Health check up for Projects

Round 2 of USQ's staff health check survey for the Student Management and Corporate Services Projects will be open for staff comment and participation with both project leaders expecting a high hit rate for its online survey.

Introduced in December last year the Health Check Survey is used to provide valuable feedback on how organisational changes introduced as part of the RoP Corporate Services and Student Management projects are affecting the USQ workplace.

HR Change Coordinator Jan Elsley said that responses to Round 1 of the Health Survey Check were encouraging and demonstrated that staff across the campus were wanting to be involved in the evaluation of both the Student Management Project (SMP) and the Corporate Services Project (CSP). 

'With the large number of staff involved in the CSP and SMP transition process it is essential for both project teams to understand how staff are settling into new roles and functions and to determine if additional training, support services and communication strategies are needed.

'In Round 1 of the survey, staff were telling us that they understood why the changes had to happen. They were also telling us that managers and supervisors were working hard to speedily bring about implementation changes and to create staff friendly work environments.'

Jan said that two main positives to come from the survey showed that staff generally were happy with how the transition process was taking place and how HR was able to move staff into new roles relatively quickly.'

'This has had the positive effect of allowing staff to settle into their positions easily and commence developing new working relationships to effectively share workload and ideas.'

Jan said the survey also showed where some additional support work was needed to capture concerns relating to staff vacancies, training and development programs and some communication needs surrounding engagement issues.

'Generally whenever major organisational change occurs in any workplace there is always a number of issues that need to be worked through. Both project leaders and teams have considered the comments from the previous survey and along with managers are actively progressing strategies to assist staff progress through implementation. 

'Round 2 of the Health Check Survey, due for release on March 16, will again allow staff the opportunity to comment on their experiences and show where instances of best practice are occurring across the university or inform us on how best project leaders and project teams can respond to their concerns,' Jan said.

Staff wishing to discuss the survey results should contact Project Leaders Professor Janet Verbyla, Student Management Project or John Pearson Corporate Services Project.