Message from Emily Brook

26 Jun 2020

This week Emily updates us on a number of staff wellbeing proposals.

I think that everyone is aware that there’s a huge ask of our people at the moment. The practicalities of home-working in a situation that needs collaboration, trust, initiative and pace are tricky in their own right. I’ve been watching my sister doing a huge amount of work to reopen a social care service safely while looking after her baby son, so for those of you who are also looking after someone that relies on you I think you’re doing a particularly amazing job at the moment.

There are some things that we can’t fix organisationally at the moment. Things are uncertain within and outside the sector, so we’re going to need to keep finding our way through new challenges for some time to come. There are ways that we can try to help though, and it’s important that we try to help people get the space to do the work that is needed, to think about the ideas that will help us through this, and to have chances to step away from work for a much-needed rest.

In addition to the extra closure day announced for 24 July 2020, the Faculty Leadership Team has approved some short-term practical steps to try and give people this space. These steps won’t make everything easier, but hopefully they’ll help – if you have ideas about ways in which we can make things easier at the moment please let me know.

It’s going to take everyone a little while to adjust to the below and some arrangements will need tweaking to suit local teams, but please try to adopt as many of these as possible to help yourself and your team out:

Meetings

Wherever possible please don’t book meetings on a Friday to free up time to progress other activities/work.
Remote meetings (eg Zoom) shouldn’t last longer than two hours.
Wherever possible please don’t book meetings between 12pm and 1pm so that people can take a lunch break.
To help give people time to make a cuppa, stretch their legs, or nip to the loo, chairs and participants of meetings should aim to finish ten minutes early.
Everyone is asked to check the scheduling of regular meetings now that we’ve been operating off-campus for a while, and make sure that the frequency and duration match up with the priority and size of the task at hand.

Annual leave
Please work across your teams to make sure that everyone has a chance to take their annual leave. I’m sure that many of you need a break, and we as a University need our people to take breaks – we need the creative thinking of our people more than ever right now, and most people find that their best ideas come to them when they have time and space to be away from the day-to-day routine of work.
When you are on annual leave please put a clear out of office message on, your return date and alternative/emergency contact details. If you’re a manager, please assign a deputy. This should enable people to step away from email and meetings and have a proper break. Equally, if you’re about to email someone and see that they’re out of the office, have a quick think about what you’re sending and whether it can wait for a discussion once they’re back.

Email
With emails it’s really important that we help each other to keep on top of our inboxes. These are a few easy ways to help your colleagues out:
- make the email subject line relevant;
- keep it short, and consider other ways of communicating if a longer conversation is needed;
- don’t reply to all or CC additional people unless there’s something they need to know or do.
We’re asking everyone in the Faculty not to respond to emails after 12pm on Fridays. This should allow time to catch up. You can use this time to clear your inbox if that’s what you need time for, but please don’t expect anyone to respond before Monday morning.
Where possible, for non-urgent matters, colleagues are encouraged not to send emails out of hours. If colleagues are working flexibly because of childcare or other commitments they are encouraged to draft emails and not send, or use the schedule email feature in outlook.

Take care of yourselves and have a good week,

Emily