What are we trying to achieve by focusing on colleague engagement?
Our colleague engagement, while not out of line with other Higher Education benchmarks, can always be improved upon, and it is a key commitment from our World Changers Together Strategy 2025 to do so. We want to help all colleagues to feel a sense of belonging and pride of the University and in working here; and to want to do the best work possible. Feeling this way improves wellbeing and makes our work a more enjoyable experience. It also means that more of our colleagues would recommend working here to others so that we can continue to recruit excellent people.
The definition of engagement we use also describes colleagues “contributing to the University’s success”. For this framework, we take “success” to mean living our values to a greater extent, and to achieve the ambitious outcomes set out in World Changers Together and our supporting strategies.
Across our strategies we have identified where increasing engagement will be most helpful, and grouped into three themes outlining what we aspire to (recognising that we have not achieved these for all colleagues yet):
1. Provide an environment with opportunities to learn and where colleagues feel valued.
As an organisation, we recognise that our people come first. Celebrating the varied ways in which we all contribute is part of our everyday. We have access to, time for and are enabled by our leaders to prioritise our learning. We recognise learning takes many forms: by engaging with learning communities, secondments, and career opportunities inside and outwith the University; reviewing how we do things to understand how to make it better; working with different teams of colleagues or external partners; as well as through formal training or professional development.
2. Foster a culture of community and collaboration.
We are part of one team. We want to build on our sense of community and ensure that everyone feels included in Team UofG. Led by our senior leaders, we emphasise team effort as we mark our successes. We value all our collaborators, from work with students, to local and international communities, to our trade unions. We want to continue to work in partnership, from increasing joint pieces of work between teams in our every day, to creating opportunities for all to be involved in our big ambitions.
3. Encourage empowerment and autonomy
As an organisation, our people are able to identify what would make a difference to their work, and our leaders and structures support us to engage productively with challenges and see the opportunities in responding to feedback. This is true of our day-to-day work as well as our big ambitions. We recognise that we need to work to remove barriers to empowerment: from addressing structural barriers to greater inclusion to improving our processes and systems.
Through improving colleague engagement, we aim to realise these strategic goals. In addition to these, we recognise that colleague engagement could be better understood and embedded in our ways of working at the University and have added a further goal: to develop enabling factors for engagement.