Strengthening Staff, Staffing, and Operations
We have spent three years hiring faculty at a pace not seen since the 1970s and 80s. Why? Our faculty define the upper limits of our academic excellence. Now we need to strengthen our staff. Why? Because our staff facilitate the ability of our faculty and students to achieve the highest levels of academic excellence necessary to maintain and advance our field.
I am well aware of how stressful our recent faculty hiring activities have been for many of us. We began at 31 tenure-related faculty in 2014 and nearly doubled that number by hiring 20 additional tenure-related and career-instructional faculty in the space of 3 years. Our faculty experienced “search fatigue”, our students and staff bore the additional burden of serving on search committees, and our human resources, finance, operations, communications, development, facilities management and other staff have devoted considerable time and expertise to getting the job done. My gratitude goes out to those who contributed to building and furnishing new offices, moving staff and faculty, processing seemingly innumerable personnel changes and the host of other critical activities that ensure that our new colleagues are brought onboard as seamlessly as possible.
It is abundantly clear that all of this effort was worth it. Our new faculty have collaborated with and inspired our faculty already in place, and they are driving our level of academic excellence even higher, ensuring that the College of Education (COE) will continue to be a field leader for decades to come.
With three faculty searches this year, our faculty hiring seems “light.” This is not the case. We are simply returning to a more normal pattern of hiring. The three scholars that we bring in in the next academic year will also play a big part in determining our College’s future. These hires are just as high stakes as the others have been and we must keep our standards high.
There have been stressors along the way. Some staff members have lost private offices to our new faculty hires, our staff census has not increased and in fact has decreased slightly, and I understand fully the importance of perceptions. The clear valuing of new tenure-related faculty hires may have left others feeling less central to our work. Nothing could be further from the truth, so we have to find new ways to value our staff and ensure that their work circumstances are reasonable and rewarding.
In the absence of adequate tuition funds to increase staffing we have to find ways to reduce some of the workload and stressors experienced by our current staff. As I have mentioned with concern many times before, we are a “transaction heavy” institution. This is due in part to legacy practices that need to be automated (e.g., accreditation data collection, storage, retrieval, and analysis), different staff carrying out the same duties in different ways and with differing levels of intensity (e.g., travel reimbursement may be 10% of the workload for some and 90% for others, making the work more time consuming for the staff member who performs a particular duty only on occasion), and we have many boundaries, barriers, and walls that require fiscal or other transactions to surmount (e.g., four academic departments housing a relatively small tenure-related faculty of 50, and several Ph.D. programs with different prefixes, signage, forms, application and admission procedures, student manuals, etc.).
In order to address the subset of challenges that burden our staff unnecessarily I have asked several staff members to offer solutions. They are fourfold.
First: Where possible, we will be increasing staffing (i.e., about 40 hours a week) in reception areas with UO student workers. There are numerous benefits to this staffing pattern. This model allows us to support our students financially while reminding everyone who enters our area, and all of us, why we are here. Our students are impressive and contribute in important ways helping faculty with the many duties often requested from staff — duties such as unlocking rooms, copying materials, sorting mail, running errands, converting files and numerous other miscellaneous tasks that keep our machine running. In return, our students are able to gain and polish skills that support and enhance their learning in their chosen discipline. To fill these roles in our college, students will require more training and supervision and our business managers are prepared to deliver both. Lisa Fortin and Maggie Bosworth are available to assist if needed given their experience gained in the dean’s office.
Second: We will accelerate our efforts to automate and better manage and coordinate much of the work we do. Automation is a key theme of the university and the COE needs to be at the forefront on these efforts. A few examples:
- Human Resource hiring practices, for example, are newly digital this year within the MyTrack system. This, in time, will save us considerable work during the faculty hiring process.
- Our Director of Institutional Assessment, Julie Wren, is providing consultation aimed at creating improved record keeping that will serve us well with current and future accreditation efforts.
- Our Finance and Accounting Manager, Melynn Bates, has created templates for budget planning that save our college time through consistency and analysis, allowing us to centrally address Johnson Hall and Budget and Resource Planning (BRP) questions for the college since these inquiries have greatly increased in the recent budget climate.
- Similarly, our Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Equity, Krista Chronister, will be working with Department Heads and others to coordinate our course scheduling activities to ensure that curricular decision-making is informed by activities that are occurring throughout the college.
The university is now requiring forecasts and regular updates from colleges on variances within their budgets. These changes in our processes will allow us to quickly and consistently view our budgets, evaluate our progress and answer Johnson Hall inquiries while improving the workflow to the benefit of our faculty and students.
Third: We will ensure that staff have a focused set of job duties. Some staff, for example, have entirely too many duties while others focus their efforts on a few. In our refined model, we plan to let travel specialists perform the majority of the travel-related duties, business managers concentrate on financial decisions and program administrative operations, and grants and contracts specialists continue to do their fine work supporting the mechanics of our research. I have tasked Chris Krabiel and Melynn Bates, in collaboration with business managers, to refine our staffing structure to accomplish this goal.
Fourth: I will empanel a group of faculty to study our departmental, academic program, and other structures with an eye toward streamlining and reducing transactions between units. We must streamline or have fewer boundaries and barriers between units. Fewer barriers and greater collaboration will reduce the number of transactions conducted by our staff. This work will begin in the Fall when our faculty are back on contract.
In the face of limited state support, new accountability standards, and our collective desire to reach the highest levels of academic excellence, adaptation and change will always be a constant. I appreciate everyone’s efforts to help us in the daily work of building an ever more accomplished College that will serve as a model for others, and I look forward to the work ahead.
Regards,
Randy