Every year, we ask our staff what it’s like to work at De Montfort Students’ Union (DSU) – what we’re doing well, what could be better and where we should focus our attention next.
If you know DSU mainly through our elected Student Voice Leaders, you might not realise there’s also a whole team behind the scenes. DSU is an independent charity, employing permanent professional staff and student staff across everything from student representation and activities to advice, events, finance, communications and governance.
And our elected Student Voice Leaders are staff too. Each year, DMU students elect a team of five students to take a year out (or join us after graduating) to work full-time, representing students. So, if you’ve ever fancied having an actual say in how things work around here, keep an eye out when nominations open…
Together, we’re a small team, but perfectly formed, and we exist to support students in their leadership, education and university experience from day one to graduation.
Our annual staff survey is one of the ways we find out how we’re doing as an employer. It is completed anonymously through the NUS (National Union of Students) benchmarked staff survey, which means that as well as hearing directly from our own staff, we can see how our results compare with other students’ unions and charities.
This year, 91% of our staff took part, giving us a really strong picture of how people are feeling across DSU.
A great place to work
We were incredibly pleased to achieve an overall engagement score of 100, the highest possible score and above the NUS benchmark. This is based on whether our staff would recommend DSU as a good place to work.
We also saw improvements from our 2025 results across a number of areas, including management, wellbeing, colleagues and role, and performance management, with our scores in these areas also sitting above the NUS average.
Those results matter to us. We’ve worked hard over recent years to build an organisation where people feel supported, trusted and able to do good work, and it’s encouraging to see that reflected in what our staff have told us.
Where we can be better
A staff survey is only useful if we pay just as much attention to the things people tell us could improve.
Like many charities and students’ unions, we operate within tight financial constraints and have to balance what we would like to offer with maintaining jobs, protecting services for students and keeping DSU financially sustainable.
Over the last two years, we have reviewed and strengthened our wider employment offer, including flexible and hybrid working, additional leave options and discounts to support everyday living. We’ll continue looking at what more we can realistically do, including recognising exemplary performance.
The feedback also links closely with something we already know about DSU: our next opportunity is to make it easier to get things done.
Bring on the new academic year
As we move into our refreshed strategic plan for the next three years, we’ll be focusing on simpler processes, clearer ownership, stronger working across teams and better communication.
Our refreshed organisational behaviours (sometimes known as Values or Ways of Working in other organisations) will help us build on the strong culture our staff have told us they value, while continuing to improve how we work together day-to-day.
Ultimately, being a great place to work isn’t an end in itself. Happy, supported and brilliant people are better able to do what DSU is here to do - make student life better.
So, a massive thank you to our permanent staff, our student staff and our elected Student Voice Leaders. They advise students when things go wrong, help societies and communities thrive, put on events, represent student voices, keep the organisation running and do a frankly enormous amount of work that most people will never see.
We’re incredibly proud of this year’s results, but mostly we’re proud of the people behind them.
To Team DSU: Thank you. You’re rather brilliant.