Enabling strategy on people and talent

Recognising strength

The University of Dundee, with a population of over 16000 students and 3300 staff, is a complex, imaginative, and collaborative community.

The opportunities to participate in it are endless. That is one reason Dundee is consistently rated as one of the best places in the United Kingdom to be a student, while over 90 percent of staff agree that the University of Dundee is a great place to work. 

We are an engaged university. Our whole community has been engaged in the process of transforming our teaching, research, engagement, governance, recruitment, and student experience: all leveraged to sustain a diverse and inclusive culture, and create a positive influence in the world.

Through our Athena SWAN Charter Action Plan, Race Equality Charter and many other internal initiatives, we have taken actions to help ensure equity and inclusion.

We are each other’s friends, colleagues and supporters – working together to help one another achieve our ambitions.

Strategic vision

Our vibrant organisational culture will be nurtured by a deep commitment to equality and a celebration of our diversity.

We wish to inspire and support all colleagues to shape their own contributions to the organisation, whether through delivery of their formal roles, or being empowered to innovate and to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in their own work.

Our aim is to be an employer of choice for highly talented academic and professional service colleagues, demonstrating clearly how we provide an environment where staff perform at the very highest level.

Ours will be a dispersed model of leadership, allowing us to be dynamic and forward-looking in identifying the capabilities that are needed for us to achieve excellence in all aspects of our mission.

Supporting excellence

Culture

• We will engage proactively in the struggle to overcome all forms of discrimination and the ongoing impacts of historical injustice, within and beyond our community, supporting the dignity, health and wellbeing of all.
• We will energise and empower all staff and students to be fully engaged, to work effectively together and to be accountable for their own personal contributions to shared goals.
• We will support the career ambitions of staff in relation to both their personal and professional development and career progression, but in doing so also encourage them to take ownership and responsibility for their own careers and for the quality of their contribution.
• We will seek to embed practices, processes, and performance expectations that provide clear guidance as to how individual ambitions can best be aligned to our shared strategic aims.
• We will foster a culture of empowerment with accountability by grounding it in relations of mutual trust that will characterise our mode of engagement across the entire organisation.
• We will introduce appropriate opportunities for all to engage in open and transparent exchanges of perspectives as our strategy is implemented.
• We will review the structure and practice of our equality diversity and inclusion work so that it becomes fully embedded in all we do.
• We will take a holistic approach to supporting the health and wellbeing of all staff.
• We will promote the global outlook and impact of our staff.

Talent

• We will position the University as an employer of choice that will attract applicants with the greatest potential.
• We will introduce practices that deepen the shared understanding of excellence of academic and professional service staff.
• We will ensure that our reward and recognition practices represent best practice in the sector for all staff groups.
• We will provide exemplary staff development programmes that will facilitate all staff to be proactive in advancing their careers.

Transformative leadership

• We will embed strategic workforce planning into our integrated planning process.
• We will launch a set of initiatives to enhance the leadership qualities of staff at all levels.
• We will review our workload allocation models and practices to ensure that they are fair, transparent and maximally effective.
• We will complete a review of our staff appraisal processes.