Skip to navigation | Skip to main content | Skip to footer
Menu
Search the Staffnet siteSearch StaffNet

Professional Services

Image of pedestrians walking along Oxford Road campus
Image of all the PS Ambition Icons

Equity at Manchester - Ensuring all Voices are Heard

Alignment to PS Ambitions:

Background:

Equality impact assessments (EIA) are a tool to help colleges and universities ensure that their policies, practices and decisions are fair, meet the needs of their staff and students and that they are not inadvertently discriminating against any protected group. 

The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Team introduced Equality Impact Assessment (EIA's) into the University in 2022, having developed a template, guidance and training.  This has been reasonably successful, but it became very clear that the form was too long and complicated which in turn put people off completing them.

Kathy Bradley, EDI Partner completed a problem statement to address these challenges and found that the current process for producing EIAs within the team/organisation is overly complicated and relies on a manual, lengthy approval workflow. This complexity was exacerbated by the use of a non-digital format (Word document) for the assessment form and a manual approval process.

The cumbersome nature of the current process created inefficiencies, extensions on timelines for project approvals, and placed an undue burden on both EDI Partners and Senior Sponsors involved in the assessment and approval stages.

Key Drivers

The key driver behind revising the current EIA process was simplifying the EIA production process. A key focus of this was the digitisation of the assessment form and the automation of key stages within the approval workflow for EDI Partners and Senior Sponsors.

Wanting to establish a more efficient, streamlined, and less time-consuming process for conducting and approving EIAs, digitization and automation was the identified solution for improving operational efficiency and facilitating quicker project progression. This approached aims to enhance operational efficiency, reduce administrative burden, and ensure timely project delivery while embedding EDI. The current manual Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) process hinders these goals.

This project addresses that by:

  • Improving Efficiency: Automating the EIA process to save time and effort.
  • Reducing Burden: Replacing paper-based workflows with digital systems.
  • Accelerating Delivery: Removing bottlenecks in project approvals.
  • Strengthening EDI: Promoting timely and consistent equality considerations.

Approach and Challenges

Approach:

  • Research was conducted on how to simplify the questions asked within the Equality Impact Assessment.
  • Collaboration with colleagues was paramount, Emma Jobling, Flick Adams, Sylvia Master and Huw Peters contributed to the specifics of creating the automation and approval process. A community of Practice (CoP)was formed who are going to be the testers for the new EIA form, this practice was set up and a workshop run with them enabling them to tell us what they needed.  A padlet was provided to gather information.
  • In addition, Alithea Buchan in Internal Communications has assisted with preparing comms for when the project goes live to the wider university.

Challenge:

  • The need for more technical support from IT for using available apps such as Power Automate and PowerApps.

Outcomes

  • Automation was key to this project, so it was decided to host the EIA's on Microsoft Lists and use Power Automate and PowerApps to streamline the approval and publishing process.
  • The existing SharePoint site was expanded to make it into more of hub where anyone in the university could access EIA's.

Equity, Diversity and Inclusivity Considerations

  • Enhancing accessibility by removing barriers posed my manual processes.
  • Inclusion of colleagues in the design process from different areas of the University.
  • Training sessions and establishment of a EIA Community of Practice to ensure colleagues can engage with the tools.
  • Removal of AI bias from the process.

Conclusion and Next Steps

After presenting the new form to the CoP, it promises to be a less time-consuming task with a slicker approval process. The solution involves developing a user-friendly digital platform for EIAs, automating the approval workflow, integrating with existing systems, and providing comprehensive training and support. Continuous monitoring and feedback will ensure alignment with organisational strategies and objectives.  Feedback is being gathered from testers on this project to allow full university roll out in July.

Co-production will contribute massively to the success of this project - this wasn't a project done for people, it was done with the users.

The next steps are to take the new process live into the wider university and then to replicate the work for Inclusive Events and Inclusive Training to assist in making all our processes that involve people more inclusive and accessible.

Contact Information

For further information, please contact:

  • Kathy Bradley, EDI Partner