Supporting and Cultivating Staff
This gathering focused on ideas and strategies to support and cultivate staff community including navigating institutional expectations of the ADR role being a capacity building function. This includes managing grant expectations, disappointment, allocating support/resources and dealing with difficulties between remote, hybrid and in-person working schedules. It also includes the tension between university level expectations and the limited resources of ADRs.
Identified challenges
- Building collaborative research cultures and quality, and supporting disciplines which haven’t previously been grouped together.
- Difficulties in developing events calendars that bring together staff who have different work styles including remote, hybrid and in-person.
- Funding in-person events but not necessarily having great attendance, yet facing complaints from staff there is not enough in-person activities to foster connection.
- How to best develop partnerships and relationships across the different disciplines that comprise the School or Faculty to create more familiarity, and also support early and mid-career researchers.
- Difficulties related to restructures and working across multiple disciplines, centres, and schools to bring people together.
Strategies adapted by ADRs
- Running drop-in clinics or workshops on specific topics including research integrity, methodologies, ethics and publishing. These can be disciplinary or school focused to share different methods across the faculty and build understanding between different research skills. These are run in a mix of in-person, online and hybrid. As well as offering more casual online get togethers such as lunches to create more familiarity.
- If available, establishing committees or relationships between research directors and professional staff. Or holding meetings which brings leadership together.
- Informal ‘catch ups’ with new staff in the faculty, and regular meetings with directors. This is a means of informal mentoring and training, as well as becoming more familiar with staff research projects and interests to better link them in.
- Engaging with philanthropic teams to provide support and knowledge on applying for philanthropic or external grants, which is an area becoming more prominent for HASS.
- Showcasing and making more visible HASS and non-traditional research output, by including outcomes in data captures or asking leadership to read non-traditional research.
- Providing guidance in business development and commercialisation activities to showcase commercial and industry partnerships in HASS.
- Monthly seminars with a value based approach for research, showcasing the values that unites HASS and cuts across disciplines to bring people togther.
- Creating research ecologies separate from centrally funded centres to capture individuals who do not fall into institutions or centres. This provides everyone with a way to connect to a research program.
- Informal and formal mentoring programs, or scaffold building by senior researchers to assist with capacity building and bring in more junior researchers.
Some of the discussion also focused on managing disappointment and boosting morale with rejection, which is a large part of research. There was interest in different ways in which established researchers could show how they salvaged work from past disappointments and continued to build on it throughout their career, without demoralising early and mid-career researchers.
Professor Martin Holt, Associate Dean, Arts Design and Architecture, University of New South Wales, facilitated this gathering.
