The Lived Experience of Professional Staff Response to COVID

Abstract

This chapter is composed of short recollections of events and responses during the pandemic, in particular how the experience of individual professional staff members coalesced with organisational dynamics, and how each of the contributors responded to and was affected by the pandemic, on a personal and a professional level. In this chapter, the experiences of staff form the centrepiece, and how this group adapted its ways of providing services and relating to students, faculty and leadership in so doing.

The third set of stories comes from four colleagues in the UK, Australia and Sweden, all of whom are in outward facing or communications roles at their respective institutions and thus found themselves, in different ways, at the epicentre of the university response to COVID.

The first story comes from Liz Shutt, who is Director of Policy for both the University of Lincoln and the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership, in a dual role that cuts across Higher Education and Regional Development. She is based in London and works to improve the connection with government and the Civil Service and to raise the profile of Greater Lincolnshire in these circles. Liz has worked in various policy roles throughout her career, starting out at the Department for Work and Pensions in Sheffield, with roles at Sheffield Hallam University and sector representative bodies, Universities UK and University Alliance, before starting in her current role. She has an MA by Research in European Studies from the University of Kent, which investigated the issue of how UK politicians were using European identity constructions in debate in the UK Parliament, Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. Her thesis used discourse analysis, which proved highly instructive as even supposedly pro-EU UK politicians consistently used language to position Europe as ‘other’. Understanding these nuances and the underlying drivers that often shape policy outcomes has been a continuing theme throughout Liz’s career as she has explored a breadth of Higher Education policy issues through numerous reports such as on social mobility, research and innovation, student stories, the regional economy, the future of work and the purpose of universities in the twenty-first century. In her contribution, Liz reflects on the value and challenges of working in a cross-systems role. There is always a lot of information to absorb, which can feel confusing at times, but finding new insights through exposure to different perspectives and sectors is the prize and a central motivation for working in this way. Alongside regionally focused activities, Liz continues to be involved in national-level policy development through various blogs and thought pieces, often written with the (then) University of Lincoln Vice-Chancellor, Mary Stuart, and involvement in the UPP Civic University Commission. She is currently working with Mary to write a report on international students for the recently launched UPP Student Futures Commission. Outside of work, Liz has three children (8, 5 and 1), a husband and a yellow VW Campervan called Colonel Mustard. The Campervan has involved lots of roadside breakdown pick-ups over the years but has also provided a means to get out into the countryside and go on adventures—the West Coast of Scotland is a favourite place to head to.

The second story is written by Nicole Mennell, who is the Engagement Lead for King’s College London’s (KCL) strategic Vision 2029 and is primarily responsible for supporting the delivering of the university’s Service and Internationalisation strategies across a broad portfolio of communication and engagement projects. Following her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in English Literature, Nicole initially set out to pursue an academic career in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies and completed her doctorate at the University of Sussex in 2019. Her thesis, Shakespeare’s Sovereign Beasts: Human-Animal Relations and Political Discourse in Early Modern Drama, explores the connections made between figures of sovereignty and animals in the early modern period. Nicole has also written on the wider representation of animals, this includes a chapter on lions that was published in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals (2021) and her study on the first comparative anatomy of a human and a chimpanzee that was published in the edited collection Seeing Animals After Derrida (2018). Having come from a widening participation background, Nicole has always been passionate about the transformative power of higher education but also acutely aware of the structural inequalities that exist within the sector. She became even more aware of the pervasive nature of inequity in higher education during her PhD and so supported several projects that aimed to widen access to university and scholarly research. Frustrated by the barriers many doctoral researchers faced when trying to publish their work and the paywalls that kept that work locked away, she co-founded the open access postgraduate journal Brief Encounters in 2016. This journal provides individuals with the opportunity to publish in an alternative format to the traditional articles required by academic publications and supports the dissemination of knowledge to a global readership, with the intent that the research it publishes encourages the exchange of ideas outside of academic circles. Although keeping one foot firmly in academia and the world of animal studies, Nicole decided to embark on an ‘alt-ac’ career after completing her thesis as she wanted to help change the social purpose of universities. When a role supporting KCL’s Service Strategy was advertised in the same month as her viva, she felt the stars had aligned in her favour.

Like Nicole, Anna Löthman also works in communications, this time at Lund University (LU) in Sweden. Anna passionately believes that to communicate in a concise and easily receptive way is always a challenge. Throughout the pandemic that challenge became even greater, with communication strategies having to be re-evaluated, like many other parts of university life. As Anna notes in her story, circumstances have been different, changing the world as well as people. With no campus-based activities and an empty event calendar, the usual way of conducting internal communication was put in quarantine. Despite the fact that no staff were on campus, Anna’s target groups became more visible and multifaceted. She realised that the information needs were bigger, had in a way become more demanding and that the interaction had to transform in order to reach the receivers. Her lessons learned resulted in, not yet fully explored, new thoughts and a changed view. In short, she found herself rethinking communication.

Verity Firth grew up in a family of activist academics. From an early age she accompanied her parents as they attended anti-nuclear peace marches, and played in the gardens of retired steelworkers as her mother interviewed them for her PhD thesis in sociology. At university she enthusiastically embraced politics while studying a combined Arts Law degree at the University of Sydney. She was the youngest ever Deputy Lord Mayor of the City of Sydney when she was elected aged 32 in 2005, and went on to be elected in 2007 as a member of the New South Wales (NSW) State Parliament. By 2008, she was appointed as the Minister for Education and Training in NSW, heading the largest school system in the southern hemisphere, employing 100,000 FTE staff and overseeing an annual budget of over $14 billion AUD. However, her stellar career in politics would soon come to an end. In 2011, the Labour government that had been in power for 16 years in NSW was defeated in a landslide. Verity lost her inner-city seat and had to think again about what to do with her life. Although she loved politics, she was also exhausted and demoralised. It had a big impact on her personal life and she wanted a second baby and more balance in her life. She first headed up the Public Education Foundation, a philanthropic organisation that advocates for and supports students and teachers in public education. But she missed the scale and impact of government. She recontested her seat in 2015, and lost again. This time she wanted a clean break. She was appointed as Executive Director, Social Justice at the University of Technology Sydney. It was a new role, designed to pull together the public purpose efforts from across the university into a coherent whole. She initiated the university’s Social Impact Framework, a first of its kind for the university sector in Australia, and established the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. The Centre drives the implementation of the university’s social justice agenda. It is home to the university’s widening participation strategy and programmes; runs community engaged learning and research programmes; and delivers diversity and inclusion support for the university. Verity has never looked back. Although she is not an academic herself, having grown up amongst them she feels at home in a university. She loves how devoted people are to ideas and evidence. She also loves the scale of the institution and its capacity to influence social outcomes. She now sees her electoral defeats as liberation. She lives within walking distance of the university with her husband and two children and is enjoying her middle age immensely.

Liz Shutt’s Covid Story

Liz is Director of Policy at the University of Lincoln and the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership.

While the pandemic is global in its spread, the effects are felt at an individual, local level, often making us turn inward. And while the pandemic has accelerated long-term trends, it has also had the effect of putting people and organisations in crisis response mode.

Within all of this, universities have a significant role to play. Not just to develop vaccines and the know-how to help the world build an appropriate defence; but also to hold a space where long-term visions can continue to be developed despite the short-term pressures for tactical interventions. They need to work with partners across systems and sectors to generate this foresight and make sure that it can have impact.

I was on maternity leave when COVID first hit and this has shaped my experience of it. At home, it felt like the world (and my two other children) had gate-crashed the first year I had with my new-born, as lockdowns, social distancing and home-schooling all became part of our vocabulary. Then, when I returned to work in October 2020, I had a lot of catching up to do. I needed to adjust to the shift in perspective that those who had worked through the pandemic had undergone while I had been on maternity leave, as well as practicalities such as the technology requirements of whole teams working from home.

As Director of Policy, I am employed by both the University of Lincoln and the Greater Lincolnshire Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), a business/local authority-led body focused on economic development. Each part of England has a LEP carrying out a similar role. I am based in London as a core part of my role is about connecting into national government, providing an easy access point for government officials to link into our part of the UK as well as feeding government thinking into strategies developed within the university and region. The nature of this role means that I work across sectors and geographies and with a broad range of colleagues that have a variety of specialisms and interests. I am required to quickly develop knowledge in anything from port infrastructure to anaerobic digestion, and to understand how all the parts fit together in the research, innovation and skills systems that universities and local partners operate within. Working across systems in this way is endlessly interesting, exciting, and sometimes bewildering as I get drawn into the detail in order to understand different drivers and shared endeavours. However, the critical part of my role is to come back up from that detail, as I seek to weave together the different threads to create shared and joined up strategies that set future direction. My experience of working in a role that cuts across two sectors and organisations is that building trusted relationships is central to making this work in practice. With roles that are embedded in two organisations, the ability to develop a close understanding of ways of working and communicating grows exponentially. Opportunities to join up efforts and develop shared insights can be realised on an ongoing basis, and in reality, the day-to-day activities that I undertake can rarely be identified as ‘for the LEP’ or ‘for the university’. It works best when they are for both.

The two projects I was involved in before going on maternity leave were very much in this space. All LEPs had been asked by government to develop a local strategy that would consider a set of identified drivers to increase productivity and growth (such as innovation, skills and infrastructure) and identify sectors to invest in with the ultimate aim of addressing the fact that the UK is one of the most regionally unbalanced countries in the industrialised world.¹ Within Greater Lincolnshire, a region on the East Midlands coast, many towns have been described as ‘left behind’. Within the region there are substantial pockets of significant deprivation and rural isolation, and coastal communities, with a heavy reliance on tourism and hospitality, appear especially vulnerable to the economic impact of the pandemic.² Indeed, the development of the University of Lincoln is intricately linked to this economic and social landscape. The University was established as a result of action by local leaders, across government and businesses, determined to boost economic growth. Today, colleagues from across the university and local authority landscape continue to work together on shared economic and social development priorities.

Alongside the work focusing on local economic development, I was working with the University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mary Stuart CBE, on a twenty-first-century Lab Manifesto³ reconsidering the purpose of universities in the twenty-first century. The Lab engaged a range of experts around the world to consider the challenges of a complex and rapidly changing twenty-first century. We saw the need to start a debate across the sector as to how universities could better support society to flourish at a time of such significant upheaval and volatility. The Manifesto set out ten interrelated global challenges, such as unequal share of wealth, mitigating environmental and ecological damage, and technological disruption. However, the core conclusion of the project wasn’t so much the identification of these challenges as the realisation that twenty-first-century challenges are unpredictable and quick to change. In this environment, universities are required to tune into the world around them in a permeable manner such that they are able to continually adapt. This conclusion is all the more pertinent given the events of the past year.

While participating in the Lab, Lord Victor Adebowale CBE made the following point, which struck a chord with the way that the University and my role functions, ‘in a world that is more complicated and inevitably more multi-cultural and multi-variant, the ability to think collectively as a result of difference is vital’.⁴ The field of systems thinking recognises that complex problems occur within systems made up of interconnected, interdependent parts that work together, often in non-linear ways. Complex problems (also called ‘wicked problems’) have multiple, hard-to-identify causes and solutions and are not confined to a single organisation, policy area, sector or region. Individual organisations working alone to address such problems might provide short-term solutions, but the nature of the problem means they are unlikely to achieve longer-term, scalable sustainable change. Such change requires a systems thinking approach that recognises the need for multiple stakeholders to work together, since stakeholders in different parts of the system hold different parts of the solution.⁵ The Travel Companion: your guide to working with others for social outcomes breaks down a systems approach for resolving such wicked problems. It draws a distinction between complex problems—which are challenging to understand and require experimentation working with multiple stakeholders—and chaotic problems, where ‘the issue at hand has gone off the rails and needs to be contained. The solution chosen may not be the best solution but any solution that works is good enough as there is usually no time to search for the right answer’.⁶ This perfectly describes the experience of working across systems pre- and post-pandemic. The problems remain complex but a layer of chaos has been added over the top, driving organisations and colleagues into crisis response mode.

On the one hand COVID has accelerated many of the twenty-first-century trends that we were observing in 2019,⁷ shifting the use of technology and putting further pressure on businesses and sectors that were already struggling. It has also exacerbated and shone a light on inequality and disadvantage.⁸ Many of the issues that were being discussed in fairly closed policy circles pre-pandemic have been brought into the open, with the inequalities that cut across our society all too clear for everyone to see, especially as the increased connectivity and immediacy provided by social media sharpen our view.⁹ At the same time, the immediate pressure has been on short-term crisis response and day-to-day survival, making long-term planning difficult. Of course, universities have also experienced this tension. They have been pulled into response mode as they have adapted to teaching online and moved research resources towards vaccines and other COVID-related challenges. But the underlying work that will affect the future beyond this pandemic continues through our teaching, our research and our work as anchors within local communities.

The experience of being on maternity leave as the pandemic first unfolded can make these contrasts feel all the more stark. I missed the transition phase that colleagues went through in the Spring of 2020. Instead, I was deeply embedded in the day-to-day, or even minute-to-minute, experience of caring for a baby. Added to that, the focus of my role on longer-term strategy can sometimes feel at odds with the immediate and significant pressure that colleagues and organisations I work with are under. As I have returned to work I have had to adjust over a different timescale and adapt as the projects I was working on beforehand couldn’t simply be picked up again. I have needed to listen afresh in order to understand the shifting priorities and contexts of colleagues across the systems I work in. While there is no getting away from the pressures to respond appropriately to the chaos in the shorter term, finding ways to hold a space for longer-term thinking and strategy is vital. We can’t afford separate conversations on the now and the future. These need to be brought together if we are to flex and sustain ourselves through to the other side and beyond. The complexities are multi-dimensional as we think through what is required cross-sector, cross-society, cross-geography and over time as we go into and out of the waves of pandemic.

Universities have significant building blocks at their disposal to engage with and effect change in the twenty-first century, but substantial cultural transformation is needed in order to realise the full potential of their purpose.¹⁰ If COVID has had the effect of accelerating change, adopting this approach appears increasingly urgent. We need to harness every tool we have both within universities and with partners beyond the tertiary system. This will help us to understand how pre-pandemic strategies might shift as we seek to identify and tackle a range of deep-seated, interconnected and complex issues that won’t be quickly resolved despite the political imperative to demonstrate quick impact. Cross-system and sector roles like mine could be an important part of this process, especially as resources are likely to become increasingly stretched. The more we are able to identify shared agendas, the more effective we will surely be at adapting and working towards longer-term and embedded change.

Nicole Mennell’s COVID Story

Nicole is Engagement Lead (Vision 2029) at King’s College London.

I am the Engagement Lead for King’s College London’s (KCL) Vision 2029, which encapsulates the university’s mission to ‘make the world a better place’. As clichéd as this strapline may seem, I meet students, staff, alumni and friends of KCL on a regular basis who genuinely want to make this vision a reality. Sometimes, clichés are the only things that work, and this is definitely the case for KCL’s guiding strategy. It is because Vision 2029 is grounded in actions and not empty words that I wanted to work at KCL after completing my PhD in Shakespeare studies. While I loved my research topic, I decided to pursue an ‘alt-ac’ career that would allow me to contribute to the wider social purpose of higher education. KCL was the perfect fit.

Vision 2029 builds upon KCL’s history of making a significant contribution to society and will take us up to the university’s 200th anniversary in 2029. To fulfil this ambition, KCL has placed Service as the third and equal part of the university’s academic mission, alongside its Education and Research. Service embodies KCL’s commitment to delivering positive social impact in our local, national and international communities. Vision 2029 aims to enhance the contribution KCL makes in the city that we call home, while ensuring we play a proactive role in our increasingly more interconnected and complex world in order to help solve major global challenges.

In my role as Engagement Lead, I support the delivery of Vision 2029 across a broad portfolio of projects, which includes raising awareness of transformative social impact initiatives through news stories, features and social media content, as well as leading engagement activities that aim to empower our students, staff and alumni to become changemakers.

Before COVID hit the UK, I was in the middle of delivering a pilot community organising training programme for students and staff that I had helped develop with Citizens UK, a people power alliance of diverse local communities working together for the common good. This bespoke training programme was designed to equip people who care about their communities and want to take action to make the world a better place with the skills they need to become more effective community leaders. At the heart of this training was the importance of listening, putting people before programme and the key message that ‘you get the justice you have the power to compel’.¹¹

Since the outset of the COVID crisis, I have drawn on my own community organising training perhaps more than any of the other professional development programmes I have undertaken, particularly the importance of listening and ensuring people know they have the power to bring about change. By prioritising listening to our communities and emphasising the relational power Citizens UK promote, I have also begun to consider what ‘making the world a better place’ means for our diverse communities as we aim to ‘build back better’ in the months and years ahead. Two KCL researchers pointed out this issue with the university’s ambition to me during an interview about a community engagement project they run with local young people, by asking, ‘What is this better place?’ and, ‘A better place for whom?’

On a personal level, I adapted quite quickly to working remotely as I had only recently completed a PhD and spent the better part of four years researching and writing alone from my desk at home. I realised that many other colleagues were not used to the isolation that the new way of working brought with it and tried to share some of the tips that helped me keep focused and on track, such as sticking to a routine, getting out for a walk at least once a day and setting clear boundaries between work and rest. The main challenge for me was having to work around my partner, who was usually site-based, and my sister, all in the confined space of a top floor two-bedroom flat. We were unsure how events would unfold at the outset of the pandemic in the UK and, being an avid reader of dystopian literature, I have to admit I did fear apocalyptic levels of societal breakdown. With this fear at the forefront of my mind, my youngest sister, who was in the second year of her degree at the time, came to stay with my partner and I very early on in the first UK lockdown and ended up living with us for five months.

While it was challenging for three people to work in a tight space on different timetables, with online seminars and meetings often clashing, we managed to muddle through with the help of patience and lots of solo walks! Working alongside my sister while she completed assignments and online exams also meant I witnessed first-hand the struggles that many of our students were experiencing. Unlike a significant number of students, my sister was somewhere safe, had people around for company and did not have any major financial concerns, but she still suffered with isolation, difficulties focusing and worries about her future career prospects. This experience, plus my own desire to ‘give back’ and help KCL students, staff and alumni, kept me motivated despite an intense workload, conflicting deadlines and various personal concerns.

When the UK lockdown was enforced in March 2020, I knew that people would turn to the Service team to ask what the university was doing to support our communities. Within a day of us being told that we would be working from home, the team received several emails asking this very question. Many members of the wider Vision 2029 team, particularly the London team (who lead on KCL’s ambition to be regarded globally as a civic university at the heart of the capital), received similar emails and it was not long before the Service and London teams decided to collaborate on a means of responding to both the calls for support and the eagerness to help expressed by numerous people within the KCL community. We called this response #ContinuingToServe, in acknowledgement that KCL had always been in service to society, and would step up efforts to deliver on its promise to make the world a better place in the face of (to use a very tired phrase) this unprecedented global challenge.

I was charged with leading on communications for #ContinuingToServe and our objectives were very clear: we were going to celebrate the everyday heroes as much as the big headline-grabbing stories which focused on the transformational interventions led by KCL, for example Professor Tim Spector’s involvement in developing the ZOE COVID Symptom Study app and the Life Lines project, which has helped keep families connected by providing 4G-enabled tablets to intensive care units across the UK. While we wanted to raise awareness of these innovative and inspirational contributions to the COVID response, we also did not want to cause people who were just about surviving, whatever their circumstances might be, to feel that they were not doing enough. If the events of the COVID crisis have taught us anything, it is that we do not always know what is happening in other people’s lives so we should always be open-minded, empathetic and kind. It is also clear that people care about those seemingly small acts of kindness, otherwise the late Captain Sir Tom Moore’s efforts to walk 100 laps of his garden to raise vital funds for the NHS would not have generated as much public interest and helped boost morale not only in the UK but around the world. In producing content for #ContinuingToServe, it was therefore just as important to us that we celebrated what might be considered ‘small acts’ because, as we all hopefully now know, small acts make a big difference.

From April to August 2020, the #ContinuingToServe team shared more than 60 stories that represented KCL’s commitment to serving our local, national and international communities. I had the privilege to interview a wide range of people who wanted to do their bit to help, with many of them not anticipating the positive impact they would have on people’s lives. One such initiative was ‘Read for the Globe’, a 48-hour readathon led by a group of KCL alumni from the Shakespeare Studies MA who wanted to raise much-needed funds for Shakespeare’s Globe when they heard that the world-renowned theatre, education centre and iconic London landmark was at risk of permanently closing its doors. The team were overwhelmed by the positive global response their call for volunteer readers received, which helped make Read for the Globe a huge success. Over the UK’s 2020 Spring Bank Holiday weekend, 200 volunteers from across the world came together to read 16 of their favourite Shakespeare plays over 48 hours. The group raised more than £13,000 to help keep the Globe’s doors open for future audiences, but they also brought people together in an act of creation, despite the volunteer readers being in different places and time zones. A virtual audience also grew around the event, with people engaging with the plays on Twitter and through the live chat function on YouTube, resulting in a collaborative community of readers and audience members which helped alleviate the isolation that many people were experiencing.

Interviewing the brilliant team behind Read for the Globe was particularly special to me because not only do I know several people who work at Shakespeare’s Globe and who teach on the Shakespeare Studies MA, but watching plays as a groundling in the Globe’s yard or in various spots around the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse enriched my time at university and my PhD research. I wanted to make sure that future students would have the same opportunities to watch early modern plays to gain new insights about their production and for the pure love of theatre. Writing the story about Read for the Globe and raising awareness of what the team had achieved was my contribution to keeping the Globe’s doors open for future audiences. I also wanted to showcase Read for the Globe as a wonderful example of how working in a creative and collaborative manner can make a positive difference, as well as how we can embrace the new virtual ways of communicating to forge meaningful connections between people from all corners of the world.

The numerous contributions made by the students, staff, alumni and friends of KCL throughout the COVID crisis demonstrate the various ways in which individuals can have a transformative impact on society. It also shows that universities are in a unique position to bring about change but that we will only do this by placing people at the heart of our work. During all of the interviews I conducted as part of #ContinuingToServe, I endeavoured to put my community organising training into practice by listening and doing my best to give the people involved a chance to voice the issues that mattered to them through the power of storytelling.

In July 2020, I interviewed Jonathan Grant (who was then Vice President and Vice Principal of Service) as part of KCL’s ‘Spotlight on COVID’ series, through which staff from across the university spoke on different aspects of the pandemic and lessons learnt. In this video interview, Professor Grant reflected on how the COVID pandemic will impact on the public purpose and perception of universities. Through discussion of the various ways in which universities have contributed to the global response, he suggested that the coronavirus crisis has provided a pivotal moment, albeit one he was clear came with major costs, to reset the social contract between universities and the public.

I could not agree more but we will only achieve a social contract that truly benefits the communities we aim to serve by listening to people and learning what matters most to them. If we do this, we might just succeed in making the world a better place for everyone.

Anna Löthman’s Covid Story

Anna is a Communication Officer, Dean’s office, Lund School of Economics and Management.

To communicate with many people is always a challenge. In fact, communicating with a single person can be challenging. During the COVID pandemic, my job as an internal communications officer involved even bigger challenges than before. Within a higher education organisation with about 500 people there is always a factor of insecurity when it comes to communication. Is the message clear enough, do you really know your target groups, do you reach out to everyone, is your communication received the way you expect and will you get the wished-for effect? These issues can often be problematic, with varying results.

When the pandemic struck, some strategies I usually found effective couldn’t be used. Some were based on physical presence, others were based on the effect of look and feel. Pretty soon I also realised that my target groups had become more multifaceted and parts of them more visible. Visible in terms of perceptibility within the usual target group, as a result of the fact that the usual target group adaptation did not suit everyone now. The interest and need for what was going on had grown and new things were requested. My old strategies literally had to be put in quarantine. This insight worried me, at least for a while. That was before I realised how communication can innovate in the most rugged terrain.

A proven and elaborated strategy for communications at Lund School of Economics and Management (LUSEM) is always present in everyday work, something you barely think about on a daily basis. Since unpredictable challenges are always ahead of us, this strategy includes solutions to some potential emergencies. No matter how comprehensive a strategy may be though, some challenges are impossible to prepare for. When almost everything got affected by the pandemic, it was no surprise that the way we communicated was also drawn into the process of change. The change was more or less immediate for our staff and students, as well for me as a communications officer.

In parallel with teachers starting to teach online more or less overnight and going all in regarding our recently implemented learning platform, the communication within our organisation also became completely digital. No one knew how long the situation would last and the question was how much effort and resources we should put into new equipment, tools and arrangements. At the same time, we realised how immature we were in terms of digital skills and that digital meetings, video recordings and digital pedagogy in general were here to stay.

Like most organisations in the world at this time we had to come to terms with the situation and accept the new challenges ahead. Many of them were already here. It was a worrying situation, but with no time for worries we just had to get to know our challenges and deal with them.

One challenge was of course information related to the pandemic. What I communicated about new restrictions and decisions always came directly from the Vice-Chancellor. This was consequently an easy part and I could confidently publish the information as I knew the content was already reviewed and ready. Information about our own strategies based on the latest pandemic news was a completely different matter. The situation we were in made people almost desperate for knowledge and to get control. To gather and communicate the information needed was like trying to find your way in a jungle. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish true information from fake, and no one knew what was going to happen next. In the middle of the jungle I realised how important the original source was. I immediately stopped trying to rewrite and adapt the information and started to only forward pandemic information from only two original sources; the University Vice-Chancellor and the Swedish responsible authorities.

Three important needs emerged fairly soon; support, tools and one reliable information channel, like a first-hand source. Support, for learning different digital tools for lectures, meetings and exams. Tools, for the same purposes but also for continously building our brand and for social activities. One reliable information channel, for having one single place to get the information needed in the chaos that prevailed in the media and spread through rumours. An ever-present challenge was of course also the target groups, to really try to listen and understand what they needed. My work is a lot about relations and now it seemed more important than ever to build relations with our staff and to do that in as empathetic a way as possible.

Accepting the new challenges was easy, getting to know them was more of a struggle. Until early Spring 2020 I had communicated with our staff in a quite relaxed way, there were always things to tell but usually the internal communication concerned rather simple practical matters; ‘good-to-know-for-your-work’, combined with news about upcoming events, accreditation work and the latest from the university. Now it became obvious that the need for information had increased, both the amount and the type of information. This was not done in one day, it happened step by step and was not fully developed until several months later, and there is still more to accomplish.

The desire for knowledge seemed limitless at first. Our staff required information in general and of course help and guidelines for digital work, but I also saw an amplified interest in knowing more about things that hadn’t been that important before; the wellbeing of the students, whereabouts and activities of the management (peaking with a new management, appointed January 2021), the situation on campus and curiosity about colleagues. I interpreted this as a desire to remain close to the workplace and, in many cases, a consolation to reduce feelings of loneliness and exclusion. I tried to look at myself, what would I like to know in this situation? And then I looked into the communication channels that were closed down and asked myself how I could reduce this loss.

As understanding increased the solutions came next. This gets us back to the three keywords where communication work had to be done; support, tools and a single information channel. Reminders and information about the support and digital tools were now given regularly and the first-hand source for internal communication with our staff, the staff newsletter, had to be completely redone and issued as a new edition.

Support for digital work and related development was communicated on new, continuously updated, internal webpages with all the information needed about going digital. Digital courses and guidelines were offered and almost every week new information was posted about the latest news and possibilities to learn more. Reminders about where to find this information were given in the staff letters sent out every second week.

Closely linked to the support were of course the digital tools. Our digital learning platform was already in use but the digital tools for meetings, lectures and exams were new to most of the staff. Efforts were put especially into introducing a tool for digital exams, which seemed to be the biggest issue for the teachers. Through information, support and regularly offered courses an increasing number of teachers became comfortable with conducting digital exams. Information went out regularly via the newsletter linking to the staff web with upcoming course dates, guidelines and articles about digital exams.

A major effort and resources were put into building a video and podcast studio. There was an increasing buzz about video recording, broadcasting, live studio lectures and podcasting. We hired a professional filmmaker who helped us choose, buy and install the equipment and learn the technology. During Spring I filmed many teachers giving keynote lectures, researchers presenting their research and others within our organisation giving courses, conducting interviews or presenting news. To broadcast virtual lectures, meetings and ceremonies we equipped several bookable rooms with web cameras, microphones and lightboxes. Not only the staff had access but also the student union could go live in these bookable rooms and they even broadcast their annual virtual careers fair from one of these rooms. Thesis defences were live streamed and both students and staff used the podcast studio for professional podcast broadcasts.

The staff newsletter worked as the most important internal information channel. The formerly text-based newsletter underwent a makeover and was filled with articles about colleagues and their daily work in research, teaching or professional services. The Dean got his own column for thoughts from his point of view, the associate vice-deans shared what they were up to via video clips, as did researchers, caretakers and the facility manager. The staff thus got the latest news from campus, from the management team and from different colleagues. They also got to see parts of the campus, live. Apart from the video clips, every newsletter presented a ‘colleague check’, an article about something interesting that a colleague was working on. In addition to this the newsletter also contained a noticeboard with important messages, portraits of every PhD student with their thesis defence coming up, minutes in brief from the faculty board and a list of researchers that had recently secured new funding. Important keywords when trying to figure out what kind of news the staff wanted were ‘daily report’ and ‘word of mouth’—news that could have been spread during a coffee break on campus or during small talk in the corridor, surprisingly important when you don’t meet colleagues and crucial for a sense of belonging.

When writing the last newsletter before leaving for summer vacation I knew that the staff really needed a positive feeling, something to make them long to return to work and I came up with the idea of asking what their summer-take was. I presented a ‘smörgåsbord’ with four different articles to choose from. In the articles I interviewed key people and presented facts that made us feel kind of excited and happy: students, as many as any year, are finally coming to LUSEM, a foundation believes so much in us that they are giving us five million in funds, our campus will get a new upgraded entrance floor, and the student union is more confident and excited than ever, looking forward to the Fall semester. The feedback I received revealed that this actually spread good feelings; seeing all the smiling faces in the articles and listening to all these voices truly gave the staff something positive after a hard-working semester, when they had been feeling constantly downhearted.

For the students, the learning platform has been the most important internal information channel. Apart from the information they got from their teachers and from the student union via digital meetings and emails, the learning platform served as a dashboard where all important announcements were posted. Here the new department-wide student union ‘Wellness Weeks’ project was communicated with new activities every week to make the students feel well, entertained and not alone. I updated the calendar every Monday and sent out announcements to all our students about digital yoga classes, interesting lectures and digital social activities.

People’s views on communication also underwent some changes. When a faster and more comprehensive information flow was suddenly required, literally overnight, a lot of people became communication experts. When most things can be questioned, communication strategies easily become public goods. It is always easy to question communication because we all communicate; thus everyone has a relationship with it and we all feel that we understand communication. However, to work with communication is rather complicated. One difficult issue that has become more accentuated over the past year is target audience analysis. A simple fact that makes it difficult is of course that people are all different.

In times of insecurity it is more important than ever to reach out but also more problematic. People’s desire for information suddenly seems insatiable and new recipients unexpectedly appear—who hadn’t been visible before, as if hidden somewhere and now they emerge from the shadows. With this in mind a process of learning to know your new, or perhaps transformed, receivers begins. As already described, I tried to do that by looking into my own needs to find the communication channels that were missing and try to recreate them.

In spite of the above mentioned challenges, I dare to say, based on all positive feedback, that the internal communication within my organisation was well received during the last year. In times of turbulence when information channels have to go through changes you become aware that you are actually dealing with individuals, demanding but important. And they also have something important to express and send on, namely what they need to know. With new thoughts about internal communication the receivers must never be considered as a single group with the same needs. This is one important lesson that I would probably not have learnt without communicating during a pandemic.

To finish, I would like to emphasise some examples when it comes to rethinking internal communication. Communication is always changeable, and both the information and the receivers can change over time. Faced with unforeseen circumstances and unpredictable challenges that had to be handled at short notice, it was not unexpected that communication within our organisation underwent changes. Along with this, new thoughts on communication came easily. The pandemic situation pushed things to the limit and made us ask new questions. Things that had never, or at least not in a very long time, been contemplated were re-evaluated.

One important rethink concerned the target groups. My previously well-known target groups changed over time and so did their needs. Every person in a target group is an individual and even if communication cannot be adjusted to every single individual, the target group can be studied more deeply to see how multifaceted it is. Instead of just spreading a lot of information hoping that it would cover all needs, I looked for missing channels or sources and tried to imitate these.

Another issue that underwent rethinking was the original information source. An internal communications officer builds relationships and one way of doing that is to brand yourself as a reliable sender who knows and checks the sources on which news articles and messages are based. This makes people feel safe. News overload regarding the latest on COVID made me reconsider the sources and how to clarify them. I often found myself dealing with information from several sources. Media, authorities, the government and university management. The content was changing fast and sometimes the sources did not match. I started to write straight from the original source and made sure that the original source always was made clear. This approach is important not only in times of crisis, but always when dealing with information that does not need rewriting.

My final example of rethinking communication concerns everyday information. My aim when writing news is often to create something quite sensational with a high news value to attract interest. During the pandemic I re-evaluated this aim since I noticed that everyday information can get surprisingly important when you don’t meet colleagues and is crucial for a sense of belonging. Things that are usually discussed at coffee breaks should not be underestimated as important for unifying people when these casual conversations are not possible. To get to meet the new caretakers via a video clip can be incredibly interesting when not permitted on campus. The question is if this kind of ordinary news can strengthen a positivism within an organisation post-pandemic as well, when we are back having coffee breaks.

Finally, I wish I had never heard the term COVID, but I have. Our organisation, like everyone else, was faced with challenges, trials and months of changed working conditions. Everyone did what they could to help each other and to make the best of the situation. If I have facilitated the flow of information and found new ways to reach my colleagues who want to continue to feel part of LUSEM, I am satisfied. It was hard work but the response was huge and all the lessons learnt were reward enough. I bring my new views on internal communications with me and will develop them further, in a hopefully pandemic-free world where we also can communicate face-to-face in a lunch room nearby.

Verity Firth’s COVID Story

Verity is Executive Director, Social Justice at the University of Technology Sydney.

My job is to lead the University of Technology Sydney (UTS)‘s ambitious social justice agenda, ensuring that the university is ‘an agent for social change, transforming communities through research, education and practice’.¹² The university has a ‘whole of university’ approach to social impact, from ensuring that our students are diverse, focusing particularly on Indigenous participation and socioeconomic inclusion; to ensuring our research, teaching and practice have social impact and actively contribute to communities. We are open with our data, transparently tracking our performance through the university’s Social Impact Framework.¹³ Community engagement is fundamental to our work. When we work in partner schools we need to develop relationships of reciprocity and trust with students, parents and teachers alike. When we work alongside the local community we need to arrive at the partnership as equals, ensuring we deliver true benefit for our partner as well as the university.

After the announcement of the March 2020 lockdown, the university closed its campus and suspended all learning for a week so that staff could adjust to the requirement for online learning. Prior to COVID, the staff at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion delivered both in-school and on-campus workshops for years 11 and 12 students (16 to 18 years of age) from partner schools in south-western Sydney. Overnight these face-to-face workshops had to be reconfigured to be taught online. Staff were stretched and stressed. In addition to this it soon became clear that the digital divide is real. In May 2020, as part of its Student Support Package (SSP), UTS surveyed students identified as vulnerable, including international students. Of the 700 students that completed the SSP survey, one quarter of respondents (23%) reported concerns about not having access to a suitable learning environment and 19% were not able to access appropriate accessories, such as a printer or webcam. One in ten respondents (13%) did not have regular access to the internet.¹⁴ For our year 11 and 12 students from south western Sydney the need was even greater. UTS provided 100 laptops to partner schools during COVID, and was still unable to meet the demand of secondary school students who had no access to a computer at home. These experiences were not restricted to UTS alone, the Australian Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency released a report in 2020 that confirmed the difficulties faced by Australian students during the COVID lockdown.¹⁵

In just one month, between March and April 2020, 3% of Australians lost their jobs.¹⁶ Those hardest hit were in the 18–24 age group, due to the overnight shutdown of the retail and hospitality industries.¹⁷ The Commonwealth Government’s JobKeeper wage subsidy and JobSeeker income support programmes were welcomed by many, but those on temporary visas were not eligible for either programme. This exemption meant international students and students from refugee and asylum seeker backgrounds had no government assistance and were particularly vulnerable to a loss of income during COVID. At UTS, over a quarter of international students (27%) reported not being able to meet their full rental payments, while one-third (33%) had to forego necessities such as food and an alarming 21% feared becoming homeless.¹⁸ At the same time domestic students from low socioeconomic backgrounds were reporting similar financial and emotional pressures, with nearly one-third of students surveyed in May 2020 reporting they had been stood down, or lost work or income as a result of COVID, and 32% of students reporting they had a family member who was economically affected.¹⁹

The university’s multimillion-dollar SSP included assistance for students through grants and interest-free loans, housing rental subsidies and provision of basic food hampers and meals. However, to address issues of social isolation and anxiety, we needed to go beyond traditional financial support for our students. We were also aware that it was not just our students who needed institutional support, UTS needed to meet our public purpose obligations to our local community.

UTS is neighbour to one of the most diverse communities in Sydney. While Glebe contains pockets of extreme wealth, it is also home to people living in situations of significant economic and social disadvantage.

Over the last two to three years, UTS has acted as a convenor and facilitator for ‘GlebeConnected’, a community coalition with a place-based mission. It brings together government agencies, local businesses, social services and individuals active in the community, forming a framework to work together towards achieving a socially sustainable Glebe.

The same digital divide issues being experienced by some students were also being experienced by the local community. The global pandemic meant many services and facilities made a rapid pivot to being provided online. It soon became apparent to local service providers that residents over the age of 55 were less likely to have had access or experience in accessing online services. Gaps in digital literacy were directly affecting social isolation for this portion of the population.

Simultaneously, UTS had international and refugee and asylum seeker students who were facing their own issues with lost employment, social isolation and uncertainty.

The Glebe Digital Mentoring programme was developed to bring both of these groups together to provide mutual benefit, increasing digital literacy confidence and skill in older residents while offering income and experience for student mentors. The Glebe pilot employed UTS international students as corporate volunteers for up to ten hours a week over three months to mentor people over 55 who needed support with their technological needs.

Support included digital skills like checking email, creating folders, accessing MyGov, downloading apps and taking and storing digital photos. Where residents were undertaking digital literacy programmes elsewhere, mentors supported and supplemented their learning. But the programme delivered more than just acquiring new skills. On the cultural exchange element of the programme, a participating resident told evaluators, ‘I’d never met someone from Bangladesh before—a cultural difference which is absolutely delightful. Along with learning useful skills, we’ve become friends.’

For staff members at the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion, it became apparent that the programme was about much more than just acquiring digital skills. It was about relationships. Bilquis Ghani, who led the project, commented, ‘both for the international students who can also be quite isolated, especially at this time, and for the mentees—it’s about the relationship for them alongside acquiring the digital skills. Students are making connections with members of the population they may not have had access to before, with the potential for genuine friendships.’

At the end of 2020, the programme was awarded a Knowledge Exchange sponsorship by the City of Sydney to expand beyond Glebe, starting with the adjacent suburbs of Ultimo and Pyrmont. The first session with local elderly Chinese residents happened in May 2021. One participant commented she was thrilled she would now be able to use the NSW Government’s COVID Contact Tracing app without needing to ask her kids for help.

In addition to Digital Mentoring, the university also created the Community Ambassador programme to assist established charities such as OzHarvest and Foodbank during a time when there was a considerable decline in volunteer support.²⁰ Seventy-five UTS students were employed part-time for three months as corporate volunteers for selected charities. The beauty of both these programmes is that they fulfil the university’s self-imposed guidelines for its community engagement—that the partnership is reciprocal, mutually beneficial and delivers public good.²¹

Universities are complex institutions, and despite the constant calls for ‘transdisciplinary’ or ‘interdisciplinary’ collaboration, driving whole of university responses to identified problems is often difficult. The experience of COVID and the roll out of UTS’s SSP, including its Community Ambassador and Digital Mentoring programmes, showed collaboration for public purpose was possible. Staff in areas where workload was reduced due to COVID were relocated to help deliver the SSP and many worked overtime to deliver support to students and the community. Staff were driven by a sense of common purpose and public good, and despite it being a difficult time for many, staff expressed pride in their achievements and felt connected to the university and the local community.

COVID allowed us to deliver a partnered programme that benefitted university and community alike. The Digital Mentoring and Community Ambassador programmes provided concrete examples of community engagement during a crisis and demystified this way of working to sceptics within the institution. The success of these programmes will help drive future partnerships of this type across the university.

COVID has demonstrated that universities have an important role to play as anchor institutions that support communities during crisis and transition. However, despite evidencing the positive impact of engaged practice during COVID, university community engagement is at risk across the sector as Australian university budgets tighten post-pandemic. The positive learning, teaching and research outcomes delivered through engaged scholarship need to be reinforced during this time.

Universities must also learn from this period and continue to create processes that engage with, and respect the knowledge and expertise created outside academia. Whilst trust in expert advice has perhaps improved during COVID, universities are built on an ‘expert model that often gets in the way of constructive university-community collaboration’.²²

This point is best made by Bruno Latour when he argues that the COVID pandemic has given the public an opportunity to engage with scientific complexity, to debate with each other about statistics, experimentation and how diseases are spread. He argues ‘if you want people to have some grasp of science, you must show how it is produced.’²³

In other words, rather than undertaking knowledge work on behalf of society, universities must undertake it in active collaboration with society. This offers the benefit of incorporating contextual knowledge and experience, thereby enhancing the collective outcomes resulting from such partnerships. Great value can be generated when universities build reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships with the communities they serve.

Covid has brought into existence and in some cases revivified new forms of social coordination, including a new social licence for universities to address the present crisis (and other wicked issues) as a multi-part player in the creation of new knowledge for a social purpose. This new social contract for universities can only be achieved by engagement.