Well, good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for hanging around for the for the last session.
I, I want to share with you some of my anxieties, actually, before I get going,
the first of which is why on earth would you want to hear what I've got to say?
I have I have my own ideas about what happens here in Oxford.
Most of those are probably completely wrong. Just as perhaps your ideas about what happens at Manchester may also be wrong.
So I'm a little bit anxious about perhaps having been set up as the entertainment for the end of the day.
My other anxieties, of course, that I'm all that stands between you and a drink at the end of the day.
So here goes. What I'm going to do is is really share with you what I what I have put together as a as a case study.
I think it is a story worth sharing about my library.
And of course, it's not my library. And I feel very much this afternoon the mouthpiece for my team and and my colleagues at Manchester,
because what's important about what I have to say is that this really is if it's a success story at all,
it's because it's an achievement of quite a large number of staff working together as one big team, and I feel very proud about that.
So I'm going to tell you the story from the point briefly, from the point at which I arrived in Manchester and then where we've got to so far.
It's been a it's been a big challenge. And I think we now at Manchester would say that we have a pretty good research library.
But what we're trying to do is, is move that good research library to become a great library in a modern sense.
And that is, in my view, that is only possible through the efforts of a large number of colleagues.
So I'm going to talk to you about the vision for this library and very briefly,
the kinds of things that we're trying to do in terms of of becoming more innovative and and very aligned with the strategy of Manchester University.
But really importantly, and I have to kind of manage the time to make sure I don't squeeze this bit at the end,
really importantly to to talk to you about how we're trying to achieve the next
sort of level of step change through culture change within the organisation.
So it's really a story of sort of from here to there and how we, how we hope to do that.
This is my team. This is and yes, it does rain quite a lot in Manchester, so I threw in some university library umbrellas.
This is my team and you'll see there's a bit of a diversity issue there, but apart from that, they are truly high performing.
And as I've said, I'm really proud to have them as colleagues.
I thought I'd throw in a couple of slides to show at least something about the strategic mission of the University of Manchester.
But of course, everybody does that,
and it can become tedious because if you look at the strategic plans of most research universities, they look very similar.
But I wanted to highlight a couple of things.
Well, first of all, you know, Manchester strives by 2020 to be to have global standing just like everybody else.
Global standing and world class research.
And I don't mind sharing with you that until only a few weeks ago.
The label at the top of this slide could have said Manchester 2015.
We're still our criteria for meeting the second bullet that world class research is, is to do with being in the top 25 universities in the world.
So we didn't make it by 2015. Now, our aspiration is to make it by 2020, but to draw attention to three and four on that slide.
And don't worry that you can't read anything on the side. It's not really there to be to be read.
It's to show you that this is a university. This is extremely driven and ambitious to move up the league tables.
But three and four there are to say that we are also taking very seriously our strategy for students, for learning and the student experience.
And Manchester tries very hard to identify what makes it distinctive compared with all the rest.
And we often say we want to be this, this and this, unlike Oxford and Cambridge and the Golden Triangle.
So we really do try to say what will make us distinctive and different.
And most important, there is is the last bullet, social responsibility,
where the university says that it will contribute to the social and economic success of the local,
national and international community by using our expertise and knowledge to find solutions to the major challenges of the 21st century,
and by producing graduates who exercise social leadership and responsibility.
So that's the strategy for Manchester that the library tries very hard to align itself to.
And there's just something there about the library aligning its vision with the statements that come from the the parent university so
that the University of Manchester Library will harness the pioneering heritage of Manchester to inspire a world of learning and research.
We will broaden understanding and cultivate intellectual growth in our students, researchers and local and international communities.
And that is a quote from our current strategic plan.
And I think I want to say at this point that when I did arrive in Manchester in 2008, January 2008, there was no strategic plan for the library.
And my sense was that this was an organisation that we all had a very strong sense of its own purpose and and a pride in itself as a library.
But actually the library might as well have been over here and the university over here there was very little common ground.
And so my promise to myself was that I was going to bring the library much closer to the university
and and to make us as relevant as we possibly could be to the aspirations of that organisation.
So say a little bit more about the library so that you you get a feel for for us where we are.
What about the university and the library?
We're a large university, 40,000 students, the largest in the UK with 300 library staff, not the largest in the UK.
Our budget is there £22 million per annum and we have quite a large estate.
This university came about recently.
The modern University of Manchester came about as a result of a merger with You Missed back in 2004.
So that is what has given us our increased research power, but also our scale, which is what it was all about in those days and continues to be.
So as a library, we've seen significant change since 2008 because I think that's why I was employed there.
And that changes continued as as you'd expect.
We have a focus on and some of the terminology I use, I sort of cringe when I think about the words that I know you use.
We talk a lot about whether we're quite open and overt about line management and reporting too.
And I noticed that the terminology that you use here at Oxford is much softer than that.
So I apologise if I alienate my audience in the first few slides, but here I talk about customers.
We use the term customers in the library, not because actually we think we're running a business and we want to be like that.
But just because we find it quite hard to always list all of our stakeholders and so customer is just a nice,
neat and tidy term that is used only as a last resort actually.
But more often than not we will use student, we will use researcher, just as you do.
Collections and connections. Well, we've heard a lot about that already today.
You don't need me to expand on that. I think we have invested a great deal in the library, in leadership development, starting with my own team.
That has changed in the time I've been at Manchester. We spent a great deal there, but also increasingly through the whole organisation.
And that last square there at the bottom right hand corner is just to indicate that increasingly it is, it seems to me, less necessary.
And here I am going to alienate my audience again,
increasingly less necessary to employ library professionals in all of the roles that perhaps we might have done at one time.
So one of the changes I've made is to professionalise in other ways the services that we offer, both internally to the library and to the university.
So you might ask, how are we doing? Well, I think we're doing okay.
And one of the obvious questions is, so why don't you just stop now and, you know, it's fine.
We're reasonably satisfied with our score at 93%.
It could be higher, but it's it's a good score.
I think it's Monday. We hear what the next the previous next year's sorry, 2014 score will be.
But I'm reasonably happy that every year since 2008 our score has gone up and it is the highest score across the university.
We've received a number of awards against something that Manchester culturally didn't really.
Go after. But as my team, my larger team of 300, have grown in their aspirations and their excitement for what we're doing,
they themselves are quite hungry to chase after any award that's going really, which is quite fun and quite rewarding.
So we've had some successes there. We base a lot of what we do now on market research, and I'll say a bit more about that in a minute.
And generally speaking, I would say and of course, you perhaps think I would say that wouldn't tie.
But I'm trying to be really honest and balanced in what I tell you this afternoon.
We are taken quite seriously within the University of Manchester,
and the pot of gold and gold in the middle is to represent really the message I send to my own colleagues about if we keep doing well,
they'll keep giving us the money and we can carry on with what we want to achieve.
So then it's about how do we get even better?
How do we move from good to great?
And you will know perhaps that title it's a Jim Collins book.
And that is that is my aspiration for this library.
How do we move from where we are now to where we want to get to in the future so that
the university keeps holding us in high regard and keeps handing over the cash,
basically, and of course, so that our students leave Manchester feeling very satisfied.
And our research profile is continues to improve.
So I'm going to now frame the quite a bit of the talk now really around.
These things. There are four headings in that box.
Down in the left hand corner and I'm going to use those to structure what I say.
Now something about so so in terms of trying to move from good to great.
And again, if you know the Marshall Goldsmith book, what got you here won't get you there.
Then I would say that those four things in that purple box, corporate purple box,
all the things that we are paying attention to in order to move us ahead.
One is around market intelligence.
It's about and again, we don't use this terminology, but I couldn't fit it all in the box if I didn't try to to paraphrase and summarise.
So this is about really understanding our communities better than we ever have,
really getting into the bones of the organisation and understanding what our stakeholders want from us.
What do I researchers want? What do our students want? And so on.
It's about having a strategic vision for this library so that all staff can sign up to it and feel involved in it and help to achieve it.
Then of course, it's bound to be about innovation,
because if you've got a strategic vision that isn't innovative, then you may have a bit of a problem.
And then it's about the culture, the culture of this library, to enable us to achieve the vision that we have set out for for ourselves.
So dealing with the first of those. Market intelligence, if I may use that term.
We have employed a company called Alltel or commissioned perhaps is a better word, a commissioned a company called Alta Lion.
I don't know whether you've come across them, but they are doing some or have been doing some ethnographic work with us.
And basically we got them to forget about all the new things that we're trying to do, the clever stuff, if you like,
but to actually look at our core services, the things that libraries are known for and that everybody associates with a university library.
And we said we really want to know, warts and all, how those services are perceived.
And what we find is that actually they're quite deficient. And I'm not all that surprised by that.
Actually, I know there are things wrong with even basic things like signage in our buildings,
but we got the whole story and we got over 100 video clips of students trying to use our services.
And on one hand, it was laughable, but actually it was utterly depressing to find that there is so much that we have got wrong.
In what we're trying to to provide at a very basic level.
Um, in fact if you're interested in know more about this work there was at the all UK members meeting last year.
I think I'm right, yes. Last year there were some presentations from Penny Hicks, my colleague at Manchester,
but also Soumaya from Mira from Cambridge and Susan Gibbons from Harvard, Yale.
And you might get that wrong. So I looked at Richard. Thank you from Yale.
And there's some really interesting stuff going on in this area.
But what I am pleased to say is that one year later, we asked all to line, to come back and to tell us,
okay, how is it now just one year and we will continue to do this and in one year the detractors.
So the people who actually were not happy with our services and were obviously the most inclined to talk about that experience with others.
So the people we need to really worry about, they have moved from 9% to 18% and 8% to 9%.
So what time do we have a drink? And promoters have moved from 38%.
I got it right away around this time 38% to 48%. So even that results is it was worth doing.
And as I say, we'll continue to do that.
Okay. Moving on now to the strategic vision, our purple plan, corporate cover that this is, as I said, the second strategy for this library.
And we adopted a new approach this time to the way we produce this.
I would say that the first strategy in 2008 nine, when I look at it now, I think actually it was quite inward looking.
It focussed quite a lot on putting things right, things like policies, collection, development policies,
the things that are that one might assume would always be there for a research library of fairly long standing.
So this strategy was going to be different. It is different.
And the boxes there on the right are the criteria that we use to determine whether something made it into the strategic plan or not.
Each thing, each idea, each strategic thought had to have a wow factor.
If it didn't amaze us, we wouldn't put it in our strategy.
It had to be bold. It had to be something, a problem, an issue.
It had to be something that is hard to crack. Otherwise it doesn't need to go in.
The strategy will just solve it. It need to be leading edge.
How is it going to enhance the reputation of this library with its students, its staff, its academics, its researchers, and also people like you?
How are we going to amaze you?
Probably it would be something quite big because actually we want to have a small number of big strategic projects to work on.
And. It needed to take us from here where we are to way where we want to get to.
So it needed to mean some kind of step change for this library.
Moving on to innovation. So this is a a team, a sort of self nominated team, really.
It's not hierarchically based in any way. These are people who identify themselves with good ideas and are creative.
And there's a bit of a shortage, I think, of creative people around. So this is a group led by Lorraine Beard, who's a member of my team.
And they have well, they continue they've been probably doing it for two or three years now, thousand and 12, three years.
They have been working with library staff, with academics,
and particularly with students to generate to act as a sort of catalyst to generate
bright ideas of any kind that might improve the library service and its reputation.
The first thing and this was back in 2012 13.
I don't know whether Richard's daughter knew about this. Perhaps she wasn't there then. No.
No, she wasn't. This was a prize of £1,000 for the best idea coming from students.
In a kind of Dragon's Den style competition, and you'll see if you know him.
On the right there is Phil Jupiters.
He was the host of our second Eureka Challenge, and he did a great job for us and he's itching to do it again because it was really such fun.
The students had a great time and we we loved them for it. So this is a competition.
If you know Dragons Den on the TV, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
Students entered, they were shortlisted, and then they were given, I don't know,
a minute or 2 minutes or something to present their idea to a small panel of entrepreneurs.
And of course, there's a winner. Bit more about Eureka.
It's about enabling innovation, of course. It's about changing student perceptions of us and what the libraries.
Therefore, it's about understanding their needs.
Because of course we may only shortlist, say, eight students for the Dragons Den.
Um, sort of awards and presentations.
But we got I think two or 300 in from them that we could then pick from pick ideas from and, and many of those have been implemented.
And it really helped to raise the library's profile.
So in order to get this off the ground, the library staff put together a whole really professional.
Sort of organised, professionally organised competition, and they designed their own advertisements that were out across campus and online.
And I thought I'd just show you, show you a couple of them, if only so I can have a glass of water.
So here's the first one that was found.
And. This.
Is anybody still saying? Okay.
Are you all awake now? There's another one, actually, that I really love, but I thought it wasn't fair on the member of staff who did it.
She's. It's about getting books to students more quickly.
So she goes around the library with roller skates on. But I thought she might not appreciate me showing that to.
So from that Eureka challenge and from numerous other initiatives,
we have been gathering in ideas and many of these have come from the staff themselves.
So, for example, a library game, it's called booked in.
It's no prizes for innovation there. And this is about engaging students through the gamification of library services, adding gaming mechanics,
rewards points, leaderboards, badges to existing student behaviour in the library.
Now, I don't know what you think of that. I'm not entirely convinced by it,
but one of the things I have to do is go with some of these ideas because I realise that I'm of a different generation.
So that's that's one of them. And we're doing that in partnership with Glasgow, actually, Glasgow University.
The next one is Booker Space now. This was the prize winner, the thousand pound prize in the first year of the Eureka Challenge.
And this was to deal with the frustration that students have when they turn up to a library and they can't get a seat because their peers,
their fellow students, have placed all their belongings in a desk with a PC, and they've gone off for a break, a long break, sometimes hours long.
So we were awarded the prize, and then we worked in partnership with an IT company to install the technology that
enables students to book ahead just to place a desk in the library book ahead.
And they're allowed to hold a space for have a space for themselves, for working for 3 hours with a 20 minute break.
They can book ahead or they can turn up and do it there and then.
But we're just seeing how that how that goes. And it seems to be quite successful.
And another idea, this was a sort of quick win, really wellbeing during exam times.
So we offer a tai chi sessions,
massage and meditation along with numerous other programs to do with revision clinics and help with procrastination actually.
Okay. So textbook rescue, this was another idea from students.
So we have been at the doors of our libraries towards the end of each academic year asking students,
you know, if you're not going to read your books again, why don't you pass them on to the next year?
And we've had several thousand books donated in that way.
And then there's a big Beano when the next year students come in and help themselves.
Quite simple ideas, but I hope you're getting the impression that this is really about a thousand flowers blooming and again,
encouraging everybody to work up these thoughts.
Click and collect. Now, this was the prize winner of the second Eureka Challenge and it's modelled on the John Lewis click and collect.
So students no longer want to go to the bookshelves to get their books.
They want us to get them for them and they will just come and collect them.
So what we we decided to or the panel.
I wasn't involved in the second year the panel awarded the prize to this because there was a thought that there was there
were some that there were the bones of an idea that even if we wouldn't just adopt the whole John Lewis partnership model,
but that there was something in that that we would explore.
And so that's what we're doing. But we rewarded the idea and and we'll now see what comes of it.
And we do have our first sleep pod in the A-League, the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons,
and it's been in the national press, but fortunately it was a positive story.
I did worry about that one. Come to Manchester and have a dog so I could just see it.
Did you lab? This is this is about wearable technology.
I'll say a bit more about that in a minute.
It's about using the learning commons that the digital library, if you like, as a place where people can come and trial new technology.
Exam extra. This is an extension of those tai chi and massage and those things,
but there's much more to it that's more serious about helping people through their revision.
And, uh, well, you can imagine the kinds of things that we will offer.
And support for personal devices.
Students turn up these days with all kinds of technology, don't they?
And the university was actually not really equipped to support that.
If you had if you had what the university supports, then God bless you. But you're on your own otherwise.
So we we now have a service to that's devoted to the whole the whole spectrum of student personal devices.
To say a bit more about did you lab and we did have hundreds of students turn up to trial the technology
so we we feel that that was something worth doing again and I think we've done it two or three times now.
So Google Glass, when it was in its infancy and looking like it had a future.
3D printing pens, virtual keyboards, Oculus Rift, the virtual reality staff, 3D printers I notice you have out here on display.
Um. And the whole idea of that really is to develop student digital literacy.
Of course, it encourages innovation again, and it has enabled the library to strike up new partnerships and improve our profile in the university.
This summer, we invested in deck chairs to put outside the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons and
we've actually been lucky enough to have some sun in Manchester this summer.
So that was a that was a good thing. Looks right here, right now.
This is a project that we are currently in the middle of and it is seeking to improve the student experience
by investigating student reading behaviour and implementing innovative models for providing textbooks.
In other words, Manchester, like most other universities or university libraries,
has not cracked the problem of access to high demand reading material for undergraduate students.
And we said, this is going to be our wow project for students.
We are going to crack this problem. So it is in our strategy to do that and we'll see how it goes.
We have a project called E-library that's about the future needs in accessing the digital library and related services.
And just last week, I announced to my team or my my staff,
I suppose that we will have a new program called Digital First that will
facilitate the transition for the library from a print based to a digital future.
And a lot of the work there will be internal.
It's of course, it will impact on our our students and our our researchers.
But we have a long way to go in being able to do that.
And we have to start with staff with ourselves. So that's it.
That's a new one. My learning essentials.
This is an award winning program for skills development amongst students, undergraduate and postgraduate students.
A lot of the courses here are curriculum linked. We take a blended approach and these these are not subject specific courses.
They are designed to be generic and they cover a whole range of things like assignments being critical.
My future so that we've brought in careers, the careers department to work with us on that.
We've brought in student services to work on my wellbeing, how to organise better referencing writing research skills, presentation skills.
The list is very long and it's on our website if you're interested.
But it's really about supporting learning while students are at Manchester and supporting their success, both while they're students.
But when they leave. Particularly when they leave.
And I know the students look younger and younger all the time, but these are actually that the kids who've come in to use the John Rylands Library,
because we have for the last probably four years we've had an education officer and we run programs for little children.
So we're talking about the future researcher early this afternoon.
And here they are. The these I think came in to do Doctor Who sleepover, I think it was.
And yes, we did do a risk assessment. And we have Harry Potter days and all sorts of things, digital preservation.
We've won an award, the Deepsea Digital Preservation Coalition Award for our Digital Preservation of a Poetry Archive,
a very large publishing archive of over 200,000 emails and 65,000 attachments.
A drop in the ocean compared with the problem. But we're pleased to at least have have done that.
I should say we have moved away from in structural terms within the library, we have moved away from subject librarians.
We now have developed teams around research research services, around services to support students in their teaching and learning.
And and then there's a team of people who are really responsible for our outreach into the university again,
so that we can be as strategically aligned as possible with what the university is up to.
So the whole team of people there who are out there,
the eyes and ears of of the rest of us finding out what's going on and also offering our services.
I haven't said much about support for research because most of the innovation is coming in support of students.
But a few things that we have done. And again, by moving away from a subject structure,
we I'm pleased to say that we can say that we have now quite expert people around the whole all all of the changes that have gone on in research,
open access research, data management.
I feel that we can now provide services in those areas and more in a way that we couldn't manage when we were organised by discipline.
And we have in the last two years. Two years ago, we established a John Rylands Research Institute, which is the University Research Institute,
a partnership between the John Rylands Library, our Special Collections Library and the Faculty of Humanities.
So now I'm onto the, um, the last bit really,
and that if you remember that purple box earlier in the presentation, this is about a hard look at our culture.
If you remember I said we're trying to move the library from good from where it is now to something great too, something to be really proud of.
And we can only do that if we have a really honest, hard look at the culture of the organisation.
So starting with my team, my senior team, but then actually extending this conversation to all staff.
We have had a number of workshops away days, that kind of thing to ask ourselves these questions.
Is our current culture enabling us or inhibiting us?
You can guess the answer. Do we need new thoughts, values and behaviours?
I guess the answer. Are we ready to face up to the barriers?
And I think I like to think that by engaging all staff with this conversation, most people said, yeah, actually we like the sound of this.
We're going to change it all. So I'm going to run through some of the things that we've been doing.
I've already mentioned that we have invested a lot in in leadership development.
Um. We have identified three groups of staff in the library who have not necessarily current leadership potential, but leadership potential full stop.
So. Including staff at relatively low grade.
So new entrants into the into the library identifying those people who show some kind of leadership potential and they are being treated differently.
I think this is a new departure for us. We are actually saying, yes, we're going to take these three groups and we're going to work with you.
We're going to invest in you. And that's been going on for 2 to 3 years.
And I can tell you it's already worth it. Managing business as usual, trying not to get drawn into business as usual if it isn't appropriate.
So in other words, managers and leaders letting go of the day to day, focusing on the strategic being, more time and cost conscious.
I talked about empowerment, becoming a more self-confident organisation.
Do we see ourselves as supporters or the support act of the university or are we actually partners?
Together in an academic mission. And I think that the library I inherited was very much the former.
We were the servants to our academic masters.
And that's something I really want to continue to change.
Pace and agility. Try to do things more quickly.
I've brought in some people from quite different previous employment and although I think the pace actually is a lot faster than it used to be,
they still think it's very slow compared with perhaps the private sector.
So we have to find the middle ground and what works for most people.
More business like. I've talked about that really and increased risk taking.
Is it safe and comfortable as an environment in which to try new things or if you get it wrong, do you get your head shot off?
Basically. So together with staff.
And I said that I started this with my own team.
We came up with eight ways of working and this was going to be our sort of blueprint for a for a new culture.
And the staff said, No, no, no, it's too many. We want five.
And so here they are taking collective responsibility to achieve our goals.
More questioning and working with greater openness and trust.
Empowering and supporting individuals to take more risks,
recognising and celebrating our differences and our strengths and delighting in our successes whilst also supporting each other through adversity.
A number of you have probably done something like Myers-Briggs.
You know, the personality profile. I can see if, you know, it's nice, Briggs or Belbin.
We've done all of that. We've done it to death, actually. But it now enables many of us to talk about why we do things like that and to have a
sort of mutual respect where perhaps once we were just irritated with one another,
it's not perfect, but I think it's helped. And the whole trust thing, I think, is where is where it really starts.
So improving the culture. Now, the next few slides I'm afraid are a bit of a a catalogue of some of the things that we're doing.
So we've developed recently a strategic workforce plan to identify looking, looking forward, looking to the library of the future.
What are the gaps in terms of skills for this library and how on earth are we going to address them?
And included in that is the whole notion of succession planning, which is where this idea of these groups of of future leaders has come from.
Cross team working, trying to increase people working across departments, but also having the opportunity to.
Go and try a different job and swap and shadow and that kind of thing.
Tim dysfunctions. Again, I don't know whether any of you have come across the book Violent Chianti The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
I'm not seeing anybody. No, this book. Well, it's a great book to read.
It's. It's a fable. It's written as a fable. But it's it's really, really a very good read.
And it talks about, in fact, is that there's a there's an assessment that you can do with your team to see, you know, where the dysfunctions are.
And in my team, my own leadership team and I'm going back now a couple of years, um, trust was an issue.
I think it's fair to say everybody's incredibly nice.
We love each other and we're all very nice to each other.
But I felt that the library was me because I was not feeling that decisions were being shared.
I felt as though I was really carrying that burden myself and I wanted much more of a, I sort of, um, well, I wanted more challenge, actually.
Surprisingly, I wanted more challenge because I think that's how we get better decisions.
I wanted more grit in the room and what used to happen doesn't happen anymore.
In fact, you have to be careful what you wish for, don't you? But what what used to happen was people would be very nice in the meetings.
There'd be a lot of looking at me, you know? And I think you should stop looking at me.
I wish they'd look at one another. And then outside the meeting there'll be lots of rumbling and corridor conversations
now and I really can hand on heart say this is this has changed dramatically.
We, we've talked a lot about, um, the elephant in the room.
What is the elephant in the room?
We even have an elephant, just a small one that sits in the middle of the table to remind us that things need to be said in the room.
And we've then had so it rather than after after the meeting.
And we've done a lot of work together in quite a personal way,
actually having conversations in pairs about what are the things I'm comfortable talking
to you about and what are the things I'm really uncomfortable talking with you about.
And we've cleared away a whole lot of baggage and people have really risen to that challenge.
I feel we make better decisions. We have a much better quality of debate in our meetings and it things are feeling very positive, actually.
So the team dysfunctions. LANGONE The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
There's a sort of pyramid that starts with trust at the bottom.
If you don't have trust and then you can't challenge.
Then you are a bit stuck for the rest.
Which sort of stops with accountability and attention to results at the very top.
So I commend that to you if it's of a of interest at all.
There are a few other things that we have a virtual wall of praise for any member of
staff to congratulate colleagues on things they're doing or things they've done.
We have an ideas wall of a similar style for people to dump their their best ideas.
We've changed meeting formats. My senior team meetings now all weekly, but last for an hour only.
We usually have about two items on the agenda, but we always have coffee beforehand because we are very hard working,
totally driven, task orientated, bunch of people who never.
Talk about anything other than work and actually getting to know one another as human beings has made a big difference to.
Mythbusters. So Rachel Beckett here on the far right, in case some of you know her,
she is head of special collections and leads that John Violence Research Institute from the library side.
She leads this team of people and their job is to bust all the myths that have been kicking around the library for a long time.
Um, is it true that there's 30 years worth of special collections in the basement of the John Rollins Library and catalogued?
Is it true that there really were wild parties every week in the good old days before John King is there are no jeans policy.
Is it true that when John wears her leather skirt, bad news is coming?
So improving the culture again a little bit more on this.
Um, performance management has has had quite a, an increased profile and reward and recognition.
The two go together.
It's about developing people, it's about rewarding good work, recognising good behaviour, but also doing something with the other people.
Does everybody need to stay in this organisation? People who chair meetings, we expect them to be trained to do that properly.
We won't tolerate port sharing anymore. Changes to the work environment.
Whereas this time next year the LIV, the main library of the university will be completely gutted in three phases over three years.
Bad news for your daughter, Richard. And when we reopen, I can't say reopen because we're not closing.
But when that work is finished, all of all of the staff in the library will be working in an open plan,
hot desk environment, including me, believe me, because I do believe it's better for communication and collaboration.
And we're giving more space to. Our students, really, and people who need the library changes the work environment,
devolving as much as possible, including finance, including budgets.
A lot of these. I've covered no elephants. Um.
Again, something that's been introduced by staff in the interests of us all knowing one another as well as we possibly can,
agreed to, which possibly doesn't mean anything at Oxford, but it's the lowest grade of the lowest pay grade.
A grade two member of staff will come and interview me every supposed to be every month.
I'd say it's about every two months. And then that gets published in the staff newsletter and I have to find something to give away about myself
so that there's a feeling that people are getting to know me better because otherwise I'm very scary.
Staff have had resilience training. We've had some of us have had training on how to make an impact that so that's sort of the
one of those groups of people that we're investing in for for leadership in the future.
And I think a lot of this is repeats. Some of the things I've touched on, there's a lovely picture there of one of these groups.
This is called the Leadership Development Network.
These are people who are not necessarily managers at the moment, but they're people who display leadership behaviours.
And they're working on a thing. It's called feedforward.
So rather than feedback, it's about giving advice before you've tried to do something rather than the rather negative concept of.
Well, you didn't get that right, did you? Talking about something.
This is a challenge I'm facing. What would you do about it?
And you can gather. What happens is one row stays still and one row moves down one place every time.
So if I have an issue and I want to get some ideas to help me solve that, I get maybe 20 ideas to take away with me.
Some of them are thrown in the bin, some I might keep.
But this has really helped to free up the culture, I think, and I really notice the difference in that group in the two years they've been running.
That's it. Thank you very much.