University Strategic Plan 2022-2025
This section is part of the Strategic Plan 2020-2025, which sets out the goals and priorities for the University, its faculties, departments, centres, institutes and schools.
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Enabling Strategies |
Commitments |
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Attracting and Retaining Staff
The University will continue to ensure that it can attract, retain and manage essential human resources, so as to meet its strategic and operational objectives. We will boost our efforts to employ academic, administrative, technical and industrial staff of a high calibre. It is essential to attract prospective candidates for vacancies and to focus on an efficient and effective recruitment process. The University will continue to recruit qualified and trained academics in specific disciplines and interdisciplinary areas, which will drive the calibre of the institution’s learning, teaching and research.
Retaining the right people presents a challenge. We will ensure that the conditions of work are competitive in the context of a rapidly changing market landscape and conducive to creating a positive working environment. The University will encourage mechanisms that motivate staff to reach high standards of service quality and that reward outstanding performance.
Organisational Culture
We will cultivate an environment that encourages professional fulfilment and promotes a culture of listening to ideas and providing support for new initiatives. The University will support career progression, which acknowledges the duties and professional conduct associated with each post. The current organisation chart would benefit from the streamlining of reporting lines to empower the workforce and improve collaboration.
Knowledge Sharing and Support
The University will play its part in ensuring that staff members are knowledgeable, informed, engaged and self-motivated. We will stimulate a culture of knowledge-sharing among staff to leverage their areas of expertise and to promote best practices in operational, curricular and infrastructural matters.
We encourage cross-departmental activities to inform, train and communicate regularly with staff on academic and administrative processes. Information sessions for staff will increase in frequency and will be organised at regular intervals. We will conduct periodic annual seminars, providing an additional opportunity for staff to suggest new initiatives to improve our administrative services.
Orientation and induction programmes will be provided automatically for new members of staff. We will consider setting up a formal process of mentorship to support new members of staff. Employees who move into new roles of leadership in any department will benefit from briefing sessions designed to guide them on educational processes, administrative procedures and people management. There is a need to establish clear guidelines for handover processes of leadership positions. There is also scope to expand team building and social activities for staff.
Professional Development
We will seek to improve administrative output and performance through leadership, good management, operational skills and greater involvement in decision-making. The University will continue to drive forward with internal training programmes for all its employees. Staff members are also encouraged to benefit from the unique educational environment and opportunities for learning in a wide variety of subject areas at their place of work. The development of staff will be designed to increase professional capabilities and advancement in their respective career paths.
Digitisation and Modernisation
Manual processes, in general, can be modernised by transferring them to the University’s digital platforms, thereby reducing the use of paper and increasing efficiency. The My UM mobile app can be made more relevant for staff by adding the functionality of services pertaining to human resources, including basic services such as online leave applications and information on salaries. The use of multiple databases that rely on similar information variables can be coordinated to reduce duplicate entry of information pertaining to the programmes of study, study units, timetables, Programme for Human Resource Requirements (PHRR) and remuneration of staff.