Fostering wellbeing at our University – the results

In April 2024, we launched ‘Our Wellbeing Commitment’, outlining our approach to supporting good wellbeing within our staff community. The Commitment focuses on how we provide three key areas: 

• A Thriving place – colleagues feel well, supported, connected, valued and appreciated at work. We promote the importance of wellbeing and our policies and processes are supportive of good wellbeing.  
• Headspace – colleagues are able to work at their best and get the balance right between work and home life. There is a good level of understanding within and across teams as to how to work best together, balancing meeting and individual working time. 
• A Psychologically safe place – colleagues feel able to speak up when things aren’t right and have a positive level of workplace pressure. There is proactive management of high workload and other workplace demands and factors that can impact on wellbeing – both day-to-day and during times of change. 

To help us understand where we are right now with our Commitment, we asked for your views via a wellbeing survey.  

Thank you again to those who took the opportunity to complete the survey and share their views. 41% of colleagues completed the survey, 52% of Professional Services colleagues, and 26% of Academic colleagues. The lower completion rates for our academic community isbeing consideredwhen drawing conclusions from the survey, while also ensuring that we continue to act on feedback that has been provided. 

Wellbeing survey results 

• A summary of the results 

Wellbeing survey headlines 

Manager Support and Purpose Clarity: 

• 76% of respondents felt supported by their manager or supervisor. 
• 71% were clear on their purpose, contributing to overall wellbeing. 

Social Connection and Informal Communication: 

• 71% had opportunities to speak informally with colleagues, fostering wellbeing.  
• The most commonly selected source of support when experiencing poor mental health at work was to turn to a colleague or friend at work (44% of respondents). 

Consistent Themes: 

• Sense of belonging and bullying remained broadly consistent compared to 2022, although there is variations between academic and professional services colleagues 
• Ongoing efforts to create a safe, inclusive environment through EDI Strategy. 

Challenges: 

• Workload, work-life balance, and excessive pressure were common challenges. 
• 27% dissatisfied with work-life balance; 28% didn’t take sufficient breaks. 
• 29% felt under excessive pressure due to workload. 
• 47% worked while unwell (1-5 days in the last three months), with the most common reason being to stay on top of workload.  

What are we doing with this information? 

The detailed results will be readily available to all leadership teams across the University to better understand the responses in their areas, taking into consideration response rates. The Wellbeing team will also be delving into the detail of open text responses to see if we can pull out any further local or thematic actions. 

There are already a number of actions underway that will help to foster a better sense of wellbeing across the University and improve any of the areas of concern highlighted. These include: 

 Addressing Workload and Work-Life Balance 

• We know that this is a recurring theme across our University and other higher education institutes. Our senior leadership team is committed to exploring this further and finding solutions that streamline processes and ease some of these pressures. 
• We have established an academic workload task and finish group who are actively working to reduce workload and professional services colleagues are also collaborating to find solutions for workload challenges. 

Equality and Diversity 

• The survey data will contribute to our ongoing charter mark and award plans and activities. By fostering a more inclusive environment across the University we can have a direct impact on colleague wellbeing. 
• Bullying and harassment is another clear area of focus within the EDI Strategy and something our EDI colleagues are working on closely with our Leadership team and Staff Networks. 

Mental health and wellbeing 

• The insights from the will help us to formulate our approach surrounding mental health and wellbeing support, looking at how we can communicate and educate colleagues about the support on offer throughout the University 
• The free text comments also highlight the opportunity to further upskill our managers in being comfortable and confident in having conversations about wellbeing and mental health.  

We will continue to update on progress of our work. If you have any questions or would like to offer further feedback, please email wellbeing@manchester.ac.uk