Liverpool FC legend Bill Shankly once said “The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they don’t know the game”.
Well, we’ve been looking at some of our processes and ‘rules’ to see if they support our University community to carry out our roles effectively.
As a result, we’ve made some changes to our senior management team meetings and recruitment procedures and I wanted to let you know about these arrangements.
Three meeting groups (the Vice-Chancellor’s Group, Executive Committee and University Planning Team) have been replaced by one body: the new University Executive Board. The intention behind this is to try to have more streamlined and less bureaucratic processes and hopefully this will go some way towards tackling this challenge.
In the first instance, the Executive Board will meet every Tuesday morning. Further information on the Executive Board, including the membership, can be found at https://www.bath.ac.uk/teams/university-executive-board/.
At the first meeting of the Executive Board, we also made decisions about improving our recruitment approval processes. I know this is something many colleagues have raised as an issue, so I’m sure reducing the number of approvals in the resourcing process will be a welcome move. The process for submitting a Staff Request Form through Stonefish will not change in the short term. But approvals should now happen much more quickly, and for the simplest of cases, we would hope to process these in 2-3 days. Our Director of HR, Richard Brooks, will be communicating with you over the next couple of weeks with more information.
Talking of communication, one of my priorities is to enhance senior management engagement with our community so thanks to all those who’ve signed up to a Café Conversation over the coming months. I look forward to meeting you.