MGMT 9.3 Course Reflections

This course was a great instrument for me in regards to some changes I want to make in my own communication styles. One of the biggest things that stuck out to me is the performance feedback communication. This is something that I have just begun to experience last few years and this year because of this class, I am going to change up how I conduct these. It is so easy to copy and paste items from past evals and give the same feedback each year and move on to the next meeting, phone call, training, etc. but I want to make an impact, to mentor to challenge my employees.

Today one of my coworkers came to me saying that she is struggling with what goals she should put down on her eval. After I asked her some questions I listened to what she was thinking and based on that I told her what goals she should put down. She felt good about it and I felt that I got something out of this as well. I don't want to just say, "yeah we can see what we can do about that" I want to actually help make a difference. On the other hand I have an employee who puts down exceeds on pretty much everything on her eval and what she feels she is exceeding on is exactly what her job is. How do I approach this? I am nervous to speak to her but I know that going over the eval with her and explaining ways she can actually take initiative, mentor, improve her communication skills will help her in the long run. I am also going to ask her where she sees herself in the department in the next few years...is she looking for promotions or just raises?  

Effective communication is another big one for me. In our department, we are always sending out email reminders about things that counselors have done incorrectly or dispelling rumors or misunderstandings that they may have. It appears that we need to make time to do some refresher training and spend more time mentoring and coaching our employees. I am going to start a monthly training so that the counselors have an opportunity to learn and in turn teach each other. 

I am excited to see what these changes will do for not only me but for our department as well. 

MGMT 8.3 Innovation

Being in higher education, our organization is always looking for ways to be more innovated, more creative to bring in more students to the university (Daytona, Prescott and Worldwide) as well as retaining these students. In my department, we are always looking for ways to keep students’ sensitive information safe when they are submitting documents to our office via email or fax. Our IT department does a great job of monitoring each of our systems and sending out information that keeps our cyberspace safe.

One way we found to help keep sensitive information safe (such as tax returns which have their social security numbers and bank information) when students need to submit documents to us was to create a secure upload with IT. No system is fool proof but using this new system will help decrease the chances of documents being compromised. Once we got this secure upload up and running, we had to get our staff, online advisors and campuses on board with this as well.

We met with our staff and encouraged them to let their students know that we had a new secure way to receive documents and we also sent out emails to all our campuses and advisors explaining the advantages to using this system. Before long, our campuses and students starting using this secure upload and the best part is that we get documents a lot faster now. Another improvement that we can make is on our Terms and Conditions form that each student must complete annually. Over the years we have tried to make the form easy to use but it seems to have confused our students even more. By improving this process, we are still moving toward innovation in our processes. Because our counselors are the ones who deal with students daily and they also review the forms they should be the ones to suggest improvements on the form. By giving the staff the opportunity to suggest a better form, we will be promoting creativity among our staff.

As I stated in my discussion this week, I would like to improve communications with our team by seeing what they want improved (processes, policies). I would take the Underscore and Explore and use it from the employee point of view as a major way to boost creativity and innovation. The folks who are in it working our systems as well as our students on a daily basis have the best understanding of what improvements are needed and how we can get this. This is not a quick fix and will take time and dedication but I know we can get there.

MGMT 7.3 Communicating In Your Organization

Again this is the perfect week for this discussion and blog! In financial aid we get a ton of questions and some of the time they do not deal directly with financial aid. Questions such as what is the tuition rate? or Will these credits transfer in? or when will my refund hit my bank account?  None of these are directly related to financial aid and the student is always frustrated when we can’t answer those questions for them. Each department has their niche and it would not be wise for other departments to speak to the expertise of said department. However, Power explained in his article that being able to communicated across an organization helps employees understand the process from start to finish. They get a better idea of the who, when, why and what of that process.

Our office is teaming up with the online advisors to do some cross training as a group in the next couple of weeks. This is something that I have wanted to do for a long time but we never were able to do so in the past, primarily because of the time factor. Not enough time and too much to do. A few of the online advisors have sat down with us to review what our processes are and I feel that it has given them a better appreciation of what we do here. It is really easy to make assumptions and blame each other when things don’t go the way we want them do or there is a miscommunication between the departments and the student.

This is the first step in working across boundaries and I want to go to the next level and involve the other departments as well. We all work on the same floor (except the advisors) so we should have an understanding how each department functions and what makes them tick. By doing this we can improve our communications as well as look at processes from a new angle which can be a good thing. Power suggests that by working together we can solve some underlying issues that we may not be seeing because we are not working together as a team.

The plan is to speak with each department and set up some cross training or possibly workshops to bring everyone together for a better perspective. So many times there are issues but they are looked at by upper management, who have not been in the mix for a long time so they miss out on the key problems. By putting the people who deal with these issues everyday together, we can help solve or suggest better ways of doing things. This would be an ongoing project not something we try once and stop once we think we figured it out.