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Defining What Activities Are Truly Critical

Staff metrics and evaluation can be used to incentivize both superior staff performance (by giving managers the rationale and flexibility to reward high performers) and meaningful progress toward the strategic goals of your unit –- if you approach staff metrics in a thoughtful, credible way. This entails: Defining what activities are truly critical to measure Establishing criteria or rubrics for various levels of performance Designing and rolling out metrics through a fully participatory process Ensuring that the metrics inform effective supervision and staff development There is often need for greater intentionality in deploying staff metrics across both the administrative and academic divisions of an institution. In this edition, we’ll address examples from both sides of the organization. Focus on Results, not Tasks First, just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to measure. It may be easy to track the number of service requests responded to by facilities management staff or the number of events organized by alumni relations staff, but these measure tasks completed, not necessarily progress toward that unit’s strategic outcomes. To take a more intentional approach to measuring performance, identify the outcomes that truly matter to the division (whether these are learning […]

Deploying Intentional Staff Performance Metrics in Higher Education

Included in this Report: Establishing a culture of performance at colleges and universities is rapidly becoming a necessity as increased competition and an unsustainable cost structure drives institutions to rethink how they do business. To remain competitive and respond to increased calls for accountability, institutions need to grapple with the critical question of how best to balance building a high-performance culture while honoring the ideals, traditions, and fundamental purpose of higher education. These two goals can’t be viewed as mutually exclusive. As an initial step, managers in higher education need to define staff performance metrics that are results-focused while not unnecessarily reductive. In this edition, we’ve sought the advice of highly successful managers, both at academic institutions and in the corporate sector, to gather key considerations for deploying staff metrics in a thoughtful and credible way within the unique context of higher education. We hope their advice will be useful to you. Read the report. See Upcoming Leadership Workshops

Three Tips for Supporting Veteran Students

NEED A MORE ADVANCED APPROACH? If your institution is in the earliest stages of investigating how to better assist this student population in the college transition, this February 23, 2012 article (below) will help you with: Some initial practical steps that you can undertake with minimal resources Advice for phasing your effort from a very small and informal start toward a funded position For more advanced strategies, read our previous article “Helping Veteran Students Succeed” (featuring recommendations from Don Pfeffer, director of the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs, Higher Education Veterans Programs) for tips on: Establishing a veteran services center Clarifying veterans benefits Reviewing academic policies to ensure they don’t offer unnecessary impediments to veteran student success With more veterans returning from overseas and looking to transition into college classrooms, the question of support services for this growing student demographic has received more attention recently, and the challenges veterans face in transitioning to campus are becoming more well-known. This week, we asked several experts on veteran student services what items they considered top priorities for institutions at an early stage of planning to offer more comprehensive student services to veterans. Among the top answers: Assign a single point of contact […]

Applying a Restorative Justice Approach to Student Conduct

A small but growing number of colleges and universities have been adopting restorative justice (RJ) processes as an alternative (in some cases) to traditional, sanctions-focused student conduct proceedings. Taking an RJ approach requires a philosophical shift for the student conduct office – it entails new sets of questions for student conduct hearings and an alert ear for cases in which there is the possibility to restore harm that’s been done, rather than simply (or only) penalize. If a hearing indicates that restorative justice may be possible and desirable, RJ processes usually proceed to individual pre-conference meetings held with the offender and those harmed in the incident. Ultimately, if all parties are willing, the issue is dealt with through a group conference with trained facilitators. The goal of the conference is to arrive at a mutual understanding of the harm caused and a mutual agreement for how the harm will be repaired. To learn more about how to make a restorative justice program most successful, we interviewed two officials from Colorado State University, which has frequently been recognized for its restorative justice and other student conduct programs. The two officials are Paul Osincup and Melissa Emerson, the associate and assistant directors […]

A Proactive Model for Managing Off-Campus Parties

Colorado State University has recently expanded its two-month pilot party registration program into an all-year initiative. Adopting a markedly different approach from initiatives at many other institutions and from CSU’s own prior efforts (such as a “party partners” program that offered students who received noise citations for off-campus parties the choice of proceeding through the standard student conduct process or attending an educational seminar), the party registration program focuses on empowering students to police their own events. The program is designed to: Here’s How it Works The details: Students have the option of registering planned off-campus parties with the office of off-campus life. Students provide their first name, the address, the expected attendance, the phone numbers of two contacts, and an email address so that they can be surveyed at the end of the year to provide feedback on the program. Each Friday morning, the institution provides a copy of the list of registered parties to the city police department, and dispatch adds a code for the registered addresses. If dispatch receives a noise complaint over the weekend, they can cross-reference and see if the address is registered; if so, they can call one of the registered contacts, notify the […]

Creative Approaches to Rewarding High-Performing Advancement Staff

In a difficult budget climate, it’s all the more important to find creative and authentic ways to reward and recognize your advancement shop’s highest performers and foster a culture of healthy competition and high performance across the shop. A few institutions have established rigorous systems for measuring staff performance and awarding bonuses to high performers. (For one model on how to approach bonusing with transparency and rigor, see our article on “Getting Started with Advancement Staff Metrics”). Yet during a slow economic recovery, most shops will see limited options for establishing a slush fund for staff bonuses. We turned this week to Chris Groff, executive director of corporate and foundation relations at Fairleigh Dickinson University, to learn more about how advancement leaders can take a whole-picture look at practices for rewarding, motivating, and retaining high-performing fundraisers. Thinking through Non-Cash Rewards The standard in human resources is to identify opportunities for rewarding high performers with increased recognition, resources, or professional development. Practices such as recognizing individual achievements with gift cards, certificates, thank-you letters, thank-you lunches, and plaques have become increasingly common in the corporate sector. In higher ed fundraising, Groff recommends trying these additional ideas: Rewarding the Star Performer What about […]

Transportation Demand Management (TDM) as an Opportunity to Improve Town-Gown Relations

LEARN MORE Discover more of Spense Havlick’s thinking on TDM in his book Mitigating the Campus Parking Problem. Issues of parking and traffic congestion in neighborhoods near campus have long been a sore spot between campus officials and the surrounding community. Yet, for this same reason, an investment in information-sharing and collaborative planning to address transportation issues can build (or rebuild) bridges between campus officials and municipal planning authorities. Here’s one recent example. Learning from a Success Story: A $7.4 Million Collaboration On the edge of the University of Colorado Boulder campus, you can find one of the most complex bus/bicycle/auto/pedestrian intersections in the Denver Regional Transportation District service area. The intersection involves Colorado State Highway 93 (28,000 vehicles per day), the University of Colorado main campus (32,000 students), multiple bike paths, and 16 different transit routes (involving both regional and city buses and campus shuttles). A history of bike, car, and pedestrian collisions has given the intersection an especially onerous reputation. As part of a field exercise at an Academic Impressions conference in 2007, participating transportation officials from postsecondary institutions around the country observed the intersection and proposed alternative plans for redesigning the intersection for safety and efficiency across […]

Keeping Your Division’s Strategic Priorities Current

Picture this scenario. Your institution undertook a lengthy and arduous strategic planning effort, to which your division responded with an operational plan, identifying a list of core initiatives intended to help meet the institution’s strategic goals. It is now two years later. Your division’s operational plan or action plan sits on a shelf (whether physical or digital). Some of the initiatives were pursued and met with varying success; some were not. Few attempts are made to refer back to that operational plan for your division — not because the initiatives outlined in it were ill-considered but because the environment and your awareness of what is on the horizon for higher education and for your institution has changed. Much of what was proposed in the plan is no longer relevant to the demands under which you work and the opportunities that are most critical to address. This is a fairly common scenario, and a symptom of an episodic, reactive approach to planning, in which identifying and resourcing strategic priorities for the division is treated as a completed process once there is a documented plan. Five years later, the process has to be repeated again in order to arrive at a substantially […]

Supporting Faculty Use of Social Media and Cloud-Based Technologies in the Classroom

Recently, we offered examples of how some faculty have successfully leveraged social media technologies to help them address specific challenges in teaching and learning –- you can find these examples in our article “In and Out of the Classroom: Using Social Media in Ways that Matter.” This week, we’d like to provide you with practical tips for how faculty developers and instructional technologists can assist faculty in identifying these high-potential opportunities. To learn more, we turned to faculty development veterans Alisa Cooper, assistant chair and e-courses coordinator for the English department at Glendale Community College, and Kimberly Eke, senior manager of the Teaching and Learning Interactive division at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Cooper and Eke offer their advice for what support faculty developers can provide at multiple stages of social media adoption: Resources and training not just on the tools themselves but on the tools’ pedagogical affordances One-on-one coaching Cultivating a community of practice among faculty Provide Training on the Tools and their Affordances Besides providing “how to” tutorials or seminars on common tools, foster conversations about pedagogical affordances and walk faculty through scenarios demonstrating how particular uses of social media might be employed in support […]

Vetting Early Alert Technologies

As more colleges and universities look to improve the success of those students who are most academically “at risk,” a host of software technologies to assist in early alert have proliferated on the market. Investment in such a third-party technology can be significant; yet many institutions purchase these tools quickly without the up-front decisions needed to ensure that the benefits will outweigh the cost. We turned this week to Jennifer Jones, adjunct instructor at Minnesota State University, Mankato and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, to learn more. While serving as the director of academic retention at the University of Alabama, Jones developed a comprehensive and strategic approach to identifying at-risk students. Jones offers three critical pieces of advice: In speaking with us, Jones offered checklists of the questions you need to be asking up front, prior to procuring new software. Here are some of the most important points. Is it the Right Fit for Your Goals? The tool itself won’t resolve the challenges you face, but it can help you target your solutions –- if you define specific goals for what improvements you want to see and what role the technology will play in your early […]

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