Across the three White Rose universities, around 200 research staff take an extended period of parental leave each year. White Rose has commissioned a research project to identify strategies that support a smooth and successful return – one that looks beyond formal policy to the everyday experiences, local cultures and informal support that shape how that transition actually feels.

Alys Kay, research culture coach and consultant, is co-leading the project alongside Sarah Penny, Researcher Developer at the University of York. In this reflective piece, Alys shares what a service-design lens is revealing about how institutions produce – or fail to produce – safety, trust and equity at moments of vulnerability. Alys is starting her next phase of consultative stakeholder engagement across Leeds, Sheffield and York, and we will share further findings as they emerge.

* * * * * * * * * * *

As the White Rose returner interviews get underway, I’ve been reflecting on the service-design lens we’re using to think about return, safety and institutional journeys. This perspective is helping us see research culture not only as policy, values or leadership intent, but as something people must actively move through at moments of vulnerability.

In my current work as a research culture consultant with the White Rose University Consortium, the partnership between the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York, I’ve been having a series of sense-making conversations about how key career transitions are actually experienced in practice across different institutional contexts.

This article introduces a service-design lens as a way of understanding research culture as a lived, navigated system, rather than a static set of policies or values.

My background sits at the intersection of qualitative research, service design and researcher development. I therefore approach this work not only as an inquiry into lived experience, but as an exploration of how institutional systems are designed and how that design distributes safety, risk, trust and agency when people are under cognitive, emotional and professional load.

This feels particularly timely in light of the shift within REF from People, Culture and Environment (PCE) to the broader framing of Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE). The direction of travel is clear: SPRE is not simply asking whether policies exist, but whether responsibility, leadership, support and care are coherently designed, embedded, and experienced as reliable, legitimate and safe by the people whose careers and wellbeing depend on them.

Why a service-design lens

A service-design lens does not replace established approaches in qualitative research, equality, diversity and inclusion, or leadership studies. It adds a complementary way of seeing: treating research culture as something people navigate, not only something institutions articulate.

Service design focuses on journeys, touchpoints, cognitive load, trust, risk and responsibility. It asks how systems are encountered at moments of transition, where hand-offs succeed or fail, and where people are required to compensate for design gaps through personal resilience rather than structural support. From this perspective, research culture is not only what appears in strategy documents; it is what is encountered in the corridor, the inbox, the first meeting back, and the unanswered question.

Alongside the interviews, I’m drawing on a wider evidence base on return-to-work, career interruption and institutional support design, including research on workload and “return debt”, progression penalties associated with absence, psychological safety and disclosure risk, and the role of line management in shaping equitable outcomes.

Held together, this illustrates what practitioner qualitative research can do when it is combined with systems literacy and design thinking. Deep listening, when paired with attention to institutional architecture, journeys and responsibility, does more than describe experience. It reveals where safety, risk, trust and agency are structurally produced, and how design choices in policy, process and governance either buffer vulnerability or quietly amplify it.

Research culture as a lived journey

Returning from parental leave, seen through this lens, is not simply a policy event. It is a complex institutional journey shaped by:

• how and when people first realise they need support
• how information is encountered under exhaustion and time pressure
• how responsibility is distributed between line managers, HR, EDI, researcher operations, research culture and academic leadership
• how safe it feels to disclose uncertainty or vulnerability
• how continuity of role, workload, identity and professional legitimacy are managed across an absence

Rather than beginning with “Do we have the right policy?”, the service-design question becomes:

What is it like to move through this system at this moment, and where does the design reduce or amplify risk, effort and uncertainty?

It reveals where safety, risk, trust and agency are structurally produced, and how design choices in policy, process and governance either buffer vulnerability or quietly amplify it.

From policy to “policy safety”

One of the most generative distinctions emerging from the White Rose work is between:

• Policy availability – does something exist?
• Policy findability – can people locate it when they need it?
• Policy usability – can it be understood and enacted?
• Policy safety – does it feel safe to rely on, without fear of financial, contractual, reputational or progression-related harm?

Early sense-making suggests that some researchers return earlier than they would ideally wish not because they are unaware of policy, but because of concerns about workload accumulation, funding timelines, career visibility and professional standing. A working proposition, therefore, is that earlier-than-ideal return may in some contexts be driven less by information gaps than by perceived risk and limited trust in institutional protection.

Seen through a service-design lens, lower uptake of support may not primarily be an awareness problem, but a safety problem. The system may be legible, but not always experienced as something it is safe to depend upon.

Importantly, these questions of safety are not confined to returners. Line managers themselves are navigating uncertainty about what is guaranteed, what is discretionary, and where accountability sits between HR, faculties, heads of department and individual supervisors. In service-design terms, they too are users of the system, carrying cognitive load and legal, equality and wellbeing risk. Variation in practice can therefore reflect not only individual confidence or values, but how clearly protection, authority and institutional backing are designed into organisational infrastructure.

“Noticing” as institutional infrastructure

Another theme emerging from the conversations concerns noticing: who becomes aware that someone is returning, struggling or navigating a major transition, and how that awareness is translated into coordinated support.

In most institutions, responsibility for noticing is spread across multiple functions, line managers, academic leads, HR, EDI and wellbeing teams, professional services, and informal networks, and the way this works differs between schools and organisational units. A service-design lens focuses not just on whether individuals are attentive, but on whether the system intentionally embeds clear roles, processes and accountabilities for noticing so that responsiveness doesn’t depend on chance or personal goodwill.

Where it is not, support depends on confidence, informal networks or chance, and line managers carry heavy coordination and emotional labour without structural backing. Where it is designed in, noticing becomes part of institutional infrastructure rather than an act of individual heroism.

From experience to evidence: specifying what could be measured

A further value of holding this work through a service-design lens is methodological. Much current work on research culture oscillates between two levels: rich narrative accounts of experience, and high-level institutional indicators or dashboards. What is often missing is a meso-level analytic frame that links lived journeys to system design and, in doing so, specifies what should be examined empirically if claims about safety, equity and environment are to be meaningful.

Because service design attends to journeys, hand-offs, defaults, cognitive load and responsibility, it points to forms of evidence such as:

• Navigation burden: time and effort required to locate policy, establish eligibility, and reach a legitimate decision-maker.
• Default versus negotiated support: what is automatically triggered and protected, versus what requires individual request, confidence and social capital.
• Consistency of workload re-baselining, clock-stopping and phased return across comparable roles and contracts.
• Alignment between return processes and appraisal, promotion and funding timelines.
• Distribution of coordination and emotional labour: where the work of stitching the system together actually sits.
• Disclosure pathways: where escalation succeeds, stalls, or becomes unsafe.

In this way, practitioner qualitative sense-making does more than surface experience. It helps establish the construct validity of future indicators of research culture by showing where, in the system, safety, trust and equity are actually produced and where they are eroded.

Stress points and differential outcomes

This lens also helps to highlight where unequal outcomes are most likely to arise. If safety, the burden of navigating systems, and responsibility are unevenly distributed, the effects are unlikely to be random.

While the present project does not analyse demographic dimensions directly, existing evidence suggests that experiences in this space are likely to vary across factors such as contract type, seniority, funding source, caring responsibilities, and other structural or demographic factors, as well as the local managerial and administrative support surrounding the researcher.

The stress points in the journey, return timing, workload reset, clock-stopping, contract continuity, disclosure, promotion alignment, are precisely the moments where small differences in system design can produce large cumulative effects over time.

A measurement-relevant question therefore becomes not only “does support exist?”, but:

• Who is buffered by defaults, and who must negotiate?
• Who experiences protection as reliable, and who experiences it as contingent?
• Where do we see systematic variance across comparable roles, and what design features explain it?

Here the distinctive contribution of practitioner-led qualitative research becomes clear. Embedded in the interfaces between HR, EDI, research development, leadership and lived academic experience, it can surface where risk concentrates, where responsibility becomes ambiguous, and where inequity is structurally generated and in doing so, indicate where empirical analysis should focus if we are serious about evidencing research culture rather than merely describing it.

In this way, practitioner qualitative sense-making does more than surface experience. It specifies where, in the system, safety, trust and equity are produced, and what must be measured if research culture is to be evidenced rather than merely described.

Why this matters for the sector

Bringing a service-design perspective into research culture work reframes familiar challenges in ways that open new possibilities for both action and evaluation.

It makes visible that:

• Many “culture issues” are also design issues: matters of journeys, hand-offs and responsibility, not only attitudes or awareness.
• Equity is often experienced as a question of safety and trust, not merely formal access.
• Supporting people well depends as much on system architecture as on individual capability or goodwill.

Although grounded here in parental leave and return, the same design questions arise across many transitions in academic life: early-career progression, leadership, precarity, and periods of high emotional or cognitive load. The lens is therefore not topic-specific, but infrastructure-relevant.

The White Rose project is one context in which this way of thinking is being actively developed, alongside rigorous qualitative inquiry and close collaboration across HR, EDI, staff networks, line management, researcher development, research culture and academic leadership at Leeds, Sheffield and York.

For me, combining deep listening with service-design thinking offers a way of strengthening research culture that goes beyond values statements or isolated interventions. It provides a means of deliberately designing, and eventually evidencing, the systems, responsibilities and touchpoints that make care, equity and trust not just aspirational, but structurally reliable at the moments that matter most.

This perspective offers a way of moving from describing research culture to deliberately designing and evidencing it.

As the work develops, we are also thinking about how this emerging finding connects to wider institutional processes and roles. If this intersects with your area of work, or you would be interested in being involved as the work evolves, please feel free to contact Alys directly at alys.kay@gmail.com