Monday, 10/28/19    //     2:30pm - 4:00pm     //     Room 219 - Olympus 

Note Taker: Haley Johnson

Attending: Rob White, Lauren Andersen, Shelby Love, Sarah Wilson, Katina Sifantonakis, Ben Leimbach, Anya Petersen-Frey, Elizabeth Aste (first two points only), Lynne Bennett, Mandy Self, Dolores Heaton, James Elder, Nate Friedman, Jodi Emery, Elliott Fraughton, Merilee Anderson, Christoph Dressler, Korrin Ebira

Slack as Official Communication – James

• 11/21/2019 Update:

  • A couple months ago, Leadership determined and announced that Slack was the “official form of internal communication for Continuing Education”. In hindsight, we used a very loaded term (“official”) without a lot of forethought and dropped the ball on communicating this change to you all. For that, we sincerely apologize. Moving forward, we’d like you to view Slack as an important communication tool that you integrate into your daily work life alongside email.

    Email and Slack are both important communication tools for us here at Continuing Education.

    Email allows us to communicate with the rest of campus and other external collaborators. It also remains the best way to share documents with other staff. Email is a more formal way of communicating within our professional world and is inextricably linked to our calendars. It’s really not going anywhere anytime soon.

    Slack is like our business text messaging tool. It’s a lot more casual and allows us to message each other without exchanging personal numbers.  While face-to-face communication is highly valuable and has its place, it’s just not workable for every conversation to be in person. Utilizing Slack to contact other staff in CE, especially marketing, IS&T and R&I, enables them to respond at a time that’s good for them. A great solution would be to Slack the person you’re trying to talk to and ask when they’d be available for a conversation. Interruptions in our work often derail us completely from whatever project we’re working on in that moment and a quick Slack message is much less intrusive than standing at someone’s cubicle.

     What we’re asking in a nutshell: That all CE staff has Slack open on their computers during the day and pays attention to the #whats-going-on-in-ce and #system-updates channels and their direct messages as their schedules permit.

    We realize this is not everyone’s preference, but we’re hoping that in trying it out you’ll come to see the value in being able to quickly broadcast messages to all of CE, send direct messages to the particular person (or people) you need to talk to, and have specific conversations that would otherwise get buried in someone’s inbox.

• Moving forward, slack is the official communication tool of CECE (internally).
• James has created a KB article detailing the channels that staff needs to be paying attention to: Slack Guides.
• While at work, all employees are expected to pay attention to #whats-going-on-in-ce, #system-updates, mktg-[your unit], private channels your unit uses, and direct messages. This ensures that you are receiving all communications.
  • #whats-going-on-in-ce has a lot of great information to keep you in the loop.
  • #system-updates is where IS&T will inform CE about any outages and new updates with the systems we use (e.g. PeopleSoft, CIS, Astra, Salesforce, etc.)
  • #help-scheduling is required for all schedulers, but no other CE staff. This channel communicates scheduling deadlines and any PeopleSoft issues that need to be addressed.
• Discussion yields some concern about the volume of messages we’re being asked to pay attention to and others worrying about all the notifications popping up from the various channels.
  • One of the reasons we are moving to slack as our official communication method is that it allows for a different kind of communication thread that creates a log that is still accessible even after employees leave.
  • To keep notifications to a minimum, we suggest that everyone spend a few minutes going through their settings and adjusting the notifications to suit your preferences.
    • For example, you can mute specific channels or change your notifications so that only @everyone and @yourusername show up as a notification on your end. Investing the time in setting that up now will create an immensely better experience down the road.
  • When it comes to the slack app for phones, managers will need to have the app installed so that they can receive any emergency notifications we may need to send out. The rest of CE staff may have the app on their phones if they wish, but it is not required.
    • We similarly encourage that managers spend a few minutes setting up their phone notifications so that they are only being alerted of emergency communications from leadership and not every channel that they’re a part of (unless that’s your preference).
  • When using slack, another thing to consider is your status. By default, slack will set your status as ‘active’ while it’s open on your computer. If you’re going to be away from your desk for a bit, you could set your status to ‘away’ or set a custom status that’s more descriptive.
  • Discussion indicates that training may be necessary on this front. We may look into having IS&T holding training sessions for each unit. However, there are also the monthly meetings that IS&T puts on and Halli regularly addresses slack in those.
  • One thing we’ll need to create best practices around moving forward is direct messaging. Many people report that they lose track of their direct messages very easily, so we’ll see what we can do about that.
  • Currently, Jira notifications are still coming through email, but we’re looking at moving that to slack.
  • Email is still the official form of communication for the University of Utah, so that is how employees will continue to communicate with the rest of campus. Slack is just the internal form of communication that we’re electing to use for CECE.

Professional Development Request (PDR) Process – Elizabeth

• Elizabeth has been working with Katina to create a new process for employees to request professional development.
• Employees will fill out a form on the KB (Professional Development & Travel Requests), their supervisor will receive an email, the supervisor will either approve or deny, and appropriate communication dependent on the decision will be sent back to the employee automatically. If approved, the employee will need to submit additional information. If denied, the process reaches its end point.
• Once an employee has completed a PDR form, the information is sent over to Salesforce. Management will be working within Salesforce to manage these requests.
  • In Salesforce, managers will be able to see what point in the process a request is in by looking at its status.
• If a request has been approved and requires travel, Katina will receive an email so that she can help with booking that travel.
• We have a KB article on professional development resources for staff available here Employee Professional Development Resources. Additionally, University of Utah HR has some information on training available on their website: https://www.hr.utah.edu/training/.

Concur Process – James & Anya

• This ties in with the item above regarding the PDR process.
• Katina is the resource for Concur, the new software for submitting travel. So if you’re ever having trouble, please get with her.
• Elizabeth and Katina have worked to provide detailed instructions for employees through this whole process, so our hope is that it will be relatively easy to follow. You can find that KB article here: UTravel Profile Setup & Travel Requests.

Shared Calendar – James & Ben

• Mistri (Marketing, IS&T, and RI) have been discussing the use of a physical shared calendar for all of CE to be hung in the main office area.
  • The calendar will be laminated and hung on the big white board behind Pro Ed.
  • It will list scheduling deadlines in a column to the side and the rest of the space will be dedicated to a 12-month calendar.
• The idea is for teams to be able to look at a glance at what’s going on throughout CE and have an idea of how any new projects or changes to their schedules would impact the rest of CE. It allows programs to see areas where our partner units might already be really busy and unable to take on much more.
• The ability to communicate this information to Sandy and St. George is a concern, so once we have the physical calendar up, we’ll look at how we might be able to translate that to a digital form for our sites.

Giving Feedback to Employees – Nate

• Feedback is an area that we have been consistently scoring lower in with our OfficeVibe feedback.
  • We’ve learned that people really like feedback and what CE employees feel like they may be missing is the constructive criticism. People want to know the ways that they can improve.
    • When it comes to constructive criticism, keep in mind that we don’t want it to feel punitive. It’s more of a coaching approach. And the ideal ratio for positive to negative feedback is 10:1.
  • Another thing we’ve noticed is that most people in CE want to be recognized in a quiet way. A simple “thank you” will go a long ways.
  • We’re asking managers to consider the frequency with which they are giving feedback to their employees and to try to make it a weekly practice.
• Feedback along with stress are the only two areas that we aren’t green in for OfficeVibe. The stress portion is something that the employee engagement committee will be looking into.

Messaging the Holiday Break Closure Dates on the Website – Ben

• Ben would like the front page and landing pages on continue.utah.edu to communicate the message to students that we’ll have closure dates during the holidays.
  • Currently, we don’t have a great way to manage announcements on our website. We have to go through each page and edit them individually.
  • A better way to make announcements would come down to programming, so that’s something that Ben and James will sit down and talk about.

Best Calendaring Practices – Haley

• In order to make scheduling meetings as easy for everyone as possible, the first thing is to make sure your calendar is up to date.
  • Include vacations, conferences, anything that would result in you being out of the office for multiple days.
    • For bonus points, send a copy of your days out (whether for vacation or conferences) to your direct manager so they know you’ll be out of the office. (Just be sure to mark it as free on their instance but busy on yours)
  • Please always hit ‘send the response now’ when responding to an appointment you've received. We understand that previous training asked employees to not send a response so as to reduce the number of emails people get, but then we can’t actually track who will be at a meeting and who won’t. So whether you can make it or you can’t, please send the response.

Centralizing Contract Storage – Jodi

• A while back, we decided that all contracts, once signed, should be sent to Haley. We haven’t necessarily been doing the best on follow through with that, so please make sure you get back in the habit.
• What counts as a contract?
  • More or less, anything that’s signed, except for instructor agreements. If you have arrangements with a facility/venue or another department, send it over.
  • If you’re not sure whether or not your document counts as a contract under this conversation, just go ahead and send it! We’d rather have extra documents being stored than have some missing.

Mandatory Reporting for Responsible Employees (Video)

• Everyone at the meeting watched the following video regarding mandatory reporting: https://mediaspace.utah.edu/media/t/0_u9a7jjnd
  • It’s about 10 minutes long and we recommend that everyone watch it when you have the time as it explains mandatory reporting really well.

Sharing Time

• RTU received an award at UPCEA for for-credit programming. RTU was also featured in an article on @THEU: https://attheu.utah.edu/home-page/its-never-too-late/.
• Test Prep has had its best Fall enrollment, specifically with ACT, since 2013.
• Katina has been working with Commuter Services to get new signage for our parking. We’ll be getting a bigger sign near the entrance that notifies people that parking is for CE only.
  • Commuter Services charges $45/hour to come ticket vehicles at our request and we do not receive the money from those tickets, so that’s something to keep in mind.