Tag: Institutional Effectiveness

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Thinking Outside the Box (or in this case, Outside the State), Part II

By Sandy Bryan, Dean of Institutional Effectiveness, Cochise College

Thank you for stopping back in to learn a bit more about Remote Working, or Telework, or Telecommuting, or Remote Employment. A job, by any other name….

Last month’s article laid the groundwork for our decision to explore a telework partnership with an analyst who was leaving the area due to her spouse’s relocation. This month I’d like to share with you the results of my research about this type of working arrangement.

I learned that considerations for continued employment fell into three general areas: benefits (health insurance), facilities/equipment/supplies, and working conditions. Below is an outline of these areas and the concerns I encountered within each.

Benefits: Compensation In Lieu Of Healthcare

The healthcare system in our state is not transportable to other states except in the case of emergencies. Since my analyst was moving out of state, I had to consider alternate healthcare benefits to stay in line with federal mandates and to ensure she was receiving full compensation for her work.

Search the internet with the phrase “compensation in lieu of benefits” to find out more about this alternative.

Facilities, Equipment, and Supplies

Office space

The employee provides a personal and appropriate space for the job function.

Equipment

The college provides the employee with the necessary equipment to perform the job function. Network access to the employee’s computer will be provided to college Information Technology technicians to upload, install, and configure all necessary software. At a minimum, the college will provide and update a computer with the following, as necessary:

  • Startup and System Password Protection
  • Up-to-date operating system
  • Task software (Microsoft Access, Excel and Word, FTP, Teamviewer, Oracle, Java, Zoom, Security, SQL Developer)
  • Camera and microphone to facilitate Zoom meetings

We asked the employee to provide:

  • Internet connection – minimum connectivity of 20-25 mbps download speed
  • Appropriate surge suppression for computer

Secure storage environment for equipment/files

A secure FTP site will be established by the college and utilized for exchange of documents. College-related data will not be stored locally, either printed or in electronic format.

Office and printing supplies

The college should provide a stipend to compensate the employee for office and printing supplies.

Cell phone

The college should provide a stipend to compensate the employee for use of a personal cell phone during working hours.

Working Conditions

  1. Equipment may not be used for personal purposes.
  2. The employee is required to participate in multiple weekly Zoom meetings.
  3. The employee is required to make a minimum of four trips annually, up to 3 days each, to campus, reimbursable up to the cost from the home of record. Convocation and Commencement will be two required trips; the remaining trips will be at the discretion of the Dean. Trips will typically coincide with major project planning/completion or provide professional development. The number and length of trips can be flexed depending on the distance the employee will need to travel.
  4. The work schedule will be similar to an on-campus work schedule, with flexibility for time zone changes.
  5. The employee must be reachable via telephone, within reason, during agreed upon work hours.
  6. The employee must notify the supervisor if the employee leaves their working location.
  7. The employee must agree to call in to the college’s voice mail system to retrieve messages at least 2 times per day.
  8. The employee is required to complete a Confidentiality agreement.
  9. The employee is required to follow established security protocols.

Task/Deliverable Requirements

  1. The employee follows an established calendar of recurring task responsibilities.
  2. The employee works to meet established goals, including clear due dates, common processes to follow, and established deliverables.

With some minor tweaking, most of the above items were included in the employee’s Telework Contract. This contract is separate from the annual college employment contract and may be terminated by either party with a 30 day notice. A longer notice period was established so there is additional time for the college to receive its computer, close down any accounts, and other tasks that take longer given the distance. Both the employee and I appreciated the extended time frame.

Watch for a final post in the coming months about how things are working out!

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Thinking Outside the Box (or in this case, Outside the State)

By Sandy Bryan, Dean of Institutional Effectiveness, Cochise College

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Or so it seemed to me. In the space of two weeks, I learned that both of my research analysts were leaving the institution at about the same time – one would retire at the end of the fiscal year and the other was resigning due to spousal relocation.

The analyst who was relocating had only been with the college 7 months, but her hiring process was long, drawn out, and challenging. It consisted of numerous conversations with Human Resources about job advertisement and several failed searches. And as if that were not enough, we felt compelled to re-write the job description and reclassify the position to a higher entry level. Finally, after 9 months, we succeeded in hiring a new analyst. I felt that the task of filling two positions was going to be arduous, especially since we wanted to keep the office functioning during what may be another lengthy hiring process. Might there be a way to keep my fledgling analyst?

I did not want to lose a dedicated employee with so much potential. Plus we had already invested a lot of time and resources into her position-related training. As soon as I received her letter of resignation, I began to plot with my supervisor how best to retain her services. I knew chaining her to her desk was not an option; however I just had to keep her on my payroll. Fortunately, we enjoy a part-time remote association with a former full-time analyst that relocated several years ago. Because of this situation, it dawned on me that a remote working relationship with our newest employee would be the only way to keep her on staff. Though the college has never had a full-time remote employee, I was determined to not let this stand in my way.

The more research I conducted into best practices for remote employment, the more feasible the idea became. First, the institutional research analyst position lends itself to a remote working arrangement. The work is done almost exclusively on the computer and much of the position’s time is spent connecting securely to databases and mining for data to answer research and survey related questions. Project requestors and stakeholders can be reached via telephone or email, and our institution recently implemented new video-conferencing software that can make face-to-face meet and greets possible.

I began to think this thing could work. My supervisor and I continued researching existing full-time remote employee scenarios and, as luck would have it, I met a young woman from Seattle who was working remotely for a major university. She kindly agreed to answer general questions I had about her working situation. Putting all of this together, I came up with a list of recommendations related to benefits, facilities, equipment, and supplies (who provides what), and working conditions. We were getting close to something really, really big!!

Next month, I’ll discuss in more detail the remote employment recommendations that we presented to our Vice President of Human Resources. Stay tuned!

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What’s So Hard About Playing with Numbers?

By Dianna Renz, Director of Planning and Improvement, Western Wyoming Community College

Woo-hoo! Rock on! There it is: the happy dance you do when you’ve completed a major reporting project! This is the feeling of satisfaction you get for a job well done. A competent smirk arrives when you’ve successfully built the query and it spits out the information you need. There’s a definite thrill when you put a number in each and every cell in the reporting template. Take it one step further and you can feel the creative high of building pivot tables to discover the fascinating details of your data. With this information you can uncover important information for your stakeholders, which you present in a colorful chart. This is the lovely part of Institutional Research that fulfills the “OCD” in the heart of—and inspires the artist in the soul of—each IR practitioner. This is what makes it all worthwhile, but this is not the difficult part.

No, the difficult part of the Institutional Research field is not the act of doing it. The hard part of the job is serving multiple masters with competing deadlines and agendas. When VFA, CCA, and NCCBP are all due in the same month, how do you divide your time? And where do you prioritize an internal request from the math department for a longitudinal study of student matriculation and success? What about the feeder institution that keeps begging you for information about students who transfer to your institution? Oh, and don’t forget the ad-hoc request from the state legislature!

What is the use of completing reporting efforts if we cannot use the information returned to us? Delving into the data is the fun part; the challenge is finding the time to conduct this critical exploration. Our office has made a commitment to use the data derived from mandatory reporting for other efforts. Using nationally- or state-normed data for comparison to institutional numbers is an excellent approach to inform strategic action projects, and to assess existing initiatives. Our Assessment of Student Learning Team uses CCSSE data, for example, as a qualitative assessment of student learning gains. Our Building Student Connections Team uses math and English pass rates from NCCBP as a quantitative assessment of retention and completion efforts.

Sharing new approaches at the annual RMAIR conference is an exciting part of the job. Presenting at RMAIR means selecting something you’ve done well to showcase for the greater good. What we don’t share are the messy conversations we have with our internal and statewide colleagues regarding the sticky subjects of common coding, extract validation, data integrity, and faulty BI reporting. Research shows there are as many as 250 different ways to wash the dinner dishes, and there are certainly as many varied approaches to institutional data standards and extraction methodology! As I’ve learned from Wyoming’s effort at common coding, reaching agreement among practitioners is often difficult.

But it’s no wonder that we struggle to reach consensus: Institutional Research is still an uncategorized field. Although I’ve learned that some folks have served in IR for over 30 years, there still does not exist a recognized degree in the field (graduate-level certificates do exist, but institutions are divided on whether the certificate is offered through the School of Education, the School of Psychology, or the School of Business). As a result, the strength of this field is that current practitioners have arrived from a wide variety of backgrounds. I know of individuals with degrees in math, psychology, astrophysics, library science, business, and English, just for example. As IR offices are increasingly connected with other institutional effectiveness efforts like assessment and accreditation, this vast experience serves us well, as quality IR is both a science and an art.

In truth, the work we do is critical for the greater success of higher education and student learning, but this charge is not to be taken lightly. Although the thrill is there, our work is NOT just about filling in the boxes of a reporting template. Using information for the lofty goal of continuous quality improvement is both valid and necessary. We must, then, continue to use all our resources to do the work of finding The Answer, but not creating the answer; serving multiple masters, but remaining true to the spirit of inquiry; and sharing successful approaches while always practicing “virtuous data politics.”*

*This succinct phrase borrowed from a discussion on “the Dark Side of Data” at the 2015 RMAIR conference. If you missed this conversation, you really missed out!

What do you find are the most enjoyable parts of your job as an IR professional versus the most challenging? What is your perspective on the practice of “virtuous data politics?”