Living our values: listening and responding to our community

We are committed to talking openly as a community about opportunities, concerns, areas for improvement, and our progress in the areas that really matter.     

Over the past few years, we’ve been inviting feedback through town halls, all-staff surveys, and consultations on our strategic plans, which have collectively shaped our planning and priorities. 

We’ve also been working together to make improvements in areas that you’ve told us matter to you. 

With a university of our size, it’s impossible to showcase everything being done, and so much of this valuable work has been happening locally within faculties, offices and departments.  

However, there have also been several areas cross-institutionally that we have been focusing on making progress in. 

This includes: 

• Investing more in infrastructure, systems and processes to help people do their jobs as easily and painlessly as possible. 
• Prioritising looking after staff wellbeing and fostering a more inclusive workplace. 
• Continuing to be open around how and why decisions at a senior level are made, and how input from our community informs these. 
• Seeking opportunities for people to share their views and be heard. 

Progress in these areas

How we’ve been progressing in some of the areas raised by the last My UCL Experience survey and other staff conversations. 

Investing in infrastructure, tools and processes

As set out in Strategic Plan 2022-27 and heard in conversations since, a major focus is on improving our infrastructure. Through investing in maintaining and improving our physical and digital environment, we can ensure our people can do their jobs more efficiently, effectively and comfortably. 

The progress we’ve been making in tackling our digital infrastructure through new platforms and systems impacts all of us. This includes investment in the user-led Inside UCL which makes everyday tasks less time-consuming, new systems like MyServices for raising and tracking service requests, and MyCampus for reporting issues and raising and tracking maintenance requests. The move towards making things simpler and easier for staff to get things done continues to be a core priority. 

We have also been making major investments in, and improvements to, our physical campus. This includes significant, essential investments in maintenance and backlogs of repairs, alongside ambitious capital projects such as investing in world class new centres for areas of research excellence like eye health, neuroscience and our UCL East campus. At the same time, we’ve been consulting with our community on the UCL Estates Vision 2050, a long-term plan setting out better use of our extensive estate for the next 25 years to inspire and enable our staff and students, with sustainability, inclusivity and welfare at its heart. In the coming months, we will see work begin to make major improvements in the Quad, with a new layout that will improve accessibility and create new areas for socialising and other activities.    

By making improvements to our shared working environment and the tools that make our work possible, we can enable our staff to continue the life-changing research and teaching that is having such a positive impact on the world. 

Looking after staff wellbeing and fostering a more inclusive workplace

Belonging and equity is a key institutional priority at UCL. There has been significant dedication and commitment from the EDI team and the EDI community across UCL to foster an equitable and inclusive culture for everyone. Despite this, we know we still have a way to go – in particular in improving the experiences of our disabled staff – and are committed to continuing to prioritise this. 

To help us deliver in this area as meaningfully and effectively as possible, we recently completed an institution-wide strategic review of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). The insights from this will lay the foundations for the development of a comprehensive institutional EDI Strategic Plan during the 2024/25 academic year. 

And over the last year we completed a three-year consultation process around our community’s experiences of studying and working on campus, feeding into the development of UCL’s Inclusive Environments Policy and Action Plan to create campuses that are inclusive, welcoming and accessible to everyone in our community. Since then, teams across UCL have been setting up project groups aimed at tackling some of the key issues raised, and we’ll be sharing more details about the success of the plan so far later this term.  

Alongside this work on improving inclusion, our Workplace Health Team has been focused on introducing a new strategy and initiatives to support the wellbeing of our staff in three key areas: Healthy Mind, Healthy Body, Healthy Work – to support staff to look after their and their colleagues' health and wellbeing at work. This year, UCL took further steps to recognising the importance of mental health in the workplace with the launch of the new mental health principles (2024). 

Improving transparency and openness about decision-making

We have heard from you that understanding organisational and governance structures in such a large, complex institution can make it challenging for staff to understand how and why decisions are made at UCL, and who is responsible or accountable for these decisions.  

Across the institution, we’re doing a significant amount of work to provide greater transparency around these decisions and to build engagement with leadership.  

This includes:

• the introduction of termly Town Halls on key strategic areas which provide updates and open the opportunity for all staff to ask leadership questions on any concerns; 
• monthly emails and Open Office sessions available from the President & Provost Dr Michael Spence to all staff; 
• a commitment to providing more explainers on the reasoning behind strategic decisions and the channels for engaging and inputting into the decision-making process; 
• and the introduction of sharing high-level digestible summaries of the topics discussed through University Management Committee meetings.

Continuing to listen to you 

Alongside continuing to progress activity in these areas and our wider strategic priorities, we will continue to look for opportunities to ask for your feedback. We want to ensure that all opinions and concerns are heard, and to amplify your voice in institutional decisions.  

Autumn Staff Town Hall

On 5 November, we will be continuing our all-staff Town Hall series with a conversation about UCL’s strategic priorities, an update on key areas of progress towards those ambitions, and our goals for 2024/5. Find out more and sign up to join the Town Hall.

Staff Experience Survey and UniForum Service Effectiveness Survey

Next month we will also be asking staff to complete two complementary surveys that will help us to further identify areas for improvement and enable us to make positive change, both cross-institutionally and in areas of local concern.  

The Staff Experience Survey will be an opportunity to tell us what it’s like to work at UCL, share your experiences of leadership, culture, inclusion and health & wellbeing, and help us understand what matters to you.   

And the first part of the next UniForum Service Effectiveness survey will more specifically allow us to assess the effectiveness of our services. This helps benchmark ourselves against other universities, understand better the needs across different areas and improve how we can best meet your needs.