Ops SIG at One:
What We’ve Learned (and Why You Should Join!)

Don’t Overthink It: we started out by creating MS Forms for colleagues to register for events, but found that attendance and engagement increased significantly when we started simply sending a calendar invite to everyone in our SIG. One can still monitor likely attendance, and colleagues have the chance to accept or decline, but creating and filling out a form seems to have been an unnecessary additional step. 

Engage Your SIG: some of our most rewarding sessions and conversations have been when SIG members have presented their career journeys, or where colleagues have brought a challenge or question to a coffee morning and we’ve all been able to feed in with suggestions or advice. While didactic events can work really well, fostering space for conversation and community has been a real defining factor for us.

Pick Your Channels: this is an evolving piece for us. Our main channels of communication are the AHEP Teams area, our SIG LinkedIn Group, and email, and it’s important not to bombard people with information, but to generate the right engagement in each space. We now communicate about events by email/calendar invite, try to generate conversation in Teams, and post information about opportunities on LinkedIn. While we continue to work on engagement in these spaces, it’s important to match message to medium.

Collaboration Is Key: many of our SIGs will have overlapping interests – and these are great opportunities not only to share the load and to cross-promote, but to bring people together from different areas. Our collaboration with the EDI SIG (which can be found here – do make sure you are logged into your AHEP account in order to view the recording: https://ahep.ac.uk/events/inclusive-recruitment-how-and-why-to-raise-the-recruitment-game/) was engaging and inspiring in equal measure, and we’re really looking forward to future collaborations with the Digital and Early Careers SIGs. As Operations, we generally need a broad, rather than a deep, knowledge – a little of everything. This means we have a great opportunity to work with other SIGs to get introductions to different areas of activity and to share communities.

Set The Tone: life is hard in the sector at the moment and there is grim news on many fronts. In the Operations SIG, we try to create opportunities to lighten the mood when we come together, and that in turn helps our events (hopefully!) seem like a positive break in the day. Our sort-of-regular “Freaky Friday” posts in Teams celebrate the randomness and the chaos of the world of Operations and as Louise has occasional trouble with disruption and… mess caused by campus geese, and David has a well-shared anecdote about having to evacuate a bat from an academic department earlier in his career (as “Department Administrator”, it fell into his job description under “any other duties…), our informal mission as Co-Ordinators is to find a suitable animal-based operational challenge for Nikki.

The Team That Vibes Together, Thrives Together: spend time getting to know your fellow SIG co-ordinators and understand how best you’ll work together. It’s great to connect in person where possible, and set regular online catch-ups. Understanding one another’s strengths and motivations has been really powerful for us and has meant that we can spark ideas, share successes and challenges, and model the behaviours that we want to foster while having a few laughs along the way!