UHR keeps a keen and interested watching brief on matters of equality, diversity and inclusion in our universities, supporting where we can, helping colleagues to understand the issues and the emerging and changing understanding of how the HR profession in higher education can work and influence for the good of all of our staff and students. For instance we are proud that the UHR Awards helps us to focus on fantastic work being carried out in this field every year.
In terms of our own processes and activities we are keen to do more and better in helping marginalized groups come to the centre of the discussion, where their views and perspectives can be heard, and their ideas acted on. In this we are doing our best but we are very ready to listen to ideas of how we could do more and differently.
For instance we try to ensure diverse and inclusive representation at key annual events including the UHR Conference, where we look at our speaker panels through the diversity lens, and encourage those organisations working with us to do the same and welcome participants from a wide range of backgrounds. We aim to be inclusive and diverse in everything we do, but as with many organisations we are still taking steps one at a time and arguably not moving ahead as quickly as we could. We’d be interested to hear what you think.
Professional HE Services Ltd (PHES – our parent organisation) has recently launched a new Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Policy, alongside a new Dignity At Work Policy, and the UHR team contributed fully to these, and were very pleased to be able to add our knowledge and experience into this work. We’re confident we have a much stronger underpinning understanding around these issues than we previously did.
This website was refreshed in late 2022 and gives us better options for collection of EDI data than we had before, which help us to understand our membership better and the chance to create new tailored workstreams to support wherever that is needed.
