Culture Change Works

This World Menopause Day, this is my message to companies: The narrative around women’s wellbeing and performance in midlife MUST change. Perimenopause and menopause have huge physiological impacts on women. Every woman will experience menopause at some point, yet workplace policies often fail to acknowledge and support each woman’s unique journey. How companies can support women through menopause👇🏻 → Provide managers with training to enhance their understanding and improve their ability to support team members. → Implement corporate policies that protect women's financial stability during menopause, especially if they need time off. → Be flexible to help women to continue working during this time. → Create a culture where women are comfortable talking to colleagues, managers and HR about their symptoms. Let’s normalise speaking about menopause openly - it affects half the population. Currently, nearly a quarter of women leave their jobs due to the detrimental impact of menopausal symptoms. This not only disrupts their career journeys but costs the economy billions. It’s promising to see the government’s intention for companies with 250 or more employees to have a ‘Menopause Action Plan’. However, there’s much more to be done and we can all do our bit to support our female talent.

It was a thrill to share a stage with Professor Brian Cox at the start of Times Higher Education's World Academic Summit. Who better to articulate the transformational power of universities at a time when it is often questioned? I took the opportunity to ask the The University of Manchester physicist (who still teaches, carries out research, and supervises PhDs, alongside his stadium tours and BBC television series) how important it was that under-fire disciplines such as the arts and humanities were protected alongside science and tech subjects. His response couldn't have been clearer: "absolutely vital", as is support for curiosity driven research. Here's what he told me: “We have to admit that we are not smart enough – nobody is smart enough – to know where you can invest your money in order to make profound changes in society... Cosmology raises some profound philosophical questions about our place in the universe…what does it mean to live a finite fragile life in an infinite and eternal universe? Science does not give you the answer to that – it does not tell you what the discovery of 400 billion suns in the Milky Way galaxy means. If there is some answer to this question, it is, as Plato said, that we can shine light on the shadows – science gives us a necessary but not sufficient light [to do this].” Without a broad range of research disciplines being funded, it might not be possible to make those breakthrough discoveries, he warned. “Are you smart enough to invest research money? Are you smart enough to know which discipline to switch off without damaging research?” Read our report on my interview with Professor Cox here: https://lnkd.in/eErbfeKs

We're proud members of the White Rose University Consortium which relaunched this week with a new vision and mission. The Consortium is a partnership with University of Leeds and University of Sheffield. It supports career development and strengthens our communities enabling individuals from all backgrounds to thrive: https://lnkd.in/euvDEmbz

New on Wonkhe: Katy Shaw introduces some of the work universities are doing to support local areas in the way they support cultural activity https://lnkd.in/es754gjF

Lots of coverage of the UUK Blueprint this morning on Wonkhe - start with our bluffer's guide 👇 https://lnkd.in/eDGFxFiH

English universities have lost £3 BILLION in real income in just three years - as the real-terms value of the £9,250 tuition fee for domestic undergraduate students (frozen since 2012) has fallen to below £6,000. New analysis from the Times Higher Education consultancy dataHE shows the impact of inflation when converted to today’s money, with the current fees worth almost £13,000 in 2017. Funding per student is sliding fast and will soon fall below the low point of £8,800 in the mid-1990s and reach roughly half the per-student resource of 2012, it suggests. DataHE MD Mark Corver said funding levels for UK students were “unusually low”, with universities left unaided in a commercial market but unable to take action because of increasingly distorting price controls. Meanwhile a major new policy paper from Higher Education Policy Institute argues that a surcharge paid by employers on graduates’ national insurance contributions could be a key plank of a fairer student finance system in England that would allow university funding to be increased without leaving the government out of pocket. The paper, by Tim Leunig, the The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) professor who has had senior advisory roles at the British Treasury, 10 Downing Street and the Department for Education, says that the current student funding system “has not worked”, leaving graduates saddled with debt for up to 40 years and universities on the brink of bankruptcy. Professor Leunig says that it is “time to accept that employers benefit from a better educated workforce. They too should play a part in covering the costs.” He proposes a 1 per cent surcharge on national insurance contributions for graduates, paid throughout their working life, which would, he says, raise an additional £10.7 billion per cohort. What do you think? Should employers cover more of the costs of the higher education system? Should tuition fees be increased to catch-up with inflation? Read more on Mark Corver's analysis here: https://lnkd.in/eeUHtE7r Read Times Higher Education's report on Professor Leunig's HEPI paper here: https://lnkd.in/eBsTQhGd #studentfunding #tutionfees

📢 NEW PODCAST ALERT! 📢 In our latest " Jobshare Stories" podcast, we welcome Hannah Clayton and Holly McConnell-Whitehead - who are strategic communications and change specialists with more than twenty years' experience working in cultural organisations, further and higher education and charities. ⚖ Hannah and Holly discuss how their jobshare has evolved over the years - having shared a variety of roles and now operating a truly flexible job share model to facilitate their consultancy business. 👭 As co-founders of Culture Change Works they support a variety of clients to consider and develop change - with people and their wellbeing in mind. 📢 If you want to hear about how they've flexed their jobsharing model, how jobsharing supports workforce planning and how their brilliant partnership delivers better outcomes for their clients, search for Jobshare Stories wherever you get your podcasts.  #TheJobshareRevolution #JobshareStories #FlexibleWorkingWorks #FutureOfWork