronics and that the biggest problem areas nationally lay in business, health and education. HEIs also reported some problems in recruiting manual staff, estates managers, skilled trades’ people and project managers.
Our experience has been that we have struggled to fill some senior vacancies in the past two years in Facilities, our Business School, professional roles in our School of Distance and E -Learning, our School of Education (Primary and Secondary Tutors in PE and Mathematics) and Analyst Programmers in IT Services.
We intend improving on our current level of filling 76% of academic and management staff vacancies on the first advertisement to 82% (82% achieved in 2005 / 73% achieved in 2004) and from the current 90% of support staff to 92% vacancies on the first advertisement (91% achieved in 2005 / 90% achieved in 2004). This will be achieved by high quality marketing and advertising vacancies both in suitable media and with specialist employment agencies. We will develop our corporate brand further in conjunction with our advertising agency. We will use HERA through our Grading Review and promotion procedures to meet such challenges. We may also apply market supplements via our Market Pay Policy and provide relocation expenses, where appropriate. We will also analyse responses to job advertisements, staff turnover and exit interview data to identify other areas/disciplines where market supplements are needed. We will continue to implement the HEFCE ‘Golden Hello’ scheme, to assist the recruitment of high quality teaching staff new to our sector in ‘hard to recruit’ disciplines.
Action: 82% of academic and management vacancies and 92% of support staff vacancies to be filled on first advertisement by above actions.
[See item 1 on Action List]
Further analysis needs to be carried out on recruitment data to ascertain why certain Schools / Services have difficulty recruiting and any remedial action taken.
Action: Analyse recruitment data at school and service level and act upon any issues highlighted.
[See item 3 on Action List]
Having used the HERA scheme for job evaluation purposes, we will pilot the extension of the HERA competencies framework to staff recruitment and selection (via re-formatted job descriptions and person specifications assisting in shaping interview questions), induction and probation. If the pilot is successful, we will extend it to SDRs, staff development and organisational change.
Action: Undertake pilot of using the HERA framework for recruitment and selection, induction and probation purposes.
[See item 33 on Action List]
Our relocation from Longbridge Road to a significantly enhanced infrastructure at Docklands and Stratford campuses has improved our ability to attract the best staff, as has our growing reputation as a progressive employer. The 2012 Games in the Stratford region should also attract staff, but it is expected that we will continue to struggle to recruit to some senior specialist posts.
Our pay levels for staff are generally competitive for our sector (particularly so for lower grade staff following the HERA job evaluation project). However there are some staff who are disappointed as a result of HERA job evaluation. It will be important for managers to continue to work with them to enhance their competencies and roles and develop their careers through the SDR process in the next few years.
In the first half of 2007, we had an overall staff turnover figure of 9%, with 7% for academic staff and 10% for support staff. This was similar to 12 months previously, where the overall turnover was 9%, with 7% for academic staff and 9% for support staff. These are not unduly high figures by London university standards but ‘new blood’ is essential if we are to increase the representation of women and BME men and women in senior academic and management roles.
We also need to recruit many more staff who are new to academia. As at 1.1.08, 73% of academic staff are aged over 40 and 39% aged 50 and above, with only 12% aged under 35. So we must recruit plenty of ‘new blood’ by external recruitment. Recruiting new academic staff with PhDs and good records of research and scholarly/knowledge transfer activities also helps address one of our key strategic goals.