Conference sub-themes

Achieving staff engagement

The quality and quantity of the learning, research, and services provided by your institution are a direct result of the efforts of all of your staff. Are your staff highly engaged and committed to achieving the mission of your institution? If your institution enjoys high levels of staff engagement, please consider sharing with conference participants how this has been achieved. We would like to know how you define, sustain, and measure staff engagement and about initiatives taken to improve engagement.

HR and the student experience

The services provided by the HR function should be aligned to support the achievement of the goals of the organisation. How does your HR function support the student experience? What steps has your HR department taken to directly or indirectly improve the student experience? Please consider sharing how your HR department is focused on improving the student experience.

Transforming HR

Today’s HR department is under pressure to provide accurate, timely, and reliable transactional services. At the same time, there is a growing requirement for HR to provide strategic expertise to the human aspects of planning, development, leadership, and operations, which often requires a different HR skill set. Tensions may arise when HR must maintain high levels of transactional services, and have the credibility to be a strategic contributor. If your HR department is successfully providing strategic and transactional services you may wish to share the factors contributing to this achievement. Conversely, if your HR function is struggling to move from the transactional to transformational, please consider sharing what you consider the obstacles to be and how you propose to deal with them.

Best practice in performance evaluation and management

The annual performance management process in some institutions is a 'groan and bear it' activity, if it happens at all. However, change is upon us. Agencies that fund and/or accredit institutions now want to see evidence of good performance management practices. Some universities are linking explicit rewards to the performance management process as a means of driving improved academic performance. Such developments pose great challenges for HR functions.

Are you aware of performance management processes that: are collaboratively developed and implemented; have objective, measurable outcome criteria; align staff effort to institutional goals; have a developmental component; are not labour intensive; and are well received? This is a challenging topic and the conference will be an excellent venue to share experience and best practice.

Leadership and change

Change leadership requires different skills and abilities from leadership in a static environment. Change leaders often need to manage the day-to-day activities of running a business or function, and also lead the transition to a new business model.

As a change leader you need to convince everyone, from your immediate reports to the security person on the gate, of the need for change, while giving them the opportunity to share in the vision through active participation, so that it becomes more personal to them and motivates them to accept the change agenda. If you have a story to tell about how you have led a major change initiative, we would love to hear it.

The impact of technology on higher education

Technological change will alter the perception of the university from a one-dimensional physical concept to a multi-dimensional physical and online one. It is changing not only the way that academics teach, but also the way that students learn with distance education, sophisticated learning management systems, and the opportunity to collaborate with other researchers on a global basis.

Campus administration is also undergoing change, with HR not being an exception, through e-recruitment, self-service and social networking all changing the way things are done. We want to hear how technology has changed your university either within HR itself, or the way that HR identifies and supports the introduction of new technologies, through such things as training and development, adoption of new media as part of change consultation, elimination of manual processes, or revised promotional criteria etc. that encourage adoption of new methodologies.

Academic workloads

The need to ensure that academic work is allocated fairly and equitably has resulted in the development of workload allocation models in many universities. Such models identify the different activities undertaken by members of academic staff and allocate an agreed time or weighting to each activity. The aim is to allow academics, their departments, and their institutions to construct a clear and comprehensive picture of who is doing what and how much time they are dedicating to it.

Increasingly the data in workload models is becoming part of the overall HR management process, either to measure productivity or as a means of fostering excellence in teaching or research. Tell us about how your institution manages academic workload and how that process fits into the overall HR management framework.

HR and governance

One of the key decisions that a governing body of a university makes is the selection of a new vice-chancellor or president. Increasingly, governing bodies rely on professional HR advice on the selection process. Furthermore, HR functions are often accountable to the staffing or HR committees of governing bodies, which in turn establish the framework for HR governance by approving HR policies and procedures. This may include policies, procedures, classification structures, promotion rules, etc.

Despite the seeming complexity of HR governance, the process provides an opportunity for HR directors to develop effective and fit-for-purpose HR policies; review and update procedures; garner support for training and development initiatives; and ensure that HR expertise is represented as part of the skill set of committees that deal with the management of staff. What is your HR governance framework and how do you manage it? We want to hear why you think it is an effective model.

HR and knowledge transfer

Knowledge transfer is a conscious effort to get the right knowledge to the right people at the right time so that it can be shared and put into action (Mathis and Jackson (2010), p.254). So how does HR contribute to a university being able to utilise its knowledge to achieve a competitive advantage? What are you doing at your university?

Examples might include:

• Developing an open culture, which encourages the importance of sharing knowledge, e.g. a performance management scheme, focusing on the development and sharing of knowledge
• Encouraging senior leaders to support knowledge management initiatives
• Facilitate knowledge sharing through networks and communities of groups with similar interests
• Motivating people to share knowledge through appropriate reward systems