Employee experience - our strategic priority
UCEA prides itself in supporting our members to respond to an ever-changing employment landscape. Employee experience (EX) is an umbrella term for the holistic experience employees have with their workplace. The CIPD say that EX is about “creating a great work environment for people and helping them to be their best”. We asked our members what their employees valued about working in HE and the responses confirmed that purpose, meaningful work, wellbeing and employer value alignment have become increasingly important recently. Roshan Israni’s spring Enhancing the HE employee experience, together blog recognised that the employment dial has long since shifted, emphasising the importance for our sector to embrace an approach to enhancing the EX.
UCEA's EX launch event set out the ambitious work relating to our second strategic priority, 'supporting employer aspirations to enhance the employee experience'.
UCEA’s EX in HE event in September, showcasing the new resources, publications and case studies, certainly confirmed that our sector is embracing EX and more but that there is a lot to be done in this area. The importance of focussing on ‘moments that matter’ to an employee during their employment journey and communicating effectively the total reward offered to employees through a clearly defined employer value proposition were discussed by our participative audience and speakers.
We are delighted to provide members (only) with UCEA’s EX section of the website, housing resources to encompass UCEA's support for members to understand and provide solutions for addressing contemporary EX challenges, bringing together expertise from the sector and beyond, and shining a light on good practice.
The website hosts rich resources including these key publications:
- 'Employee experience in higher education - a guide'. UCEA's guide drills down into the EX background, concepts, themes and frameworks and provides models, case studies, signposting for more information and so much more.
- 'Total Reward and Employee Value Proposition in a ‘perma-crisis’ era', provides practical guidance, case studies, support and tools to enable members to better define, evaluate, improve and deliver the total reward package and the employee value proposition.
- 'Benefits of Working in HE' report, which is publicly available, provides an overview of the benefits that are offered by our member institutions and includes how these benefits compare.
Our sector's EX work is far from over and to that end we will continue to support our members with further materials, case examples and events. Our members are central to this, so please continue to share your valuable ideas, approaches, successes and experiences and feedback regarding our work in this area, including anything else we can do to support you.
If you have any questions or would like to add to our case studies please contact Roshan Israni, Deputy Chief Executive, Simon Sumner, Deputy Head of Employment Policy & Advice or Alison McGrand, Senior Employment Policy Adviser.
