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Involving staff and students

How we involve our community

Involving Staff & Students

Involving our WMS community is a crucial part of our Athena Swan work. We work closely with our staff and students to make sure we're listening to their concerns and ideas in order to make the Medical School an even better place to work and study.


Surveys

We hold a bi-annual Athena Swan survey, encouraging colleagues to share their thoughts about their experiences of working here, including their work-life balance, recognition, challenges and ideas for improvement.

The University also runs a biennial pulse survey for staff. We receive detailed information about the responses from colleagues across WMS and use this feedback to plan our Athena Swan actions as well.


    Focus Groups

    We run focus groups with members of our community on specific topics. Recent focus groups looked at career progress and development opportunities for Professional and Support Services staff, and flexible working. We also ran two specific focus groups to support those taking maternity/ paternity leave in April 2024.


      Annual People Priorities Event

      In June 2024 we held the inaugural People Priorities event. This event was designed to facilitate feedback from the WMS community in terms of what matters to them. Around 58 people attended and discussed future People strategy and KPIs. This will be an annual event with further outreach activities across our other WMS sites to ensure that all staff can engage with our People and ED&I work.


        Encouraging involvement in our SAT and working groups

        We encourage all staff and students who want to be actively involved in our Athena Swan work to join one of our working groups or our Self Assessment Team. Further information is available on the School's intranet, or please contact Professor Kirstie Haywood.