Digital and Creative Media

Hey there. It’s beginning to feel a lot like it’s common in big organisations for teams to compete for resource and attention to get the job done. 

Why is this? 

The reality of business and big organisations being historically male-dominated is well documented, and it’s only in recent years that many organisations have sought to address gender representation at senior levels and aim to close pay gaps between women and men. 

Out of this male hegemony over business operations and strategy (which IMHO has influenced corporate structures, procedures and culture since the Second World War), we’re experiencing a distinctly male justice perspective on how we work. 

You what, mate? 

You might be surprised to realise you already know what a “male justice perspective” is. You’ve been living through it for most of your career. 

In relation to workplaces, a masculine justice perspective emphasises individuality and independence in human relations. 

This leads to the potential for conflict, which gets moderated by rules and procedures. These rules and procedures create a kind of “ethics” and the difference between “right” and “wrong”. 

The masculine justice perspective means any dilemmas or disagreements must be resolved definitively, with the claims of the person “in the right” being protected by the rules and procedures. 

This is how organisations have traditionally functioned for decades. 

A feminine perspective – another way 

For some time, researchers (according to leadership expert Peter Northouse) have questioned whether women talk about ethics and the needs of a group in a different way. Northouse cites a researcher called Carol Gilligan, who spent a lot of time in the 1990s probing the idea of a feminine ethic of care.

Gilligan (through her book, In A Different Voice) contributed to the idea that women may take a different view on ethics and justice, based on the way children develop. She puts forward the concept of a distinctly female ethical voice, based on the idea that girls follow a different developmental path to boys in relation to friendships and groups. 

You might agree if you’ve seen how some boys and girls behave in the playground at school*. 

The ethic of care in the face of a justice viewpoint 

What does this mean for the traditional justice perspective? 

Whereas the masculine justice perspective emphasises individuality and independence, the feminine ethic of care relies on connection and interdependency between groups. 

This means there’s more likely to be positive interactions, as people view themselves as part of a network of relationships and emphasise the preservation of bonds in the network to resolve any issues so that everyone benefits. 

“Ethics” in this scenario are reinforced when people care about others and encourage each other to engage rather than confront other individuals. 

Of course, it doesn’t really work like this, precisely because of how organisations have functioned for decades. 

Ethical perspectives and hierarchy 

Given that organisations have been male-dominated for a long time, it’s no surprise they operate in a hierarchical way, which encourages and cultivates competition, from a masculine perspective. 

From this perspective, hierarchy is not only desired but essential to the maintenance of a masculine ethical view of the organisation. 

A feminine construct dismantles the hierarchy and views all people in the organisation as part of an inter-connected web, on whom they all depend. 

What this means for a university website 

Historically, as website editors are often based in schools or departments, it means they fall into a hierarchy. And by extension the justice perspective means there is competition for resource, agency and prestige. 

We then enter an arms race, where different factions seek to acquire their own staff, and appoint them to the most senior role they can get away with, in order to go toe-to-toe with others who may seek to undermine their claim to the digital estate. 

But what if we take a feminine perspective? What if we view this group of people not as separate individuals, working to the beat of their own line manager or departmental aims, but a combined group with a shared understanding? A group who naturally rely on each other for the betterment of themselves and the group? 

Perhaps even the betterment of the university? 

Or even, dare I say, for the benefit of users? 

Why this can work at Sussex 

The good news is that Sussex is heading in the right direction in terms of women in more senior positions: women have been taking home 52% of the upper-mid pay quartile over the past three years, compared with men, and increasing their proportion of the take-home of top pay quartile earnings over the same three years, up from 40% in 2022, to 42% in 2023, to 45% in 2024**. 

If quartiles mean nothing to you, in cash terms, the top quartile is something in the region of a £60K salary. 

While it’s hard to be sure, especially as neither perspective is the exclusive preserve of men nor women, it’s conceivable that Sussex is primed to operate from a feminine ethical perspective, which in turn places a greater value on a combined network with shared benefits. 

This can only be a good thing for website governance in the future and, by extension, our website users and their online experience. 

Let’s take that thought home for Christmas. 

• If you enjoyed this post… you might be interested in a companion post about tactical resourcing in response to emergency situations.

*You might not agree with any of this, depending on your views on gender and development, and that’s OK

**data from the following public documents: University of Sussex gender pay gap report 2022 [PDF 526KB]; University of Sussex gender pay gap report 2023 [PDF 229KB]; University of Sussex gender pay gap report 2024 [PDF 184KB].

On 12 June 2015 I was sat at my desk (yes, my own desk!) in the news room of The Argus – the daily regional newspaper covering the county of Sussex.

I was monitoring the police and fire logs for breaking news and at about 5.30pm two separate incidents appeared on the fire service log. Each just said “FDR1” – a fire that is a danger or risk to life. Both were in Brighton & Hove.

There had already been two FDR1s in the city that day. As the old adage goes, sometimes you wait ages for an FDR1 and then four turn up at once. 

I found out Hove Engineerium was on fire at the same time as a shop in the North Laine area of Brighton. I was sent by my news desk to the Engineerium, where five crews from the fire service were already on the scene. 

Afterwards, I learnt there were seven fire engines at the other fire. There were only six fire engines for the whole city, so naturally I wondered where the others had come from and, since they were all in Brighton, what would happen if the places they’d come from also had an FDR1? 

I wasn’t one for press office spin, but what the fire service said actually made perfect sense.

Imagine a map of your local area laid before you, and imagine it is covered by a large net. Imagine each knot in the net is a resource that you need. Imagine grabbing the net with your hand and scrunching it up. As you gather the net, other knots will move closer to what you’ve scrunched up.

Now imagine the net covers the south-east of England. You get the idea. We saw this play out in July 2023, when part of the Royal Albion Hotel in Brighton went up in smoke, drawing in fire crews from as far away as London (pictured above).

Unknotting the net

If you’re still reading, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with the governance of a university website. 

At the university, about 500 people currently edit the website, with more accessing forms and uploading news or events. Each main department or area has several people editing pages. 

The (logical) argument for each team having several editors is that they need a back-up for the main editor, and a back-up for the back-up, etc. 

With turnover, training back-ups for hundreds of people and keeping that knowledge up-to-date, it’s a never-ending job, with no tangible benefit for users. 

Thankfully, the vast majority of our digital content is not a danger or risk to life, so it doesn’t need to be this way. 

It’s entirely possible that a more specialist group of editors could be part of a larger net that gets pulled, as needed, on to priority work. Why not have fewer editors but with more expert knowledge of the subject area and the right level of skills? If they’re busy, they can draw on the network for help. If they have capacity, they can get pulled on to other projects where they can do their best work. And if they’re sick or on holiday, the wider network covers for them. 

We’ve been thinking about the idea that this kind of network could mean the whole organisation is resourced efficiently, yet has access to the right skills to produce great content. We have a long way to go and there is more to do to prove that, actually, by taking this approach the University won’t burn down in an emergency. 

• If you enjoyed this post… you might be interested in a companion post about strategic resourcing in relation to feminine ethics and masculine justice perspectives.

We’ve had a series of engagement meetings about who is going to control information in a new web estate and how we manage that.

It involved a lot of notetaking, scribbling and imagining. It was enlightening and, fingers crossed, it’s also been encouraging. There’s a real collective desire to improve our content processes.

Historically, pretty much anyone could gain editing access to the Sussex website. It was just the way things are done. 

But now we need to rethink our governance model and ways of managing information. We need fewer editors with better skills and clearer responsibilities, rather than 500 people editing their own small section once in a while. 

One clear way to do this is by centralising more of our website management, so we have better governance. But this is not a palatable concept, because it’s absolutely about control of content. 

A case study – the Student Hub 

We’ve tried centralising in the past and it’s been very difficult, partly because you’re trying to instigate a cultural change and partly because of the “uniqueness” of Sussex.

The Student Hub (a project started in 2018) was partly successful in centralising website content for current students, rending it from the internal structures to which it was hitherto inextricably linked. 

We tried bringing everyone along, explaining the purpose of what we were doing and why.

Over time, it became clear that the only way we were going to truly finish populating the student sub-domain, and centralising the governance of this content along the way, was by stealth. Through the back door. There were a lot of emotions tied up with the content we were trying to migrate. 

The Student Hub project is now more or less done (more or less informally, because the budget was about 50 quid’s worth of vouchers for some user testing and some digestive biscuits from Asda). There’s always more we can do, but that will now be part of the New Web Estate project.

In the process of working on the Student Hub, up until last year, we had managed to: 

• reduce the number of web pages for the current student audience from at least 1,155 down to about 340 – a reduction of approximately 70%; 
• remove about 200 website editors from our system and instead have 15 editors networking on a Teams chat
• retire old parts of our website that were largely managed by devolved student services, structured according to the organisation; 
• generally increase sessions and users to the Student Hub year-on-year; 
• increase visits from Google search to the Student Hub year-on-year (pertinently, by 24% over 2021-2022, and by 30% over 2022-2023).

You’ll notice the majority of the work was about removing and deleting stuff, rather than creating through action bias.

How this phase ended

Cool story. So does this mean we won? 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the drive from senior people to complete the work had evaporated, because of other priorities.

Yet neither had we been told to stop. So we kept on going until the job was done. In the end, we deployed the last sections without sign-off just to get it over the line.

We did win, kind-of. But really the question is: Did users win?

Did students win? Did they get all their information in one place?

Our work was at the expense of some internal relationships. We had not won together.

A second chance 

This time round, as part of the NWE project, it will be different.

We will win together – and not just as a department, or a division, or as a collective of professional service staff. 

We will win as a university, across professional services and academia, across the third space, across our student body, across our wider community, across all site users. 

And we’ll do it through more engagement meetings, more discussions about control and autonomy, more debates about academic freedom and more relationships with people we didn’t get close enough to the first time round. 

I can say this with certainty because, this time round, if we don’t win together, we will definitely lose together. 

It’s been a while since we last posted on this blog. (Just shows the work involved in content creation, I guess…)

Since our last post, the project previously mentioned has been given a snappy name: the New Web Estate project. It broadly has the scope of covering our website, a staff intranet and the supporting systems and processes needed to make this work.

We spent the rest of 2023 pulling together a project mandate, which enabled us to take on a couple of new, fixed-term people in the digital team to help us keep going with business-as-usual while sizing up the task at hand.

After getting sign-off on the mandate, we’ve spent 2024 so far building a business case.

This has involved several strands of work, including:

• gathering audience insights
• developing a new approach to managing content
• engaging senior people from across the university in our work
• understanding how a new CMS would support a connected content model.

We’ll cover all these individually in future posts.

We’re shortly to look at a provisional new structure for the website – known as information architecture – and explore the beginnings of a content strategy.

To help us, we’ve brought an agency on board for this phase – more to follow on that in another post.

All of this will help us to build a business case that will go to the leadership of the university later this year.

After that, all being well, the real building will begin.