Our people are key to the University’s success. As part of the ‘Our People’ and ‘Ways of Working’ areas of focus of the 2020 – 2024 Operating Plan, we’re on a journey to recruit and retain high performing academic and professional staff, and support their development, performance, and career progression at Macquarie.
As such, we’ll be implementing a reinvigorated performance and development review process, underpinned by the ‘Talent and Performance’ functionality in Workday. Here, Nicole Gower, Vice-President People and Services, takes you through the changes.
Following broad consultation across the Macquarie University community, including academic and professional staff, hospital and clinical staff, and staff in Campus Life, we have now developed an improved PDR process to facilitate this for all our staff.
Our current Performance and Development Review (PDR) will be re-named the Development and Performance Review (DPR). We wanted to place the emphasis on having conversations not only about performance but also about what development is required to help our staff achieve their goals and support career aspirations. The Academic DPR has been designed to align with the new academic promotion criteria. Professor Lesley Hughes (member of the Our People board and lead on the Academic DPR Workday Project) says “the new system has been designed around the concept that if the university prioritises and supports staff development, excellent performance will follow”.
We’ll be underpinning the new DPR process with new capabilities in Workday such as the employee ‘Talent Profile’. This is essentially an online resume – listing your skills, education and career experience – similar to an internal ‘LinkedIn’ profile.
Workday will also enable leaders and managers to cascade goals to staff, eliminating the need to develop custom DPR templates for different parts of the organisation as priorities change over time.
Training will be conducted during October in preparation for the launch of the new DPR and Talent Profile capabilities in November, with dedicated sessions to be run for academic and professional employees and MQ Health staff. Please look out for communications and information in coming weeks as we prepare for the launch.
For more information about these changes, please refer to the Workday FAQs page or email workday@mq.edu.au.
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Nice to learn that the University is seeking to recruit and retain high performing academic and professional staff. Excluding, of course, all the colleagues who are made redundant through the PST / academic change processes! Thanks for the lovely timing of this initiative.