The meeting's primary focus was on development of UQ's strategic direction for 2018 and beyond. But I needed to pursue a couple of 'professional services transformation' items arising from the minutes, while the V-C took the opportunity to brief Senate on the recent Federal Budget.
So, having raised at a couple of previous meetings the concerns of (a) authors of a report to Senate's Risk Committee and of (b) professional staff as reported to me by a senior manager of the University, that the lack of consistency of approach in the 'transformation' was negatively affecting morale and presented a risk to the business, the Chancellor invited the Chief Operating Officer to respond.
COO, Greg Pringle, said that while the Finance & HR transformation had occurred under ESS, there were transformations that he and the DVCR (who was not at the meeting) were overseeing. He said that restructures of ITS, Legal Services, and Corporate Operations & Risk did not need an ESS approach because they were contained to a single (or two) operating units and did not need UQ-wide consultation. This I could accept, and I acknowledged as much in my response.
In relation to the institution-wide review of OH&S resources and organisation, he said "we are not looking at the functional model, but efficiencies". Well I guess the proof will be in the pudding when we see the report of the review.
He then spent time cataloguing service improvements and efficiencies that had been achieved or were in the pipeline in P&F and other areas under his command, while boasting that his direct reports had been given a KPI of not exceeding their budgets in 2016, which they had achieved and were on track to do in 2017.
I responded that while the list of improvements was interesting (and probably in most if not all cases worthy of applause), it, and whether the operating budget of the COO portfolio was under control, were not relevant to the issue of inconsistent approaches to transformations that had UQ-wide impact. The COO's response did not address the Risk Committee report's concerns. It did not deal with the changes occurring in the DVCR's portfolio (particularly the changes implemented by the Graduate School that have drawn widespread criticism and resistance from staff, both professional and academic, involved in RHD candidature management).
The Chancellor decided it was time to move on with the business of the meeting, but I had to remind him that the COO had been slated in the agenda papers to respond about the Exception Based Recruitment Strategy for Professional Staff. You might recall my report from the last meeting at which the Vice-Chancellor claimed that the initiative wasn't working anyway in terms of reducing professional staff numbers funded from operating funds.
Greg Pringle said that there had been a drop of 3.2% in professional staff numbers since the initiative was implemented in September 2016. That's 160 full-time equivalent jobs, he said. However there was concern that contractor costs might have grown and this was being investigated, he added.
There was no response to the points I had made at previous meetings about a lack of communication with staff on the initiative's progress, whether it had targets, an end-date, and reports of Faculties and Institutes competing to be the OU with the least FTE reductions so as to "stay under the radar". So I repeated them. The V-C said there are no targets, did not answer about an end-date or any pressure on OUs to "perform", and said that the Federal Budget just made the strategy more relevant. I suggested that some leadership be shown in communicating the objectives, progress and future of the strategy to staff.
At this point one of the external Senators suggested that what I had raised were "operational matters for management, not Senate". I responded that Senate had been receiving regualar reports from the V-C on staff culture, at Senate's request, until ESS started (when the culture reports quietly stopped) and that he had been reporting on ESS since. I went on to say that the matters I had raised about the contrast between the ESS approach to business transformation (trumpeted as a model of consultation) and the approaches other executives were taking, and the contrast between the transparency of ESS and the opaqueness of the exception-based recruitment strategy's progress were relevant, given the impact on staff morale and workloads and the risk this poses. Besides, if they are good enough for the V-C to bring to Senate's attention, they are good enough for a Senator to comment on and ask questions about.
And people wonder why the professional staff sometimes feel like second-class citizens.
The V-C went through the cuts to higher education funding announced in the Federal Government's budget and gave a helicopter view of what they might mean to UQ. A briefing note on the possible implications to the University is being prepared for Senate. The V-C added that the Go8 and Universities Australia organisations are lobbying against the passing of budget legislation.
An brief update on a confidential strategic initiative was given.
Then the Provost, Aidan Byrne, led a strategic planning session about UQ's near future, including a SWOT analysis, the question of how big UQ should be and the mix of international and domestic students, semesters vs trimesters, and strategic focus areas. Further work will be done by Senate at a full day retreat on campus in August.
