Monday, 4/15/19     //     2:30pm - 4:00pm     //     219 

Note Taker: Haley Johnson

Attending: Anne E. O'Brien, Merilee Anderson, Katina Sifantonakis, James Elder, Elliott Fraughton, Ariel Malan (for her agenda item only), Nate Friedman, Jodi Emery, Korrin Ebira, Lisa Fuller, Rob White, Dolores Heaton, Lynne Bennett, Lauren Andersen

Agenda:

Marketing Opportunity (CE Pride Participation) – Ariel

• For the first time in its history, the University of Utah is participating in the Utah Pride Festival and Parade, which takes places June 1^st and June 2^nd. The U has purchased 10 booths that need to be filled (5 by health sciences and 5 by academic departments).
• Ariel proposes that Continuing Education participates by manning one of the booths and marching with the University of Utah contingent at the parade.
• The benefits of participation:
  • CE has LGBTQ+-identified staff as well as allies who work here, so we can show support to them as well as the diverse communities we serve.
  • With the booth, we would be able to advertise our programs to a community that is known to be loyal to providers that offer LGBTQ+ friendly and affirmative services.
  • 7% of Salt Lake City’s population and 3.7% of Utah’s population identify as LGTBQ+. These numbers are grossly underestimated due to underreporting. Using these lower figures, we’re looking at a market of about 82,000 people.
• The ask:
  • CE participation would involve 2 rotating employees to staff the booth Saturday from 1p-11p and Sunday from 11a-7p. Shifts can be made to be 2 hours (or longer), resulting in a total of 9 shifts.
  • Encourage any employees and family members who are able to walk in the parade with the rest of the University of Utah departments. The parade is on Sunday June 2^nd at 10am.
  • A donation of $650 to help cover the cost of the booth (The U has already purchased everything necessary to participate and donating back would help them cover their costs).
• Decision: management supports this idea and is happy to move forward with it. Jodi says that marketing can cover the $650 out of their budget. Ariel is responsible for creating a sign up to get employees for the booth shifts.
  • Here is the link to the google doc that Ariel created to sign up for festival shifts.

Volunteer Committee – Nate

• The volunteer committee at CECE is back in action. Last week, April Wilson, the chair of the committee, sent out an email about the first volunteer opportunity and the intention to set up monthly opportunities for staff.
• This raised some questions for management regarding how often it would be reasonable for staff to use work time to volunteer, especially considering that we are offering some paid time for volunteering (i.e. an employee volunteering for the Jordan River clean-up would be paid for the 3.5 hours they are volunteering for).
• It is important to note that employee participation in the volunteer events requires managerial approval.
• Nate is interested in setting up some parameters around staff involvement in the committee to help promote equity throughout the organization. The general goal:
  • 1) provide employees with the opportunity to volunteer on behalf of CE while understanding that there must be limits placed on the amount of paid time given
  • 2) work together as a team to give different programs the chance to participate (i.e. providing coverage to SSI if Anya would like to coordinate the whole team’s participation in one event).
• Decision: Given the fact that not all programs were represented in this management meeting, Nate will be putting together a survey for all management to participate in so that the guidelines can be established.

Onboarding Process Update (Unplanned Exits) – James

• IS&T is close to having an onboarding process finalized.
• When CE has an unplanned exit (the event wherein an employee quits or we need to let go of somebody unexpectedly), the relevant manager should inform the Leadership Team immediately. They will then pass that information along so that the employee can be removed from our systems.
  • These are rare occurrences that we don’t anticipate happening often.

Third Party Data Mapping – James

• The data team will be meeting with each manager in the new few months to talk about third party data. We want to map out what we’re giving to these partners. This will give us an idea of where our data is and build a way to manage that.

Principle of Least Privilege (Securing Our Data) – James

• Currently, we don’t have a great process surrounding changing employee privileges (in terms of data access) when they change positions or leave CE. Admittedly, the U is very slow at this as well.
• Often times, IS&T will be notified months down the road that someone has left CE and asked if that person’s access should be taken away.
• James is trying to get ahead of this and identify what access people need to make sure that we aren’t giving people more than necessary.

U Strategy Refresh – Anne

• Anne would like management to encourage their employees to attend one of the U Strategy Refresh Town Halls that President Ruth Watkins and Senior Vice Presidents Dan Reed and Mike Good are hosting.
  • Wednesday, May 15^th – 3p-5p – Alumni House
  • Monday, June 3^rd – 3p-5p – Hinckley Caucus Room, Gardner Commons
• You can find more information at utah.edu/strategy-refresh
• Jodi and Anne attended the most recent meeting and found it very useful.
• They do an exercise geared towards developing an idea to submit to the strategy refresh.
• It’s a great way for us to submit ideas without having to go through the hoops generally involved in communicating with U leadership.

Opening Strategy Meetings to All Staff – Anne

• Recently, CE held it’s first Annual Osher Strategy Meeting. Historically, marketing would have an annual meeting with each program to go over goals for the year. Anne would attend the beginning of these meetings to hear about each program’s strategy/vision. We have decided to formalize that process by breaking the one large meeting down into two separate meetings:
  • There is the annual strategy meeting, which lasts a ½ hour and involves the program, F&O, IS&T, marketing, and Anne. During this time, the program lead is responsible for presenting their program’s vision.
  • Directly afterwards, there is the annual marketing meeting, which lasts 1 ½ hours and is only for the program and marketing.
• We have decided to open these strategy meetings up to all staff so that if you’re interested, you can come and hear what’s going on with the different programs. These meetings take place in 219.
• The administrative assistant will take notes during these meetings and post them to the KB for those who are interested but may not be able to or wish to attend.
  • You can find the notes from Osher's meeting here: 2019 Osher Strategy Notes.

General Bob_bot Feedback – Anne

• The Leadership team has access to the staff responses to the bob_bot surveys and reviews them regularly. The employee engagement committee performs the first found of responding and if something needs attention from leadership, then Anne goes in and does that.
• So far, we’ve noticed consistent feedback that suggests CE needs to improve its communication efforts. Everyone on the leadership team has had conversations with their teams about communication to see what else we can be doing. We are also looking to address this problem with a communication survey that will be sent out soon. This will help us determine if the issue is regarding our communication vehicles, the type of content, or both.
• Another issue we’ve noticed is a portion of people feel very burnt out. Anne will be sending out an open memo to all staff about flexibility and schedules. She’s encouraging staff to work with their manager if they feel they have problems with their workload. Managers should be available to help their members prioritize their work.
• We still consistently get questions about inconsistency regarding why some people come in later, which seems like a lack of understanding that every program operates a little bit differently and CE as an organization embraces flexibility as much as possible.
• Anne will address any questions about the open memo at the next Town Hall Meeting (scheduled for Wednesday 5/1 from 3p-4p).
• We would like to remind all staff that bob_bot is truly anonymous. And you can initiate a conversation with Anne (or whoever responds to your feedback) while remaining anonymous. However, if you do wish to remove anonymity, you are welcome to do so and Anne welcomes the opportunity to talk with staff regarding their concerns.
• Pro-tip for using Bob_bot: if you have a difficult time remembering whether or not you’ve taken a survey, consider replying to Bob_bot in the slack channel with “done” or using an emoji to remind yourself that you’ve completed one.

Employee Evaluations – Anne

• Another item that has come up in the responses is that a number of employees have said that they’ve never sat down with their direct manager to set goals, which is a huge problem.
• We did roll out the new employee evaluation system, which is supposed to take place in a conversational mode.
• Every manager should be holding one-on-one evaluations with their employees twice a year.
• Evaluations should be complete at this point, so if you still haven’t completed that with your staff, it needs to be a priority.
• Anne will be conducting an audit with the leadership team to see who still needs to do evaluations and follow up on that.
• Anne has been encouraging staff to approach their managers if they haven’t had this opportunity yet, but it is still ultimately the manager’s responsibility to ensure these get done.
• As a related issue, we have heard from some staff that say they don’t regularly (if ever) meet with their managers one-on-one. If managers do not already have this as common practice, Anne suggests setting up weekly or monthly meetings with your staff. It provides the opportunity for staff to come forward with any issues they may be having (such as prioritizing their work and managing their workload).
• Completed employee evaluations should be sent to Danielle.

Summer Van Use – Elliott

• Elliott: “On bended knee, with humble requests coming forth: Youth is really going to need the CE Van pretty much the whole summer this year. We did have it last year. You guys were very generous with that given that everyone was up here and we were down in the Annex. While we aren’t down in the Annex anymore and you don’t need to fear us being eaten alive by the cockroaches, we will still be very back and forth. We’ve been lucky to find some temporary summer housing down at the Sill Center and we’ll be taking advantage of that opportunity (thanks to Marti! And thanks to Anne and Rob for helping set that up). Long story short, we’re going to have Club U using the van on Mondays and Fridays and then we have supplies to move back and forth while classes run in different places so it will be crucial to our overall success to be able to use the van.”
• With impressive eloquence (see above), Elliott has requested that Youth be given use of the CE Van for the duration of the summer.
• Everything seemed to work out well last summer, so management is good with this request. Any occasional conflicts (e.g. ELI needing the van for an event) can be worked out as they occur.
• CE also recognizes that Youth staff also faces some challenges in terms of parking on campus. Hailey Leek has offered to do a training for our staff on how to use public transit in the area to best get around campus.
  • Korrin is interested in potentially holding a training like that for the ELI students as well.

Lunch Bunch Program – Haley

• During the last employee engagement committee meeting, Haley pitched the idea for CE to start a lunch program that facilitates staff eating lunch with each other once a month. The employee engagement committee deliberated and decided that it would be a good idea to move forward with that.
• The Details:
  • The Lunch Bunch Program is 100% Opt-In – there is no pressure to do it if you don’t want to.
  • Haley will create and maintain a database of employees who have opted-in to the program. She will randomly create groups of 3-4 each month.
  • Staff will be notified of who is in their group and will be responsible for planning a time for their group to get together for lunch sometime within the month.
    • There is no other requirement or responsibility placed upon employees. We aren’t asking you to write reports or check in and confirm that you’ve met. We’re really just setting this up as a way for people to get to know each other better (especially across teams) and enjoy their time at CECE.
  • Lunch is on your own. Whether you go out to eat somewhere or bring your own lunch is completely up to you and your group.
• Side note: Dolores has offered that St. George could participate if groups agree to brown bag it and reserve the 219 conference room and initiate a conference call.

Locking Classrooms at Night – Katina

• A few weeks ago, ELI instructors came in and found a bunch of notices with “Unsecure” at the top attached to our classroom doors.
• Evidently, the state recently performed an audit on the University, looking at building security in general. One of things noted was that a lot of interior rooms are left unlocked overnight that have high dollar items/equipment in them. If someone were able to gain access to a building, many of these open spaces with valuable equipment are targets for thefts to occur easily. The tags were designed to raise awareness to this issue and hopefully encourage or make people think about locking as many of these spaces as possible overnight. That way, if someone does happen to break in or gain entry to the building, they don’t have nearly as much access to commit a theft or other crime of opportunity.
• Here at CECE, we do not lock the classrooms at night because the building itself is locked. We could consider having SSI lock them all at night, but then someone would have to unlock them in the mornings.
• Another issue to consider is that sometimes the building doors are left open for hyperbaric when CE itself is closed (e.g. hyperbaric has been open before on holidays that we close for).
  • A possible solution for those situations would be to lock the glass doors that are at the top and bottom of the stairs.
• We do have Sergeant Speers coming to CE on Wednesday for the leadership meeting to talk about doing a building security assessment for us. We may also have him provide some additional training for staff.

Parking Tags – Katina

• Katina has been looking into using parking tags for staff and students so that we can better enforce parking in our lots. Ben designed some tags for us; there are four styles.
• Red = staff. The idea is to have a staff parking pass that new employees receive when they are hired on. There is no expiration date on them; instead there’s a place for employees to write in their license plate information.
• Purple = ELI. These would be issued every session.
• Green = Osher & ProED Daytime classes.
• Orange = LifeLong Learning & ProEd evening classes.
  • Academic programs would need to be included in this category as well.
• Throughout discussion, Management determined that we don’t need to worry about nighttime passes at this stage. There was also the question about whether or not we needed to break down the student passes by program. Katina created it that way so we’d be able to keep track of how many people from each program are parking here in case we ever wanted that data.
• Decision: We’ll move forward with the daytime and staff passes. Katina will talk with Andrea about pass distribution since she was not present at this meeting.

Marketing Material Distribution – Merilee

• Merilee brought to attention that the distribution of marketing materials does not seem to be working particularly well. She has noticed that when she makes a courier run to distribute Academic Programs’ materials, it seems like many of the other programs already have their materials there.
• Jodi will be organizing a working meeting to address this issue as the courier run has been on her list of things to attend to.

Share Time

Academic Programs

• Merilee: Academic Programs’ summer intensive classes are all completely full!

Osher

• Lauren: Carla is officially back in the office and doing well.

St. George

• Dolores: St. George will be having its Graduation Center Graduation this weekend and they have had so many people interested that they’re actually slightly over capacity!

Sandy

• Lynne – Sandy is getting ready for a workshop coming up soon for test taking. In June, they’ll have a financial aid workshop for their students.

Other Notes

• Elliott inquired as to whether or not it would be appropriate to bring animals (keeping them strictly outside) to the CE BBQ events and that is completely acceptable.
  • We are, however, a pet-free building so it is imperative that the animals stay outside.