Create the conditions for success

We will create the conditions that enable all our colleagues to succeed in their endeavours.

Ambition

Our ambition is to create the conditions that enable all our colleagues to succeed in their endeavours, with all colleagues having pride in the University and their contribution to its success.

Mission

  • Create a fulfilling, appropriately-resourced environment and culture that supports all.

  • Lead with intent, supporting and developing teams to deliver our goals.

  • Deliver customer-centric, integrated, consistent and cost-effective processes, enabling responsible risk taking and innovation.

  • Be accountable and track performance to plan improvements.

Objectives

  • Enhance Surrey as a place to start and grow a career by creating a fulfilling environment where wellbeing is championed, and people can achieve their potential.

  • Build engaged and equipped teams through inspiring, inclusive leadership, creating a culture of collaboration, trust and transparency where people are empowered to deliver and innovate to find solutions.

  • Build a Surrey community by working in partnership with staff and students to strengthen a community identity that fosters pride and belonging and champions diversity, inclusivity and togetherness.

  • Use our resource allocation model to reward and underpin success, enabling excellence to grow and develop.

  • Develop our effectiveness and efficiency to drive up capacity for the academic endeavour, through simplified support models, digitally-enabled processes and seamless delivery.

Key activities to deliver

Make Surrey the place to start and grow a career

Lecturer speaks to students a busy lecture hall

We will enhance Surrey as a place to start and grow a career by creating a fulfilling environment where diversity and wellbeing are championed and where everyone can achieve their potential.

We will implement a range of initiatives for talent attraction, talent development, culture and engagement and rewarding excellence for all staff.

Delivery of the strategy is also dependent on a level of organisational change and will require an intentional evolution of our culture and practice towards creating an environment of trust, flexibility, empowerment and incentivising collaboration.

The Surrey community

Crowd cheering at the Surrey Sports Park

We will deliver an environment where our staff, students and postgraduate researchers feel an integral part of the Surrey community, as evidenced by the innate sense of belonging they feel at the University, and the pride they therefore exhibit.

We will ensure that all staff, students and postgraduate researchers know how they contribute to the wider university community. We will embrace a proactive approach to equality, diversity and inclusion to encourage all staff and students to appreciate and celebrate communities different to their own.

Fundamental to this will be enhanced and targeted communications with a new strategy ensuring staff and students are at the heart of delivery.

Resource allocation

People stood around a table

We will ensure high performance and success is rewarded, and growth is enabled. Our resource allocation model has been re-designed to enable a stronger alignment to need and opportunity in order to drive the academic endeavour, ensuring each academic department has the capacity to deliver an excellent student experience and meet its research and innovation objectives.

Professional services and digital enablement

Man sat working on laptop

We will drive evidence-based decisions and service improvements through digital enablement. This starts with simplicity; removing unnecessary bureaucracy while seizing the significant opportunity to improve processes and remove duplication.

We will lock in the resulting successes through digital enablement and automation, supporting innovation across administration. By extracting maximum impact with lean organisational design and clear value-for-money criteria we can invest in our strategy and continue to have a well-loved and well-cared for campus.

Measures of success

There are many ways in which we will analyse the success of our objectives but these top level measures enable us to see that we are creating the conditions in which our staff are able to excel within a financially-sustainable model.

70%

Staff engagement

≥3.5% per annum

Underlying operating surplus