Management Meeting 3.18.19

Monday, 03/18/19           //            2:30pm – 4:00pm             //            Room 219           

Note Taker: Haley Johnson

Attending: Rob White, Korrin Ebira, Lisa Fuller, Mandy Self, Elliott Fraughton, Dolores Heaton, Anne E. O’Brien, Danielle Thomsen, Katina Sifantonakis, Anya Petersen-Frey, Jodi Emery, Christoph Dressler, Lauren Andersen, Merilee Anderson, Nate Friedman, James Elder (remote)

Agenda:

Financials/Budget – Anya

• Currently, we are still waiting to hear from legislations regarding the 2% cost of living increase that is typical. Once we have that information, we will adjust budgets as needed. Hopefully, we won’t have to make any adjustments.
• The budget spreadsheets are officially on lockdown. Anya is continuing to work on the budget and it is vital that no one go in and make any more edits. Do not edit any of the budget spreadsheets.
• In terms of paperwork, we have to show that our 1001 fund hits a zero balance. This means that we are backing the ask out for EPM purposes only – don’t panic if you see that. This is something we’re required to do simply for the budget office; we are still asking for money and things will continue to look normal on our end.
• We will be asking for $542,000 in funding for the next fiscal year. This number is probably high; Anya thinks that if we’re lucky we’ll get about 75% of that. However, Anya has had conversations with Sandy about what we’re asking for money for and Sandy has said she thinks our requests are reasonable, so that’s encouraging.
• Anne and Anya will present on CECE’s budget on April 23^rd. We hope to hear back by May what amount of funding we’ve been approved for. We will be holding a debrief after everything is said and done so that everyone is properly updated.
• Even if we don’t get all the funding we want, there are still certain investments that we need to make (like a new web registration system). Management should be looking at the things that they could potentially cut if it comes down to that. It would be a good idea to anticipate a 5% cut in both funds for planning purposes.

Building the Budget Narrative & CE Goals – Anne

• Anne is currently working on preparing the budget narrative. She’s already worked through the department accomplishments and is working on the goals now.
• The leadership team recently came up with our new goals and vision for 19-20, which are included below (these are not necessarily the final versions in terms of verbage):

CECE Vision – Every learner is able to engage with CECE in their educational journey when they prepare for college, earn their degree, achieve workforce success, or enrich their lives.

• 3 Year Overarching Goal – to provide an exceptional educational experience to all students.
  • Goal 1 – Increase operational effectiveness to better service students
    • Improve business processes across the organization
    • Implement technology to support business processes
    • Align talent to support our work
  • Goal 2 – reach more students across the 100-year curriculum/journey
    • Prepare for college
    • Earn degrees
    • Achieve workforce success
    • Enrich lives
  • One of the things Anne is also working on compiling is a list of things people have stopped doing or eliminated from their programs because it was inefficient or because they found a better way. This inevitably gets asked during the budget presentations, so we want to have that information handy. If you haven’t gotten that information to Anne yet, departments need to do that ASAP.
  • Anne is hoping to have this draft of the budget narrative done by the end of the week so that Jodi has plenty of time available for editing it.
  • Once completed, the budget narrative will be posted to the knowledgebase so that everyone can view it.
    • Keep in mind that many department’s provided more goals than are included in the narrative; we still care about these goals and are excited about them, but needed to trim the list down and only include the top goals that the budget committee will care about. So you may not see everything you submitted.

Scholarship Administrations – Anya

• Anya has been looking into scholarship administrations that are entered into PeopleSoft so that we can track the types of discounts we are getting out (e.g. – being able to run a report that tells us how many people are using the alumni discount).
• Currently, everyone is using scholarship administration codes differently, so there is no way to obtain any useful data. The goal is to make these codes consistent across CECE so that the data we can pull becomes useful.
• We only have 5 different account codes that we can use. So not every code may apply to your department.
• The current idea is to have 4 codes that are specifically designated with a narrow focus and the 5^th code will be very broad, effectively capturing all other discounts that don’t fall into the other four categories (and this last code wouldn’t be used for reports).
• Anya will be sending out an email proposing what the 5 codes would be and what they would cover, then everyone will have a chance to talk about them and make a decision. These are for 19-20 and we won’t be entering them until Fall, so we do have some time on this item.

Bob_Bot Themes & Communication

• Anne and the leadership team has been regularly reviewing feedback received from Bob_bot and looking at themes. The biggest theme we’ve noticed so far is communication. Another one is wellness, which is covered in the point below regarding the sick policy here at CECE.
• Leadership was asked to have a conversation with their staff regarding about what good communication looks like to them and what, in an ideal world, what we would do to achieve that. They’ll be bringing those thoughts back to the Leadership Meeting scheduled for 3/20 and discuss them.
• We will also be sending a survey out to CECE staff specifically regarding communication and the different methods we employ to gauge which ones are useful and which ones may not be.

Sick Policy and CECE Culture – Danielle

• Background: one of the other concerns that popped up on Bob_bot was a feeling that some employees at CECE are pressured to come into work when they’re sick.
• The university policy that CECE adheres to is pretty broad regarding sick time. While vacation is at the manager’s discretion, sick time really isn’t. If someone has sick time accrued and is requesting use of that, the default should be to simply allow them to take the time they need.
• Concern regarding employees coming into work sick is reasonable and quite frankly, a bit tough. Ideally, people will be able to stay home when they aren’t feeling well so that they don’t come into work and spread it around to others. However, sometimes there are deadlines and the work simply needs to be done (for those situations, consider if working from home is a possibility). Other times, employees may not have the sick time available to them. As a cultural approach, we want to encourage people to take sick time when necessary and promote a healthier work environment for everyone.
• Doctor’s notes are not a hard requirement. While it is within a manager’s scope to request one, Danielle requests that we don’t go down this route. Then there is a large amount of medical information sitting around and it also puts us in a place of judging the validity of an absence. The only exception to this would be asking for a note to clear someone to come back to work (i.e. if an employee has been out sick with pneumonia for a week, it would be appropriate to request a note from a doctor that states they are good to go back to work).
• Distinction on the difference between sick and vacation time: here at the University of Utah, sick and vacation are not combined into the same pool like they are at some companies. Under policy, if you are sick but out of sick time, then you can use vacation time to cover your missed hours. But if you are out of vacation time, you cannot use sick time. However, if there is a pattern of abuse of sick time, we need to address it.
• Employees should recognize that there is more oversight involved with vacation time (i.e. taking two weeks off in the middle of your department’s busiest time of the year may be denied by your manager).
• Appropriate use of sick time does include doctor’s appointments. That being said, we really appreciate staff who can arrange their appointments to take place outside of normal working hours.
• If there are additional questions on this topic, Danielle is happy to answer them. Detailed information on the University of Utah’s Policy regarding Sick Time can be found here: https://regulations.utah.edu/human-resources/rules/rule_5-200A.php.

Update on CE Student and Instructor Data Privacy – James/Mandy

• Mandy brought concerns to the previous management meeting regarding access of student and instructor information via the University of Utah directory. You can find the first part of that conversation here: 2019.02.11 Management Meeting Minutes.
• Many has noticed that a lot of our instructors are no longer showing up on the University of Utah directory, which is nice to see.
• The U updated the directory to require a CIS sign-in for people to search for students, which is also a step in the right direction.
• James is working on redoing the entire directory search so that our students don’t even show up.

Managing Class Waitlists – Mandy

• For Personal Enrichment, managing waitlists has been difficult to deal with as it takes up a lot of time. Mandy was wondering if anybody else who manages waitlists for their programs has a good solution.
• Consensus is that there isn’t a current process within CECE to cut down on the time investment in managing waitlists. Youth is lucky enough to have staff that has the hours to dedicate to waitlist management. Academic Programs in particular struggles with waitlists because they have their own CECE waitlist and the U has its own separate waitlist that doesn’t work in tandem (which means that a student could potentially be on our waitlist for four months and another student who gets on the U’s waitlist might get into the class right away).
  • Lately, Osher has been asking the evening team in registration to help by calling people on the waitlist in order when a spot opens up. They have been more than happy to help and it’s beneficial because people are normally home in those later hours. This could be a good solution for others as well. Taylor’s Evening SSI Team is always happy to help out in the ways they can.

Sharing Time

• Anne (UPCEA)

  • The UPCEA 2019 conference is next week, so most of leadership will be gone. Lauren, Korrin, and James will all be here, so they’ll be your point of contact if something comes up.
  • Anne will be on vacation next week, so if you need her, text her. She’ll only be checking emails if she receives a text message that asks her to check email. Anne’s cell: 801.598.2235.

• Merilee (Academic Programs)

  • The winter break intensives went really well. We were expecting to experience some drop-offs and those didn’t happen, which shows that we may be able to hold more classes throughout the year (like spring break).

• Korrin (ELI)

  • ELI’s numbers for this session come in at 133, making the year over year growth 11%. We’re happy to see those numbers and so far two of the agents that we’ve signed with have already sent in applications for students.

• Elliott (Youth)

  • The spring break bash is happening next week for Youth. Club U will be operating down on main campus. Registrations are still rolling in and we’re about 1,000 registrations up from where we were this same time last year.
  • Michaela West is back with the Youth team just in time for summer and we’re very glad to have her back.

• Mandy (Lifelong Learning)

  • Summer classes for LifeLong Learning went live today. There is currently no advertising because they contacted everyone who was previously unable to get into a class they wanted that it is being offered again so they have a better chance to register. Thanks to that, we do expect to fill some classes right off the bat. Next week we’ll be letting the general public know.

• Lauren (Osher – Personnel Update)

  • For those who haven’t heard yet, Carla was in a pretty bad car accident three weeks ago and broke her knee. She was recently cleared to work at home and has a laptop to work with, so she’ll be able to do that now. We probably won’t see her back in the office until late April or early May because she’s been ordered to stay off her knee for another 8 weeks.
  • Lauren visits her about once a week (usually on the weekend) to drop off food and check in on Carla; Lauren will send out emails in the future to open it up for others to join in on the visit if they would like to.

• Rob (Classroom Upgrades)

  • All the classrooms in the building are now connected to Fusion, which allows us to monitor the classrooms. It also allows TLT remote control our AV equipment, which is extremely helpful in terms of reducing the time it takes to resolve an issue we’re having. Overall, we expect classes to run more smoothly thanks to this.
  • Additionally, Rob purchased a hardware checkout solution that will send out email reminders to staff return any checked out equipment.

• Jodi (Signage & Art Committees)

  • The signage committee currently doesn’t have any updates – Jodi will check in with Katie on that.
  • The art committee has been approved for a small budget to finish furnishing the building with art.
  • We’re commissioning a piece of art from David Meikle, Lacy Egbert’s husband. You can find his work here: https://www.davidmeikleart.com/.
  • The art committee will meet to discuss what to do with the rest of the funds. We all appreciate offers from staff to loan art they don’t have room for at home; if you have something you’d like to offer, just let the art committee know and send them a photo so they can vote on all of our options.