Helping our staff develop and thrive
Antony Willott, Director of Planning and Council Secretariat (PACS), shares how PACS has developed its support for professional and career development, as part of a focus on Professional Services Together.
When I reviewed our 2021 People Survey results, professional development emerged as a key area where staff felt we could do better as a department. So, we set our ambition following a rich collective discussion at an all-staff departmental away day, and it has since formed a key element of our departmental Professional Services Together action plan – supplementing our staff’s involvement in broader Professional Services Together initiatives such as the mentoring programme and University Careers Club.
Developing leaders
We established the PACS Wider Leadership Group (WLG) to bring together colleagues in emerging leadership grades to help shape and lead internal projects. Members of WLG are responsible for leading working groups in areas beyond their substantive roles, providing them with the opportunity to demonstrate leadership skills, whilst also ensuring we have individuals dedicated to pushing forward the priorities identified in our Professional Services Together action plan. Our change agenda is shaped and driven by the members of WLG and the working groups they lead.
Structured support
Members of WLG led the creation of a PACS Professional Development Framework outlining our approach to professional development. This sets out the support available for colleagues’ professional development within PACS, as well as other University resources. It provides information and guidance on how to make use of the opportunities available – and commits department leadership to encouraging every member of staff to spend ten hours quarterly on some form of professional or career development.
The challenges of being small
PACS is a small, relatively young department in its current shape, which presents both opportunities and challenges for meaningful investment in professional development. With around 40 members of staff in total, the small scale of our teams means providing a resilient service is a particular challenge – a problem we are acutely aware of after the pandemic. Our ambitions to work collaboratively and provide a service that draws upon the full expertise available in the department are often challenged by a lack of collective understanding and awareness of how each part of the department works, or the skills our colleagues possess.
Thinking creatively
To address both challenges, we identified our departmental single points of knowledge – areas where we were heavily reliant on one or two individuals with built up institutional knowledge – and used these to create a repository of training opportunities for staff. This broadens resilience across our teams whilst also supporting colleagues to develop new skills and prepare for the next stage of their career.
Teams within PACS also contribute a range of shadowing opportunities so colleagues can experience and better understand how other parts of the department work. We constantly rotate some support roles for key committees to build resilience and to increase the number of colleagues with experience of supporting major committees.
We mapped past and present colleagues’ career pathways through the University, showcasing the diversity of Oxford-wide careers. Other team members shared reflections on their personal journeys alongside their career pathway, as inspiration for colleagues considering their career development.
These resources, alongside our revised Personal Development Review (PDR) and regular review process, provide the space and structure for managers and staff to discuss development openly and honestly.
Supporting each other
Another self-generated initiative from WLG members was our PACS Professional Development Club (PDC). Open to all departmental staff, the PDC is voluntary and encourages regular progress on personal professional development goals in an informal setting. Colleagues meet online, share ideas and their plans for an hour-long session, spend around 45 minutes on professional development and then meet again to share their progress. The idea of a development club has since been adapted as a University-wide initiative.
Sharing knowledge and best practice
PACS benefits hugely from links into broader professional communities at Oxford, and our staff are active members of professional communities within and beyond Oxford. They have helped to set up two Communities of Practice – ‘Continuous Improvement’ and ‘Growing Good Governance’ – which allow us to consult widely, share best practice and crowdsource the troubleshooting of problems.
We are very supportive of secondments as a department, with approximately two to four staff either away on secondment or joining us through the same route at any given time. We are strong believers in the benefits of knowledge exchange and sharing of best practice that comes from secondments.
Into the future
We held another departmental away day in December to think about how well we delivered against our Professional Services Together ambitions, and to assess the results of the People Survey 2023 to help us decide what we’ll focus on next. We’ve still got a way to go to ensure we have the right culture, expectations and resources to really support our staff as best we can – but I’m confident we’re moving in the right direction.
