Creating a TREMOR at the ReMPro Festival

 

In April, the TREMOR team were invited to stage a training event as part of a week-long Festival hosted by AESA Research Management Programme in Africa (ReMPro) and the Association for Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), UK entitled Enhancing Research Management Partnerships between Africa and the UK: Learning from the IRMSDP Program.

As a team we wanted to help people who were at the very start of their careers in Research Management and Administration (RMA). Across the team we have well over one hundred years’ of experience in RMA and we wanted to find a fun and interactive way to share some of this with colleagues who were new to the profession and to provide a platform where they could learn from each other’s experiences. As is the norm right now, we faced some limitations around the platform we could use to organise the session, but we approached it creatively. 

The session was planned to be jointly chaired by Laurence Gardiner (Nottingham Trent University) and Pam Claassen (University of Namibia) and we kicked off the session by introducing the team and the purpose of the day. The first thing we did was to ask everyone to participate in a poll to we could understand what challenges they were facing in their day to day work. We asked participants to say if they were: a. Thriving, b. Just surviving, or c. At my wits end! We circled back to the poll later in the session to learn (unsurprisingly in these turbulent times) that most people were: b. Just surviving. The purpose of our session was to reassure participants that they were not alone and to give them all a chance to learn some tips and share some experiences to help them to start thriving in the workplace. 

Participants were then divided into
four breakout rooms, each led by two members of the team (one as a Facilitator and one as a Notetaker). The topics were:

• Ethics and integrity and Compliance – Pam Claassen and Changu Batisani

• Grant Stewardship – Bas Rijnen and Kate Clift

• Academic rejection, and bureaucratic fatigue – Laurence Gardiner and Deryn Evans

• Managing multiple deadlines and workload – Clare Edwards and Maryke Hunter-Hüsselmann

During each breakout room, participants were invited to debate various scenarios and topics (see below for examples) designed by the team to provoke discussion. Every 15 mins the participants rotated to another breakout room, so everyone got a chance to contribute to each theme. The discussions were designed to prompt debate around the best ways to resolve dilemmas and workplace issues and for participants to consider what skills they needed to nurture to be effective.

Examples of the Scenarios used in the Grant Stewardship breakout room

 

Scenario 1: Your organisation is a co-partner in a three partner research project funded by a prestigious funder. You have concerns that the lead partner is struggling to manage the budget effectively and that the project is overspending. You have addressed this issue once with the Principal Investigator in your organisation, but he/she doesn’t seem to see an issue. A milestone report is scheduled for the funder within the next few weeks. How do you manage this situation to ensure that the project can get back on track and the report to the funder can demonstrate strong governance and financial management?

·        Prompt Question 1: What would be your first step?

·        Prompt Question 2: Who are the important stakeholders in this scenario?

·        Prompt Question 3: What do you think will be the most challenging aspect?

 

Scenario 2: One of your main funders has launched a very interesting call for proposals. The call is attractive to several academics at your organisation, from different disciplines and they have all expressed interest to apply for it. Your organisation strongly supports interdisciplinary work, but you feel that for this call a specific group of researchers stands the best chance of success. The call however clearly says that each organisation can only submit one proposal.

·        Prompt Question 1: How do you deal with this?

·        Prompt Question 2: What skills do you think you will need?

·        Prompt Question 3: Who can help you to resolve the situation?

For the Managing Multiple Deadlines and Workload breakout room, participants were given the opportunity to share challenges and tips regarding deadlines and workloads. The discussions highlighted the increased workload and deadlines that require multi-tasking and creative ways to juggle between competing priorities. Participants noted how COVID-19 has also impacted on the way we work requiring an increased understanding of due diligence processes. The pandemic has meant most people had to quickly learn new technologies and online platforms to enable meetings and communication. Participants highlighted the challenges facing new staff members starting in the office during the lockdown period with no face-to-face interaction making effective handovers impossible. The participants shared their insights on ways to manage multiple deadlines and workloads. Thoughts included:

• COVID-19 provided the opportunity to relook the way we work and to streamline processes

• It is important to have clear business processes documented

• Consider having a central repository where information on processes, policies, etc can be shared with staff for easy access

• Clear communication is important – with your management, with your team and with your researchers

• Be honest and realistic with yourself and your stakeholders – it is OK to say no and it is OK to let things slide (sometimes 😊)

• Use tools available to prioritise work, for example Outlook Calendar, One Note, Gantt Charts, Trello, MS Teams

• Don’t try to do everything yourself – assign activities, try to get admin support – build trust and let go!

In the rejection and bureaucratic fatigue breakout room sessions, several examples of different types of rejection were presented as well as reasons that these might occur. This included, unsuccessful grants which can be due to quality issues, lack of track record or a lack of potential impact from the work, as well as being dropped as a collaborator from a project and tips on how to be a good partner to ensure that you minimise the risk of this happening in future.

The discussion then turned to how research managers could support academics facing or experiencing rejection. Suggestions included:

• Give them space – let the news sink in, before intervening in a supportive and empathetic way.

• Ask the funder for further feedback, they could say no, but some are willing and able to provide further details.

• Prepare for potential future rejections by setting expectations. The facts of funding are that there are a lot of rejections on the route to grant success, roughly 80% of bids are unsuccessful

• Avoid rejection by developing and submitting high quality bids to the right calls and funder. Draw on other colleagues’ experience and expertise to develop quality work to increase the chance of success. Be a good collaborator, communicate in a timely manner, be enthusiastic and be willing to compromise.

Following the breakout rooms a feedback session helped participants to benefit from the discussions of each group.

The things we learnt from the process

• Achieving successful interactive workshops for groups is challenging when using an online platform though the prompt questions helped.

• We were very clear in the marketing that the event was aimed at entry level and early career colleagues, but we still had more senior colleagues registering.

• Although we made it clear in the marketing that this was an interactive workshop, many individuals did not interact and kept their cameras off and themselves muted. This would probably have been a very different experience if we had run the workshop face to face.

• It is crucial to get the technology right. We were not in control of the platform on the day and only discovered when using it how limiting it was. This had a negative effect on the momentum of the session and the levels of interaction we could achieve.

• There is a huge amount of skills and experience across the sector and we can all learn so much from each other.

• The number of people who register for an online event can vary hugely from the number who do attend so it is difficult to predict numbers and to plan. You must be adaptable on the day.