ID273 I’m putting a man on the moon

The Idea

This idea takes its title from the apocryphal story of JFK’s visit to NASA, whereupon asking a cleaner what they did, he received the response ‘I’m putting a man on the moon’. This idea is therefore about every member of staff irrespective of role feeling part of contributing to the core missions of the university through education and research and contributing to a core purpose of societal and environmental transformation. 

This idea poses the challenge of ensuring that a university’s purpose of transforming society and the environment for the better through its education, research, operations and partnerships are embodied by all staff irrespective of role. In practice this may look like: 

1. Opportunities built into diverse disciplinary curricula for students to learn from Professional Services Staff about how environmental and societal transformation is embedded in their roles, embedding the university campus and its staff into the student learning experience. Students (and academic staff) learn about practical implementation of sustainability and how sustainability is part of diverse job roles from PSS staff in those roles; PSS staff connect with students in different ways developing understanding of student perspectives and teaching requirements. Students help drive sustainability improvements in different operations through bringing in new ideas, comparisons with researched best practice, integrated with increased practical understanding. 
2. increasing understanding of REF, TEF and KEF metrics developed through greater cross-functional working, embedding into performance reviews, training, PSS conference, town hall meetings, amongst mechanisms. This increased understanding has the potential to unlock new ideas to enhance the learning environment from those who manage it (thus enhancing the TEF); improving collection of impact metrics (and hence REF performance) from estates infrastructure used for research, for example estates staff collecting data on the impact of visits to SEND that they have run with visitors); increasing the collection of knowledge exchange metrics to support the KEF, through a greater variety of staff understanding of how external-facing activity can contribute to these metrics. 
3. Increased use of academic expertise in university campus and operation developments, helping build collaborations across teaching, research and campus operations

Why This Idea Should Be Considered

Universities are large complex organisations, with multiple missions with different drivers and expectations, and distinct job families across professional services staff and academic staff with distinct professional cultures. If all staff understand the university’s different missions, then this increases the opportunity to leverage benefit across different missions through any one initiative. This often goes unrealised due to a lack of understanding in individual areas of the different university missions, for example campus sustainability improvements could be designed to incorporate teaching and research missions, rather than being seen as just campus improvements 

How We Would Implement This Idea

Building a culture and structure that integrates rather than divides academic and professional services staff and places an understanding of organisational missions and purpose at the heart of individual and collaborative actions is key. This can in part be built into existing processes for example performance and review processes, team meetings, online learning, campus-wide communication. 
 
Things that will support the development of this culture include:  

1. Making it clear what is important to the university – its missions and purpose, and that everyone’s role contributes to those missions and purpose, achieved through onboarding processes, performance review and high level messaging 
2. An expectation that perspectives from both academic and professional service staff contribute to working groups around any new organisational development 
3. Workload modelling, reward and recognition procedures that specifically value and create time for cross-university contributions 
4. Induction and ongoing professional development around core university monitoring systems (e.g. TEF, REF, KEF) 

The new strategy provides the opportunity to bring the whole Keele community together around shared understanding of the university's missions and purpose.

What Success Would Look Like

• Strong organisational culture and sense of campus community centred on individual and collective contribution to university missions and purpose (including the role of Keele in catalysing societal and environmental transformation) 
• Enhanced outcomes in terms of research, education, local and regional impact (including as measured through TEF, REF, KEF) 
• Unlocked opportunities to enhance university missions 
• Enhanced understanding and respect across different roles and responsibilities 
• Enhanced use of institutional expertise in planning and decision making 
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