The FBS EDI Team is funding researchers at the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change to understand staff wellbeing while working at UCL during the COVID-19 pandemic and their views of the new hybrid working arrangement.  We are especially interested in gathering viewpoints from a range of UCL staff, particularly minoritised groups such as Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority staff and staff with disabilities.

Your involvement will help UCL understand how to better support your wellbeing at work, so please volunteer to take part.  The interview will only take about 30 to 40 minutes (at a time of your convenience, during either May or June) and you will receive a £25 voucher (or the equivalent charity donation) as a token of our appreciation.

Please contact Professor Leslie Gutman l.gutman@ucl.ac.uk and/or Rachel Perowne at rachel.perowne.19@ucl.ac.uk if you are interested in participating and/or have further questions before 15^th June.

UCL is a diverse organisation. However, this demographic diversity does not imply inclusion. Colleagues across the Faculty have been grappling with issues of intercultural communication and engagement and seeking to improve their communication skills, particularly with their international students. To address this, Anouchka Sterling (Faculty Religion and Belief Equity Lead) created and developed a series of workshops exploring these issues of intercultural communication and inclusion, with Stephen James, a cross-cultural communications consultant.

The workshops considered two primary needs: psychosocial safety, and intercultural competence and practice. By raising awareness of the importance of psychosocial safety, and discussing specific intercultural communication competencies that can lead to psychosocial safety, the workshop helped participants to develop tools for appropriate intercultural practices.

Participants ended the session by making pledges to apply their new skills and tools in their working life within the Faculty of Brain Sciences, including implementing active listening and responding to micro-aggressions.

Feedback from participants include:

“I thought the workshop was fantastic. I learned about concepts that I was not familiar with, the discussions and advice were really useful, and making pledges made it feel concrete.”

“It is fantastic that you are organising this and help us create a more inclusive environment within FBS. And I am definitely hoping there will be more events on this topic in the future.”

The Faculty has plans to run these workshops again in the next academic year, and to explore offering this training to our students; to give everyone the opportunity to improve the inclusivity of our working culture.

Ultimately, intercultural competence is a journey, not a destination, and is the key to creating psychosocial safety along the way. In a world where these skills are becoming ever more necessary and valuable, it is essential that we shape our institutional culture accordingly.

Please SAVE THE DATE for the first Away Day for Professional Services and Technical staff from the Faculty of Brain Sciences on Monday 27 June, 10:00 -16:00.

Results from the Faculty of Brain Sciences staff survey revealed only 36% of Professional Services and Technical Staff feel they have the same career development support as academic staff, and only 40% feel they are treated with the same fairness and respect.

The aim of this Away Day will be to encourage and facilitate:

• Networking among all staff
• Discussion of career progression opportunities

We hope you’ll join us, and look forward to seeing as many of you as possible on the day!

Please register here.

Kind regards,
The FBS Away Day Committee
(Wing-Chau Tung, Avili Feese, Ciara Wright, Linda Ali-Brown, Laura Allum, Tracy Skinner, Ana Faro, Debbie Hadley, Yana Kitova, Trudy Muggridge, Sakina Naibkhail, Faith Poyser, Tayjal Tailor).

The Faculty of Brain Sciences is relaunching its Professional Services and Technical staff mentoring scheme.

The Faculty staff survey 2021 showed that only 36% of PS/T staff feel their Institute/Division support their career development equal to academic staff, demonstrating the real need for schemes such as this. Mentoring is a valuable method to support career development, for both mentors and mentees.

Last year, mentees reported gaining a better understanding of career development, and support identifying gaps in their skills and knowledge. Mentors reported a personal fulfilment from supporting junior staff progression, and improved communication and personal skills.

As we usually have more mentees apply than mentors, please consider signing up to be a mentor. Benefits of being a mentor include:
• Developing leadership and management qualities.
• Reinforcing your own knowledge of your profession.
• Increasing your confidence and motivation.
• Enhancing your CV.

Sign up to become a mentor or mentee here.

Registration will close Friday February 11th.

Looking back at what we have achieved together over the past year, we have made significant progress advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion within the Faculty of Brain Sciences, particularly considering that we have been working through a global pandemic. The initiatives and work described below are merely the tip of the iceberg of the enormous amount of work that has gone to progressing our vision of Brain Sciences being a great place to work and study, where all members of our community belong and achieve their potential.

Supportive governance:

EDI Leadership: Equity Leads covering gender, race, disability, LGBT+, and religion and belief have spent the past year understanding their focused areas, and regularly collaborate to ensure our equity work is intersectional. Directors of EDI and Inclusion Leads within each Institute/Division have taken a proactive leadership role to ensure work conducted at Faculty/UCL-level is effectively implemented within their departments.

EDI Partnership: The EDI Team has worked in partnership with the Faculty HR Network to ensure our policies and practices are developed effectively in collaboration.

Inclusive culture:

Kitchen catch-up: For the past few months, colleagues across the Faculty have been meeting over a coffee for a 15 minute catch-up. One member of staff said: “I really enjoyed meeting my match (and in fact we are hoping to meet up in person when we are on campus a bit more regularly); it’s a great initiative to meet someone I would most probably never have met otherwise”.

Carers support scheme: With schools and offices closed, many of us have experienced immense difficulty trying to maintain normal, healthy working habits. To mitigate the impacts for staff with caring responsibilities, UCL set up a carers fund. However, we recognised that between the high costs of childcare, and high demands of completing a PhD or Professional Doctorate, continuing working during COVID-19 has been particularly challenging for our PGR students. To support them through this difficult time, the Faculty of Brain Sciences allocated £7,500 towards alleviating the pressures of caring responsibilities. 11 applications were successfully granted funding towards childcare costs, learning resources and travel costs to caring duties. One PhD student said of the scheme, “I am grateful for the help FBS has offered – both financial and pastoral – during this challenging period.”

LGBTQ+ network: our LGBTQ+ Equity Lead, Carolyn McGettigan, established the Faculty’s LGBTQ+ staff and research student network, opening the conversation on key areas to progress inclusion, from raising visibility of our LGBTQ+ community, hosting social events, organising training and workshops.

Educated community:

Race equity: Our staff have a serious interest in learning more about equality issues. Through a series of training workshops on racial bias, 228 members of staff have engaged in discussing topics such as whiteness and white fragility and debunked myths on the concepts of race. One attendee said of the training: “A really engaging thought-provoking session. I liked that we unpacked so much and there were honest but kind and respectful conversations.”

Cultural awareness: Workshops on intercultural competence later this July aim to improve communication and understanding between our staff, to enable cohesion and collaboration between our diverse staff groups.

PS&T mentoring scheme: the Faculty relaunched the professional services and technical staff mentoring scheme, to support staff with unclear career pipelines. 40 staff were successfully matched, and professionally trained in mentoring by an external mentoring consultant.

Data-driven actions:

Surveys and focus groups conducted throughout the year have covered issues such as career progression, recruitment practices, and bullying and harassment, so that our EDI strategies and priorities are well-informed and meet the needs of our staff and students. 880 staff in the Faculty completed the general staff survey, providing us with a meaningful dataset to guide our actions for the next academic year.

Athena SWAN success:

Three of our departments, IoN, IoO and PaLS, have now successfully achieved Silver Athena SWAN awards, recognising their significant impact in advancing gender equity. IoPD submitted their application for Bronze, setting them on the path to progress meaningful change. We hope to continue this successful streak when EI and DoP apply in the next academic year.

Thank you to everyone for contributing towards driving change within the Faculty. We’re looking forward to making further progress in the next academic year.

Anna, Vice Dean (EDI)

Ciara, Athena SWAN Coordinator

There are many positives to remote working; no more hour-long commutes punctuated with train delays, no more spending £5 on a cup of coffee, no more cleaning colleague’s food from the shared microwave.

However, losing some of the more mundane aspects of our lives has also caused us to lose those daily connections with colleagues that make work enjoyable. Small talk seems like a thing of the past, yet these social connections with colleagues are important for staff feeling a sense of belonging within an organisation. There are many staff that have joined the Faculty in the past year who have never actually met any of colleagues, let alone been into their building.

To mark the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Week and address the social isolation that remote working can cause, FBS is launching another round of ‘Virtual Kitchen Catch-Up’; an opportunity to spend 15 minutes having a cup of coffee whilst talking to a colleague from within the Faculty.

Sign-up by May 14^th and we’ll pair you with another member of the Faculty. You’ll get to schedule a slot for your 15-minute catch-up at a time that suits the pair of you over the coming month.

The scheme is open to all staff within the Faculty of Brain Sciences. Why not give it a go? It could be a good opportunity to chat with someone you haven’t spoken to over the past year, or to speak to a colleague you haven’t met before.

1. Sign up for the Brain Sciences Virtual Kitchen Catch-Up here by May 14^th 2021
2. Match confirmed by FBS EDI Team on Friday 21^st May 2021
3. Matched pair find a suitable 15 minute slot to meet in June 2021

“Happy Coffee Star Time” by Craig Anderson is licensed with CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

The forced move to remote working in 2020 has served as a catalyst for developing new ways of working. The 1.5 million meetings at UCL that have been held on MS Teams over the past year have proved to be an effective way to develop and maintain strong ties with those with whom we work closely.  It has also brought about other benefits – for example, meetings can be more inclusive now we are no longer constrained by room size. As a result, the Faculty Executive Team has been expanded beyond the Divisional and Institute Directors, Vice Deans, and Faculty staff, to also include all the Divisional and Institute managers. We are confident this will lead to more effective ways of working as well as helping us to increase the diversity of the committee.

However, remote working has also brought about some challenges, particularly for those who don’t have space at home to work comfortably, and for those who have been trying to combine work with caring responsibilities and home-schooling. One of the things we have missed out on at home is the opportunity to develop and maintain connections with colleagues with whom we don’t work closely. Without the opportunity to say hello on the corridor, or to chat whilst making a coffee in the kitchen, we are missing out on ways to check in with people. These “weak ties” are important though – not just for feeling a sense of social connection but also because they often allow group members to share and access information that they might not otherwise have access to. For those colleagues who have started work or taken on new roles within the Faculty in the past year, the lack of opportunity to get to know other people in their organisation outside of the direct team is particularly acute.

In a bid to help us connect with each other we are launching the Brain Sciences Virtual Kitchen Catch-Up – a monthly opportunity to spend 15 minutes having a cup of coffee whilst talking to a colleague from within the Faculty. Sign up by 23rd April 2021 and we’ll pair you with another member of the Faculty. You’ll get to schedule a slot for your 15-minute catch-up at a time that suits the pair of you over the coming month.

The scheme is open to all staff within the Faculty of Brain Sciences. Why not give it a go? It could be a good opportunity to chat with someone you haven’t spoken to over the past year or to speak to a colleague you haven’t met before.

1. Sign up for the Brain Sciences Virtual Kitchen Catch-Up here by 23rd April 2021
2. Match confirmed by FBS EDI Team on Friday 30th  April 2021
3. Matched pair find a suitable 15 minute slot to meet in May 2021