Staff Survey Results

Colleagues

Firstly, I want to thank those of you who took the time to complete the recent staff survey. Almost 70% of members of staff did so, which is consistent with the kind of staff numbers having participated in the previous exercise in 2016. Your views matter, and the outcomes will form part of our action plan going forward.

I made a commitment to come back to you with the initial findings and would now like to share the results with you (please see the attachment), along with my own thoughts and reactions.
I am pleased to be able to tell you that the University has a good engagement score overall, with colleagues enjoying their work, feeling proud to work here and wanting to do the best work they can. It is also reassuring that respondents are clear about what they are expected to achieve and feel trusted to do their job, with staff members being willing to help each other above and beyond their own role when necessary. Strong results across the theme of immediate line management are also reassuring and provide a strong foundation to build upon.

There are, however, some challenges within our results and these areas will receive particular attention in the coming months.

The first of these is around the Senior Management Group (SMG) itself. We clearly have to work harder at making ourselves more visible, and find new ways of engaging with staff and listening to your views. The themes of “wellbeing and work-life balance” along with “managing change” also featured prominently. You also told us that you want us to manage poor performance more assiduously: we shall renew our focus on these areas to complement work which is already underway.

Underpinning many of the responses is the theme of communication and engagement. On the back of these results, SMG has already endorsed a wider programme of activity to consider new ways of supporting staff to feed back their views and to continue the dialogue well beyond the survey itself. This work will be led by the new Engagement Steering Group - a group of academics and members of professional services, including HR, Communications and World Changing Glasgow, who are committed to improving engagement with staff and students across the University. Further details will be shared soon.

This is clearly a short summary of a much wider set of results so please now take the time to digest the results and to consider which areas are important to you. Units across the University will soon receive their own results, allowing for more detailed analysis and discussion to take place as was the approach in 2016. As you will be aware, a direct comparison with our 2016 HR Survey results will not be possible as we have used a different survey scale. However, we are able to benchmark ourselves against some other HE providers and organisations.

This year, the Engagement Steering Group will ensure that they both support and complement local activity whilst also delivering a range of University-level initiatives. SMG and I have already renewed our commitment to supporting this agenda but beyond this, our results and the actions we take are a collective responsibility and we must make it a shared goal to work together to plan and deliver the improvements that are clearly sought.

Thank you once again for participating in this year’s survey and I hope to have the opportunity to speak to many of you either in person or at one the many events being planned over the coming months.

Best wishes


Anton Muscatelli
Principal and Vice-Chancellor

First published: 20 November 2018

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