One Big Question (1) 

1. How do we ensure that the professional staff contribution is acknowledged, and the skills of professional staff are trusted, at the highest levels of the University?

The starting point is that the University collectively values all staff. I am clear that this is a team. The quality of this team and the spirit with which people engage focus on collective acts which will make it successful.

It is more challenging to translate this ideal into practical actions that staff can see – creating the lived experiences – and we will need a range of different tools to achieve this. The Vice-Chancellor and I need to continue to convey these messages, talking to individuals, and groups, connecting people and their work.

Taking time to express personal thanks is one of the issues the University struggles with, this was revealed in the staff survey. Also in relation to visibility and the recognition of success, we need to consider how we celebrate this in an organisation which is so large and diverse.

This initiative represents early steps in trying to achieve this. There are literally hundreds of exemplars we can choose, we need to profile these more, to show how professional staff contribute to organisational success. We should put different examples on the web pages on a regular basis, profiling professional staff who play a key part, so that we can see the over-arching goal and how all contribute. Through this process we can celebrate that work and highlight what others do.  I want staff to come up with the thoughts and ideas for this.

The question ‘trusting the skills of professional staff’ is an interesting one, as it implies that professional staff sometimes feel their skills are not trusted. One of the messages I took away from Wednesday is that people are often trained and have specialisms, but are frequently asked to undertake a much broader range of duties which they cannot always link to their primary purpose. People may, in some instances, feel they have lost their specialism and therefore feel under-valued, because they are undertaking duties which are so broad in range.

The work we are developing on the Sheffield Professional should further help address some of these questions.