1. Great Student Employers
So What?
Graham Atkinson (Head of People, NUS)

2. Objectives of the Session
Update / share some initial findings from work on Code of Practice on part-time / student employment.
Provide the opportunity for you to share and discuss your ideas and practices in relationship to student employment.
You should expect to leave the session with at least some ideas and/or tools for how you can look at your own practices and potentially become a better employer as a result.

3. Facts and Figures Over 22,000 employees (3% of the voluntary sector)
5,000+ career staff and approx. 17,000 student staff
2/3 of our staff are women… But only 1/3 of our CXs (compared to 44% within voluntary sector)
Our ‘People Power’ extends beyond our staff:
- 60k+ volunteers in community projects
- 40k+ volunteers involved in RAG
- 60k+ course, school and faculty reps
41% have IiP Status (v 44% of voluntary sector)

4. Why Bother?

5. Student Experience & Employee Engagement

6. Employee Engagement & Student Experience
Correlation score = 0.61

7. Initial Work on Code of Practice
31 students’ unions involved, ranging from 7 employees to 600 (average = 196)
Key Stats:
31% of employees on permanent contracts
8% on fixed-term contracts
51% on zero hours contracts
10% on guaranteed hours contracts
< 1% on internships / apprenticeships

8. Your Thoughts? What type of contracts do you use?
What currently works in employing your student staff?
What could you improve in your employment of student staff?

9. Some Quotes from the Data So Far…
“As a large SU, we employ about 100 core staff on permanent or fixed term contracts, plus our 7 Sabbatical Officers. We also employ around 300 support staff (mainly students) on zero hours contracts throughout the year, although this fluctuates. We do not use apprenticeships or internships. This model works well for us and we recently canvassed our support staff on their views on our use of zero hours contracts - they were very much in favour of them.”

10. Some Quotes from the Data So Far…
“The vast majority of our staff are students at the University, we employ them on a zero hours contract and work around academic and Union commitments when designing rotas. This is hard work for people doing the rotas but enables us to best support students in their studies. We have really high engagement rates - student staff even higher than our permanent staff!”

11. Some Quotes from the Data So Far…
“We are in the process of turning all of our zero hour contracts into minimum hour contracts (probably 6 hour contracts).”

12. Living Wage…? 5 out of 31 participants currently paying Living wage.
Many of those unions that don’t pay LW saying that they’d like to if they could afford it?
Some participants questioning whether the LW calculation is the right one for students?

13. Best Practice…
“Ensure the contract type is fully and openly explained at every stage of recruitment and selection. If you require staff to work a certain shift pattern or time then also make this explicit during recruitment. Make it easy for part-time 'casual' staff to sign up for shifts, ideally via a web-based system.”

14. Best Practice…
“Clarity on expectations to students or staff. We make it clear from point of receiving an application pack that hours are not guaranteed and vary according to business needs. This message is consistently applied through recruitment, induction and subsequent management of staff. In many other respects student staff are treated identically to other staff with annual performance reviews and an emphasis on supportive management and student staff are encouraged to put forward their ideas and recognised as with permanent staff through our award scheme NSU Stars. This combination of honesty and equality is important in building relationship with staff and is not unique to those on zero hours.”

15. Best Practice…
“We are introducing a generic induction programme so that student staff working in different areas have an overview of the whole organisation, which we believe will bring a sense of 'team' and better support for our student staff whilst encouraging them to be our promoters. We encourage our student staff to evidence the skills they gain from working with us. We provide an annual social event for student staff to bring together our staff from our campuses 45 miles apart. All student staff have 1 to 1 meetings with their line managers - we use a template for these meetings to ensure consistency.”

16. Best Practice…
“We have now introduced performance management processes for casual staff which we have not done previously and this includes a formal review of a probation period. This has been received very positively and this year we have seen the lowest turnover rate of leavers as a result.”

17. Best Practice…
“We in reality operate a minimum shift model, which is why moving to a guaranteed plus same rate overtime model will not be too difficult. For the freedom to work they need to give us enough notice, but we stick to a regular shift pattern where possible (95% of the time) so people know when ‘their hours’ are”

18. Where SUs struggle in engaging student staff…
Communication and engagement because of lack of set working pattern;
Performance appraisals;
More ‘scientific’ / ‘sophisticated’ rota system;
A more structured skills / leadership programme.

19. Code of Practice? Anything else you’d like to see in there?
Or think is critical to incorporate?

20. Thanks
Any Questions?