60 Virtual Brochure – March 2025 Staff lifecycle Risks around staff recruitment, retention, engagement and performance appear on almost all strategic risk registers. Risk mitigation approaches highlight actions addressing workforce planning, and reviewing career pathways and workloads, alongside increased emphasis on staff engagement. As in previous years, risks in this area are scored at a relatively low level by institutions, ranked 14th in terms of inherent risk and 17th in terms of mitigated risks. This contrasts sharply with our analysis of European business’ strategic risks which once again identifies that people-related risks are the second most significant risk facing businesses across all sectors. This suggests that on average the sector continues to undervalue the significance of people-related risks. Importantly, the UUK blueprint emphasises the necessity of comprehensive and effective staff engagement in discussions and decisions about transformation and change. However, it is notable that despite many institutions describing risks around morale and running voluntary severance schemes during the year, only one risk register addresses this risk head on, setting out clear mitigation strategies addressing staff engagement, business continuity, and embedding new structures and ways of working. Governing bodies and audit committees should ensure that people related risks are given sufficient visibility and focus, particularly where institutions contemplate substantive changes to organisational structures, resourcing and ways of working. Research Research appears as a strategic risk in 50% of registers, the same as in prior years. While, from a ranking perspective, mitigated risk scores are broadly unchanged, there is a notable increase in the ranking of the inherent risk from 21st to 12th. Risk descriptors indicate that the focus is primarily on the non- achievement of income targets for research and knowledge exchange (KE). This reflects a strategic imperative at many institutions to grow research capacity, despite most public and charitable funding not covering the full economic cost of research and reliance on cross-subsidy from international student tuition fees. Risk mitigation approaches address familiar territory and cover: strengthening horizon scanning and funder engagement, promoting research expertise, capacity building and mentoring for researchers, selective recruitment of research active staff and doctoral students, investment in research culture activities and partnerships. Given the increasing risk profile, audit committees may wish to test the robustness of assumptions around forecast increases in research and KE income and seek additional assurance around the effective costing and management of research and the extent of cross-subsidy from international recruitment, in additional to their annual review of the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) return.
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