Update on meetings light weeks

31 Aug 2022

Meetings light weeks will no longer take place - a message from Adèle MacKinlay, Director of People and Organisational Development

Dear colleagues,

After careful consideration we will no longer be holding ‘meetings light’ weeks in the new academic year.

Meetings light weeks were introduced during the pandemic as a way to review our working practices, provide some temporary relief from meetings and create some time for focused work.

The decision to end them follows feedback from a range of colleagues about the timing of them and their effectiveness in providing a long-term solution to meeting overload and workload / working practices more generally.

Your wellbeing is our primary concern and we want to make sure that we create a supportive environment that enables us all to thrive. How we achieve this, by working collaboratively together, will be a key theme in our People and Organisational Development (OD) strategy which will be launched in the autumn.

I am always keen to hear your thoughts so if you have any suggestions about how we best tackle meeting overload please send your ideas and suggestions to people-od@manchester.ac.uk.

I will feed these ideas into my conversations with leadership teams and trade union colleagues and will be putting together a concrete plan of how we move forward in the next academic year.

I look forward to hearing from you.