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One-stop-shop for communication and gathering data could reduce burden and drive change, says Anne Taylor
We are all more productive if we are content with our work environment. Different things are important to each of us. But we all like to have enough funds to do our work, the right physical set-up to enable the work, and a personally supportive atmosphere to motivate us.
This is the same for people in research as anywhere else—a positive culture helps to attract and retain the best researchers, and enables them to produce high-quality work.
Over recent years, many publications and reports have highlighted the need to improve research culture. A 2020 Wellcome survey, for example, found that nearly two-thirds of researchers reported witnessing bullying or harassment and 43 per cent reported experiencing it.
More recent polls report continuing high rates of anxiety and depression in science. Alongside this, issues in research have reflected a growing society-wide focus on equity, diversity and inclusion.
Funders contribute many millions of pounds into UK research and, therefore, have a shared responsibility with others in the system to improve research culture.
In 2018, Wellcome was the first UK research funder to launch a policy to address bullying and harassment. Around the same time, we set up the Research Funders Policy Group to enable collaborative work on funding policies. This consists of a small number of public and charitable funders with an interest in health, including representatives from UK Research and Innovation, Cancer Research UK, the Royal Society and the Association of Medical Research Charities.
In the last few years, Wellcome has also added a question asking about researchers’ working environments to its grant application forms.
Dignity and respect
These expectations, however, must usually be conveyed at arm’s length, as funders generally do not employ researchers directly. Research funders must rely on their terms and conditions to describe not only what they expect grants to be spent on, but also how they expect the work to be done. These policies describe how to treat participants, how to make research open and that we expect everyone linked to research we fund to be treated with dignity and respect.
Funders’ second problem is knowing if their efforts to influence research culture have had any impact, as there are no accepted measures; we are often left using proxies. And to measure anything we need to gather information, which brings an administrative load, particularly as every research organisation and every funder is different. But there is common ground.
How to make best use of that common ground is the basis for a pilot now being run by the Research Funders Policy Group. If successful, it could transform how we assess research organisations’ implementation of funder policies, including those linked to culture.
The vision is to provide a single system for organisations to enter data on how they manage specific policy areas—for example, environmental sustainability and conflicts of interest—and allow multiple funders to access that information. It’s a simple concept, but very hard to achieve, hence the pilot.
The first iteration will no doubt not be perfect, will have gaps, and may bring additional burden before it reaps the benefits that it promises. Success depends partly on the willingness of both research organisations and funders to be brave and ‘speculate to accumulate’.
A handful of research organisations have risen to the challenge and helped in the early stages of designing the process. A dozen more have completed the pilot questionnaire. The funders’ group is now assessing the submissions and seeing if we can all use the proposed criteria to produce assessments we can all accept.
Revealing good practice
At this point the intention is not to rank or grade, but to work with organisations where gaps are identified or improvements could be made. Holding the information in one place also helps to reveal good practice that may benefit other organisations.
The information can be used as a baseline for improvements and gives organisations a ready-made bank of answers for funder audits. Because the system supports the requirements of research funders, the plan is for funders rather than research organisations to pay for it.
We need to be mindful that we don’t run before we can walk, but, while the pilot is focusing on policies, if successful it might expand to other areas, and other parts of the world. Carefully developing a robust common framework is a crucial step towards providing everyone with the information needed to drive up standards.
Research Professional News is media partner for the 2024 conference of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators, held from 18 to 19 June in Brighton
Anne Taylor is associate director, funding operations and governance, at Wellcome. She will be speaking at the 2024 Arma conference on Tuesday 18 June
This article also appeared in Research Fortnight