The Department and Environment and Geography and SEI-Y is committed to ensuring that all members of staff achieve their full potential in a supportive and flexible work environment.  We have enthusiastically adopted the Athena SWAN charter of good employment practice for women working in science, engineering and technologies in Universities.  We were delighted to receive the Bronze Athena SWAN Award in 2014, renewed in 2017, in recognition of the support we offer to all staff in the Department and SEI-Y.  To facilitate the career development need of all staff, we advocate flexible and part-time working patterns where possible, and provide mentoring and regular performance reviews.

The Department operates a family-friendly policy, including arrangements for part-time working, job shares, condensed hours, annualised hours and flexi-time.  There are several examples of successful part time working across different types and grades of jobs. 

Subject to available finances and role availability, the Department expects to approve all reasonable requests from full-time staff to move to part-time working and vice-versa, changes to the number of part-time hours worked are also expected to be approved.

All staff have the right to request formal flexible working (involving a contract change) provided that they have worked at the University for 26 weeks. Nominally core hours are 10-4pm, but days and times of work are agreed with line managers.  Academics have considerable freedom to work at home when not teaching and this is often done informally.  Formal requests for constraints on timetabling to allow, for example  individuals to collect children from school, need to be approved by the HoD.  Research staff can work from home with prior approval of their line manager.  Administrative and technical support staff should seek agreement initially from their line manager and HoD with regard to flexible working.  Staff in SEI-Y can request a regular arrangement of up to one day per week working from home.  This needs to be approved by the SEI-Y York Management Team.

The core hours for the department are 10am to 4pm. Any departmental-wide meeting should be scheduled within those hours, which includes any networking time, e.g. over coffee. 

We encourage staff to have email auto-reply when on leave or not working to minimise work expectations. Information on email signatures when you are not at work is also very helpful and encouraged. To reduce the amount of email outside the standard work hours, use email scheduling available within GMail to send emails between 8am and 6pm.