HR best equipped to embed institution-wide values for staff and students
As universities face ongoing financial pressures and quality assessment changes, HR is using organisational development (OD) to create and secure institution-wide values for all staff and students.
The sector is going through major changes, such as budget cuts and the implementation of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which can create competing goals within the organisation. But it is up to HR professionals to influence the institutional response, said Kim Frost, chair of the Universities Human Resources (UHR) organisation, and HR director of the University of London, at UHR’s annual conference in Leeds.
Dean Royles, director of HR and OD at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said that discussions had moved on from just “saving money”. He urged HR to focus on engaging its staff to work together for a “common purpose”.
“Don’t confuse being in a business function with being in a financial function,” Royles told delegates. “There is a direct correlation between staff engagement and patient satisfaction [in the NHS],” and in turn organisational performance, he added.
However, with multi-faceted functions, disparate departments and sprawling campuses all under the auspices of one organisation, higher education institutions can struggle to engage everyone, said Christine Reid, OD business partner at Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU).
“How do you create values that resonate with every job role, with every member of staff and still represent that ‘students first’ approach?” she asked.
“Historically, marketing and HR had designed the values to which we were expecting all staff to live to,” said Alex Killick, director of people at GCU, “but a 2020 University Strategy, gave us an opportunity to get our people to design the ‘code’,” he added.
Using a model first adopted by Guy’s and St Thomas’ (GSTT) NHS foundation trust the project team at GCU asked staff and students to nominate a list of values that they believed best represented their institution.
“It’s all well and good having words written down, but values are no good without expected behaviours to live to everyday,” said Caroline Parker values project lead and professor School of Engineering and Built Environment, GCU.