Improving our People Service for you
13 Dec 2024
How our People directorate is driving for excellence in their service through incremental changes.
As part of the vision and ambitions for Professional Services, we are committed to service excellence through delivery and continuous improvement of our services. We’re focused on being sustainable, agile and inclusive.
Across the People directorate (the new name for P&OD), we’re working to improve services for our colleagues and stakeholders both inside and outside the University. By making incremental improvements, we’re already seeing the difference. And if you’re a hiring manager or new starter, we hope you have too.
What we’ve been doing
Listening to our colleagues and stakeholders has helped us focus on priority changes, and upskilling our teams has empowered them to take ownership of excellence.
The People Services team are at the heart of the process throughout the employee lifecycle – from recruitment, onboarding, pay and a range of services for colleagues, managers and leaders.
Focussing on continuous improvement has allowed us to:
- prioritise improvements by listening to what our stakeholders need
- increase capability in our teams and empower them to make changes themselves
- manage changes incrementally to add value quickly and continuously improve.
Other improvements you will see
Our improvements aren’t restricted to our continuous improvement project. In our day-to-day processes we’ve made huge leaps in efficiency across:
- issuing new contracts and transfers
- giving managers greater visibility of employee change requests
- enhanced onboarding for Graduate Teaching Assistants
- improved vacancy processing times and offer letters
Not only has this helped reduce the time it takes for us to do these processes, it has also given us time that we can reinvest in improving efficiencies and responsiveness in other areas. This has started to make a difference to our colleagues across some of our day to day activities which have begun to speed up.
Our current performance is the best it’s ever been since we started reporting in 2022. Currently we’re processing contracts and transfers with an average time of three working days and processing vacancies at an average time of one working day.
We’ve achieved this through:
- effective prioritisation on an individual, team level and cross-functional teams
- using data insights to narrow down reasons for delays so we can start to address these
- improving the quality of data across all processes
What’s next?
Our target is to further reduce our turnaround time on contracts – we’d love to get to 24 hours. We believe we can achieve this by using our data to understand where the delays in the process are and what can be done to reduce, remove or mitigate them.
The Continuous Improvement project will continue to look at key areas for improvement. We know there is more to do and that driving towards service excellence is an ongoing journey.
We’ve set up a taskforce to support, enable and guide the continuous improvement project. The taskforce members, who come from a wide range of teams from across the University, act as champions for change and advocates for spreading our improvement mindset across the University.
Thank you to all those who have been involved so far and to those who will be involved as we continue.
Feedback
We can only continue to improve with your feedback. To help us continuously improve our service to you, please send any feedback to our Continuous Improvement Project mailbox, we’d love to hear from you.
Ele Morrissey
Executive Director of People