Reward and Recognition

We want to support an inclusive culture through ensuring a consistent, clear, transparent, equitable and accessible approach to staff reward and recognition through our organisation and our staff’s host institutions. 

Due to our range of host institutions, there is a complex arrangement of internal and external reward and recognition opportunities. We will work in partnership with our host institutions to ensure that we have appropriate levels of involvement and representation in the promotions process at each site, and that our specific context is clearly understood.

We are keen to celebrate the success of our staff, so please let us know if you are nominated for or receive any form of reward or recognition from your host institution or an external body.

Line managers should have regular development discussions with their staff to include praise and thanks for high quality work, including nominations for rewards and support for promotions, where appropriate.

Line managers may need to be pro-active in suggesting applications for promotions, especially for women and minority groups as these colleagues are less likely to nominate themselves and are underrepresented in terms of promotions success. Colleagues who work part time / have taken parental leave are likely to experience challenges in successfully applying for a promotion and may need guidance with their personal circumstances declaration.

Atmospheric Stars Awards and Long Service Awards.

Each host institution has their own reward and recognition processes, such as ‘acting up payments’ or ‘one off awards’ or ‘additional scale increment’.

Please note that your manager will need to nominate you and there are usually 2 rounds per year. The deadlines may be strictly applied. It is the responsibility of the line manager to be clear about when those deadlines are to support timely applications. Please discuss these with your line manager or site lead, or contact the NCAS People Team for any questions or advice.

You will need to apply for a grade promotion in your role through the host institution process.

This varies from organisation to organisation, and from grade to grade. Please note that for some institutions, the manager applies on behalf of – or puts forward the request for – the promotion.

Our institutional promotions guide openly shares the different routes to promotion and offers support to applying, in response to the 2022 and 2024 staff Equality, Diversity and Inclusion surveys. The guide focuses mainly on university based, academic, research and technical role promotions as these tend to vary from institution to institution and be more complex than support, and professional and managerial promotion applications.