Higher education and research institutions globally are experiencing significant levels of change. Societal and economic shifts require higher education and research to adjust accordingly, and place considerable demands on leadership and governance. As part of our 2024-25 global member benefit theme Governing and Leading Transformation, together with governors and academic leaders, we will take an integrated and people-centred approach to explore change in our contexts.
Exploring change
The nature of this change varies across the global contexts of Advance HE’s membership, whether advancing sustainable development, shifts in funding models and the need for income diversification, rapidly integrating AI, adapting to legislative changes, or securing financial sustainability. In all contexts, change and transformation is a non-negotiable for institutions to continue to survive, thrive and deliver impact through their research and teaching.
We’re increasingly seeing academic leaders at the forefront of change implementation, being asked to reshape or restructure their institutions and academic areas to align with rapidly evolving institutional strategies. As the pace of change is rarely calibrated with the processes supporting and incentivising change in institutions, it leads to an increase in workloads, both practically and psychologically putting even greater amounts of pressure on systems and the people in them.
The scope of the task can range from mitigating colleague absences or pivoting on priorities, logistical challenges in creating spaces and opportunities for a collective response through to navigating relationships and team dynamics, and finally more strategically, reimagining new ways of embedding adaptability in work and organisation design.
Mental health and wellbeing
All too often this has a significant impact on individual mental health and organisational wellbeing. This impact manifests in different ways:
- poor wellbeing at an individual level (Hubbard & Bassa, 2023) may impact on cognitive ability, focus and experiences of anxiety and/or low mood, poor physical health and/or substance abuse, leading to reduced engagement, performance, productivity, and increased sickness absence.
- poor wellbeing at an organisational level impacts on a sense of cohesion and this can reduce the leadership ability to channel energy towards results, and ultimately achieve the outcomes desired from the restructure and/or the change. (Ansell & Trezona, 2021)
Our hybrid and remote work environments and the transformational change desired, require us to think differently about how change is conceived, agreed, and implemented; classic, top-down linear models of change management were not designed for this context (Hodges, 2024).
Whilst no one is underestimating the scale of this challenge, change at this scale and speed provides a wealth of opportunities, not least the alignment of purpose and people in this collective endeavour. We want to connect governors and leaders to explore those opportunities and to learn from others’ experiences.
Convening for impact
Together with governors and academic leaders, we will explore a holistic and people-centered approach to enabling and empowering impact in restructure and change, co-creating practice with and for the sector.
An integrated or systems approach focuses on the organisation as an interconnected set of components that work together to achieve common goals, with an emphasis on understanding and optimising the entire system rather than individual parts.
A people-centered approach prioritises the needs, experiences and wellbeing of individuals within the organisation, with an emphasis on empathy, collaboration, and the human aspects of change.
“By putting people at the heart of a business transformation, it enables agility and adaptability which are vital for organisations that are having to rejuvenate due to the changing environments in which they operate.”(Hodges, 2024)
Member Benefit
Within our global context, we see the opportunity to learn from recent change and transformation initiatives across the globe and seek to co-create and share practice with governors and academic leaders to support people-centered change in response to different challenges. The examples that we will seek to draw upon vary from major restructures in Australia and the UK to the recent establishment of technological universities in the Irish HE sector. They might also include the rapid shift happening in the Middle East around AI.
As part of this Member Benefit:
- we will develop a light-touch Theory of Change to ensure we are designing for impact and to connect to our evidence base
- we will work in parallel to teams accessing our Collaborative Development Fund with the same focus, to share learnings and insights
- we will work with different groups of governors, academic and professional services colleagues in the UK and internationally, in different ways at different times of the year, culminating in a summative event in June/July 2025.
To facilitate this work, we intend to establish groups that broadly fit into four categories. These groups will overlap, often occupying different roles concurrently and will be different dependent on organisational size:
- those involved with change oversight, direction and challenge (eg Governing bodies, Vice-Chancellors)
- academic and professional services leaders involved with change design and scope (eg Deputy Vice-Chancellors, Deans, Directors of Professional Services)
- academic and professional services leaders involved with change implementation (eg Heads of Department, Heads of HR/OD)
- those impacted by change (eg academic and professional services colleagues and students).
We will be offering a range of opportunities to engage for each of these four groups, and further details will follow.
We are excited to initiate this Member Benefit with two different and complementary opportunities for those academic and professional services leaders involved with change implementation:
We invite you to register your interest in updates and to share this opportunity widely within your organisations.
References
Ansell, K. & Trezona, M. (2021) Transforming organisations from student to board – reflective guide. Advance HE.
Hodges, J. (2024) People Centric Change. London. Kogan Page.
Hubbard, S. & Bassa, B. (2023) Leadership well-being, well-thinking, well-doing. Advance HE.