I spent much of yesterday interrogating the results of the latest staff pulse survey, exploring the move back to campus based working. Unsurprisingly one of the key themes was a desire for information – what will it be like when we are back there?

You may recall my discussion before about the nature of change and transition: here the change is the move back to campus working, and the transition is the psychological process we will all go through to make that happen. And a key part of supporting our psychological transition is helping ourselves and each other to get a feel for what it will be like back on campus – what will it look like, how will we operate around each other, how safe will I feel, how can I continue to balance home and campus based working and so on.

There are a huge number of people across the university working on exactly these things and over the next few weeks I anticipate more and more detail to be available to fill in these blanks. But there will continue to be a level of uncertainty because, well frankly, we just don’t know. Guidance changes, realities change, our individual desire for detail varies widely – some of us will be less concerned with the detail and be desperate to just get back and get on, others of us need more reassurance before taking that step. Neither is right or wrong.

In our team we have started to pull together some of this into a single place which, we hope, will support colleagues in the process of return. However it, too, is filled with blanks, for all those reasons already mentioned. But we felt that wasn’t a good enough reason not to share what we already do know, and keep building and creating together as time goes on. That way we can evolve and respond to changes, and add content that is requested (such as through the results of the pulse survey). We hope you find it a useful resource, and continue to return to it as it is built up.

A key feature of knowing what it will be like, and thereby providing reassurance about transition, are the stories of those already further down the line.

Hey you, over there, is it ok on your side? Tell us more…

So one feature we are hoping to build is those personal stories – as a counter to process and regulations we know the power of the personal narrative, that peek behind the corporate façade to see the genuine experience on the ground. We have received our first, from Iain McCracken in IT:

Thanks so much Iain for taking the time to show us around. If you have a story to share, please get in touch.

Juliet Flynn, Organisational and People Development