Salford SU Kickstarter - Ed's Second Brain

## Summary - We need easy ways for colleagues to collaborate across teams without excessive oversight. - We need sabbatical-led, or co-led, projects - We need to fund creative and innovative work - A way to do this is through a [[Kickstarter]]. ## USSU Kickstarter operation - Every USSU staff member and sabbatical officer given £500 allocation - Projects must advance the [[Salford SU Strategy]] - Projects are only funded once they reach £2000 (so a minimum of four staff members required). Projects need members from at least two different staff teams, and at least one sabbatical officer or part time officer (so at least one representative from three teams). - No SLT approval. Discuss with line manager from a wellbeing/ workload perspective. - Teams must report back on the impact/ lessons learned. ## MBA Kickstarter Case study The Kickstarter is an innovative approach to project funding which empowers staff and volunteers to work collaboratively and across teams and role types. It is democratic in that all staff members have an equal say in what projects are taken forward. It is a product of a decentralised and market-based economic theory (a market is created in the organisation’s staff team). There is no central oversight beyond the framework created by the Senior Leadership Team. The approach breaks down silos as it forces individuals to work across teams to gain funding. It also brings volunteers and full time staff members, as well as student representatives, together to solve problems for our beneficiaries. It has low overheads as there isn’t a stringent/ large governance structure. It is a marquee policy setting out our new, empowering and anti-bureaucratic approach to decision making and control. | ### How the evidence meets the learning outcomes. K1.1 – This shapes the organizational culture by continuing to develop empowered staff who can easily access the money they need in order to meet the demands of students. K1.2 – The approach facilitates cooperation across organisational structures K1.3 – The approach facilitates rapid adjustment to changing customer demands and trends, and the external environment. K2.1 - This facilitates innovation and is in itself a disruptive technology. It runs counter to the prevailing top-down management culture present in Higher Education institutions. K2.2 – This demonstrates a systems thinking approach, as it identifies the weaknesses in traditional strategy fund allocation models. This is also a programme in itself. K3.2 – This facilitates entrepreneurialism and effective decision making as it helps to overcome Mintzberg’s fallacy of distance. K4.1 – This approach helps to overcome financial scenarios where there is a lack of readily available funds to respond to a scenario. K5.1 – The approach facilitates the removal of silos across the organisation; to the contrary it facilitates inter-team cooperation. Engagement should follow, and it is certainly an approach that supports a high performance, agile and collaborative culture. K6.2 – This approach develops collaborative arrangements internally, and potentially externally too. This could facilitate responses to the changing external environment. S2.3 - This approach was initiated and led by me, and instils creativity, innovation and empowered staff that drives continual improvement. S2.5 – This approach manages resources and people effectively, across organisational boundaries. I am the sponsor who drove through the plan with managers, student volunteers and across the organisation. I also supported it with other key stakeholders external to the organisation. S3.6 – I believe this approach to be more ethical than other resource allocation approaches, as it empowers staff through a democratic and equitable arrangement regardless of status, provides all staff with the resources to do their role. S3.8 – The approach is designed to facilitate resilience and new enterprise and opportunities. S5.14 – This approach creates an inclusive culture as it is based on equity and democracy. It promotes others to develop projects that are not a part of the hierarchical hegemony that can occur in traditional organisations (as in those organisations managers deem what is acceptable and what isn’t, and can therefore inhibits unconventional thinking). S5.15 – This approach tells staff that both myself and the rest of the senior team trust staff with reasonably significant sums of money (£500 each) and encourages them to take risks. S6.16 – This enables open and high performance working culture. S6.17 – This approach is all about leading teams to be more collaborative, more engaged and constructive. S6.18 – This approach challenges colleagues to bring skills and creativity to bear that might not be part of their usual job role. This encourages continual development. | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | 3. Context – what was your role in using/developing this evidence? I am CEO of the organization. We introduced a ‘strategic development fund’ of £20k to progress our strategic objectives. I designed, developed and introduced the scheme, and I am currently monitoring its impact. It is designed so that each staff member has an automatic allocation of £500, however projects are only funded when they reach £2000. The individuals involved must come from at least three teams, and involve customers on their teams. Once they reach these threshold criteria the funding is allocated without organisational/ hierarchical oversight. | | 4. What have you learnt because of this activity? Include personal reflection. I’m very proud of this policy and approach, particularly from a philosophical perspective. What it has shown is that while a lack of strategic funds has been a barrier to doing additional work this is not the principal barrier. Instead this is the lack of staff capacity to take on this new and innovative work. Quickly I realised that this approach needed to be softened, and SLT agreed to adjust the criteria slightly so that staff could not just use funds for strategic initiatives but also purchases that could enable productivity towards these strategic initiatives (such as new laptops). In the future I will check in with managers to see how the approach is going, and what other barriers to adoption there are. |