Okay, I'm sorry i'm hitting my own thing Okay, there we go.
So welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for the next spotlight on Sunni Library Series.
We're here with cable stanwicks from Sunni, Albany, and the session is being recorded.
I will provide the link in the slides afterward.
And I would just say, if you have questions on, you can put them in the chat, and we can address them at the end.
And if Cable wants to you know step at any time to do questions that's fine, too.
So. I will let you take it away. Cable. Alright, Thanks, Corey. Good afternoon.
Everyone as Corey mentioned my name is cable stanwix I'm.
A librarian and the head of access services in the university libraries.
Here at U. Albany I want to thank cory and Olis for the invitation to present today's spotlight on Sunni. I'm really excited to have this opportunity to share my department's experience with strategic
planning with everyone here today. here's an overview of what I'm going to cover in this presentation I'll start by providing some institutional background about our library our university in my department i'm going to talk
about why my department developed a strategic plan and i'll share our process for doing so.
I'm also going to provide a brief snapshot snapshot of our strategic plan.
I'll talk a little bit about successes lessons learned and how we've benefited from this process, and things that we might approach differently the next time we do this, and Finally, i'll wrap up with some brief thoughts about
my department's next steps in relation to strategic planning I have 2 simple objectives for this presentation.
I'd like everyone to walk away with an understanding of Why, it's important for a department or a unit to develop a strategic plan or strategic goals.
I want everyone to walk away with a relatively simple approach for accomplishing this
So before I dive into the main content of the presentation here's a little bit of background information about my institution.
The University of all University at Albany, is one of Sunnis 4 university centers.
We are in r one doctoral granting institution and we've been around for over 175 years.
Now first as a State Normal School, then the New York State College for teachers, and finally a university.
We have 2 campuses in Albany, and we have a health sciences campus across the Hudson River and Rensler, New York.
Our school has a population of over 17,000 students and 1,100 faculty, and the university libraries consist of 3 centrally managed libraries.
Our main library, known as the University Library and the Science Library are both located on the uptown campus, and the Dewey graduate library is located on our downtown campus.
We do not have a library presence over at the School of Public Health.
Our libraries see around 400,000 visitors annually.
House over 2 million print volumes, provide access to a slew of electronic resources and contain a variety of physical spaces that meet users different needs.
We currently employ 73 faculty and staff members, and then, as I mentioned, my department is the access Services department.
We manage a variety of public facing services and back of House operations, which includes circulation, Iol and document delivery reserves, stacks, maintenance periodicals, and microforms and circulation billing We
also oversee a small army of student employees we currently have 17.5 full time staff members.
I'm not sure about this point 5 it might be the top half.
It might be the bottom half of someone if you see a pair of legs running around here that's that's the half, and we have 40 student employees in our department.
We have undergone undergone a number of departmental reorganizations over the past 5 to 7 years, which could be probably a separate presentation in and of itself.
This all started with a major retirement wave 7 years ago, when we had a number of long-term employees realized they could make more money, saying at home, and collecting a pension than coming into work every day, we weren't
able to replace all of those positions and we've shrunk a bit more. In recent years, as clerical staff have taken promotional positions and other State agencies.
Some of our staff, some of our staff have left for other career advancement opportunities, and we've experienced Turnover with the great resignation as well.
We used to have separate units for each service function within our department, but we've since collapsed the work units and simple simplified.
The work flows. So we have 4 professionals right now who coordinate major functions in the department, and we have a fully cross-trained staff who rotate through service duties each day.
Alright. So with that background information in the rear view I'd like to start by explaining why we develop the strategic plan for our department strategic plan is usually something that takes place at an at an organization's upper levels
and it's useful in guiding the Overall direction for an organization, and both the University at Albany and the university libraries have strategic plans in place.
But I felt that we needed something unique for the access services department, too.
You. Albany went through an inclusive strategic planning process that saw input from and involved students faculty, staff community partners, government leaders as well.
This was a 2 year process that we undertook, and it produced a 5 Year plan that has broad goals focused on things like student success, research, excellence, diversity and inclusion, internationalization and community.
Engagement. As the University rolled out its strategic plan.
In 2,018. It campus, vice, presidents, deans, and administrators were also asked to develop their own strategic plans to outline how their units would support and deliver on the university strategic plan within access services our
Staff knew that our work was important, and felt that we provide services that help.
Our students and researchers. but I wanted us to be able to articulate exactly how we do that, and to help Department Staff understand the importance of our work in relation to the university's plan
The university libraries developed its strategic plan, and early 2,018, and the different divisions that we have in the libraries employed a variety of approaches to contribute to this library.
Plan. Each division director was given some flexibility and crafting their divisions, ideas, and contributions to the library's overall plan.
The completed plan that we have has 5 broad goals that focus on supporting research, teaching and learning, collaboration, library, space, organizational culture and scholarly communication.
Each of these broad goals has a set of objectives, and each objective has actionable initiatives to realize the goals and objectives in the plan.
Again here. I wanted to work with our department to help the clerical staff primarily, and some of our professional staff understand how their work tied into the libraries. 5 strategic goals, so they could see how their contributions to our organization through things
like their daily work and projects contributed to the library's success
We we ended up with a situation in which some of the access services staff members didn't feel like they fit in with the university strategic plan or the library strategic plan.
Many of the staff didn't participate in the university's process despite it being very open and inclusive.
But then they also felt left out of the plan this despite the fact that they didn't engage in that process, and the clerical staff had difficulty seeing their work in the library strategic plan which led to some morale issues within our
department, so I decided that it would be helpful to engage the access services staff in a departmental strategic planning process to boost morale collaboratively set our departments priorities and goals that we could connect to our
broader organization's, strategic plans and I wanted to develop a plan that we could then share out to communicate our priorities with our library colleagues.
And the university community
As the campus and library strategic plans were rolling out.
We have. We had a separate issue that was sort of quietly bubbling up.
We ended up losing some positions due to attrition which I mentioned, and this is one of the reasons why our department went through some reorganization.
However, our service demands started to increase, and some individual workloads increased because of Job creep that was setting in.
In addition to the work that we were already doing, many of us felt that there were other things that we should be doing.
There were things that we wanted to do, and and there were some things coming down the pike that we knew we had to do, and in addition to all of that, the department had to deal with certain tasks just because of the nature of staff of the availability and
schedules. These are things like addressing to facilities, issues, expanding library hours, providing building tours and evenings on week and on weekends, resetting furniture within different library rooms, and spaces and dealing
with unruly library users. Our department staff are present at all hours that the libraries are open, so some of the stuff just naturally fell to us
I wanted to develop a way that we could collaboratively prioritize our work, and this was a major impetus for strategic planning and our department.
Everyone in the department realized that we couldn't tackle everything in our to-do list while still providing high quality service to our users, and at the same time we're a relatively large department, and we didn't
have consensus about what we should do some of The staff felt that inter library loan should be our top priority, because it's one of the highest rated services on campus.
Some people thought that we really needed to make sure that all of the books in our collection were in their correct spaces on the shelves, so that we could find things easily.
Some people thought that we needed to really beef up our student employment operation because we rely on our student employees to stay open and deliver library services.
We really needed to develop some kind of a plan, or it was pretty obvious that we were going to fail quickly
More importantly, We We needed something in writing to which we could refer back and refer up others.
We needed something to which we could refer, and remind ourselves why we were moving forward with some priorities over others, and we also needed something that we could easily share at with others to explain what we were doing and to advocate for resources
Most importantly, our department had changed and the way that we do business was changing before us, and we needed to get everyone on the same page.
So now what i'd like to do is share a little bit about how we went about doing this
I decided that we would use a swat analysis to approach our teacher planning because of its simplicity, and because most of our staff members were familiar with this process.
Swat is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
The swat. analysis provides a mechanism to examine and think about both internal and external factors.
When developing a strategic plan. Inventorying and examining strengths and weaknesses, provide an opportunity to look at internal factors while accounting for opportunities and threats, brings an external focus to the planning
process. for the purposes of our swat and analysis. we define strengths as things that we are doing well.
Weaknesses as things that we need to do better operators as anything we can take advantage of, and threats as anything that can negatively affect our operation
We had a collaborative process that consisted of 6 meetings, some independent and group work, and a whole lot of writing, with staff reviewing concepts, adding ideas and providing feedback. Between each.
Of these steps we started with a department meeting to introduce the strategic planning process, provide an overview to the swap model, discuss our timeline timeline for the process, and to look at examples from other library strategic plans
that tied into a swat analysis. After that meeting staff members generated ideas for our swap.
They were given the option to work independently or in groups, depending on their comfort level, and how they wanted to proceed.
With this we generated a list of strengths and weaknesses.
During our second department meeting, and then we generated a list of opportunities and threats.
During our third department meeting we used whiteboards to capture all of the ideas that Staff provided in these 2 meetings, and then, after that I photographed the whiteboards, transcribed the ideas verbatim.
And I shared out both the photos and the notes over our department email lists.
Serve. Immediately after these meetings staff members were encouraged to expand on these ideas and add to the list.
We put together an excel spreadsheet on one drives that everybody could add annotate and comment on stuff that was being contributed.
Then we worked on brainstorming strategic ideas and actionable items in our fourth department meeting, and i'll go into that a little bit more.
Our department managers net to group like ideas and action items, and then we generated themes.
From these groupings I took the themes and the actionable items that we had, and created a draft plan.
And then I shared that plan with our department staff. We worked through this draft, and we finalized our plan in a department-wide meeting.
Then what we did is we posted our final draft on our department Wiki space.
I shared it with the Director of Public Services and other Public Services department heads, and finally, we shared it out with all of the department heads throughout the University libraries
As we worked through this staff members were asked to consider the general questions.
You know What are our strengths, what are our weaknesses?
What are our opportunities, and what are our threats I also post some leading questions to the staff for each area of the swat to try to stimulate some brainstorming.
And the next 4 slides that i'm going to go through here.
I'll share these leading questions, and highlight. some of the ideas that came forward during our planning meeting.
This slide here contains a list of the strengths that we generated as a group.
When, considering our strength Staff were asked, What are our strongest contributions to the University community?
What do we do that no one else does? And what do users like best about our services?
Some of the ideas that Staff contributed here include our request services like inner library, loan, paging and document delivery.
Our dedicated staff's adaptability and flexibility, the course text books that we place on physical reserves in our departmental staff training and documentation
This slide contains a list of the weaknesses that we generated as a group.
When considering our weaknesses, staff staff members were asked, How or where are we lacking resources?
What do we need to improve? What do users want us to do better?
And here are the ideas that they contributed. Some of these are service offerings to students on the Health Sciences campus.
We rely on multiple disconnected service systems or hardware to provide services to our users.
Our billing processes and procedures we're really outdated and convoluted
This slide here provides a list of the opportunities that we generated as a group.
When, considering our opportunities, staff members were asked, What could we do better if we had the resources to do it?
What are things happening outside our organization that we would like to take advantage of?
What are things that we can build from our strengths and what we have here are some of the ideas that staff can contribute, and these include Rfid for our collections.
We have been using electromagnetic tattle tape for security, which was an outdated approach.
Purging user records and transaction histories in our circulation system.
When we were on the olive system we retained everything.
We did not have very good circulation retention policies in place, and we also felt that we could do better with collection sharing among Sunni libraries
And then here's a list of the threats that our staff put together.
When we generated these as a group staff members were asked, What are things happening outside our organization that could impact us negatively.
To someone else, provides similar services with greater ease for our users.
And what weaknesses leave us vulnerable! Some of the ideas that staff contributed include the upcoming systems, migrations that we were facing at the time. So, moving from Olive to Alma and moving from Iliad
to to Pasa. Copyright costs for Interl Library Loan were extremely high, and there were a number of budget cuts that we were starting to experience on campus
Once we had our swat inventory, our fourth Department began as a brainstorming session, so that we could develop some action items to pursue for this meeting.
The staff members were asked to develop answers to 4 questions, using the swap concepts that we developed.
And these questions were: What are some things that we just need to do?
How can we leverage leverage our strengths to address our weaknesses and threats?
What opportunities can we take advantage of to mitigate threats or offset weaknesses?
And are there swat concepts that need to be addressed on their own?
This slide here has a sampling of some of the ideas that came out of this brainstorming session which include moving our circulation fine appeals process online.
We had a paper based form at the time making our loan periods more consistent.
Back when we were on the olive system. I think we had about 40, some a different loan periods, and we also wanted to work on developing a consistent approach to training
So we took all of the contents that we hit assembled in these department meetings, and we worked on grouping similar similar actionable items together.
Oops. We found that the groupings were coalescing around documentation and training student employment, patron services, enterprise systems or the technology that we use, and our circulation billing operation
So we were able to take these groupings and we transformed them into themes. For our strategic plan.
We developed action items for each theme, and we highlighted the strategic action items under each theme.
Strategic action items we defined as items that would help our help with our departments forward trajectory.
And then we parked those other ideas so the items that we didn't feel were strategic in either a project list for our for our department to work through, or a list of observations that were external to our department and could
be communicated with others outside of our department. We selected our 5 themes and their corresponding actionable goals to move forward in our strategic plan, and at this point i'll go through a brief overview of our plan
now
The first area of our strategic plan focuses on enhancing patron services, and some of the objectives in this area include promoting existing services that we had in place improving access to students access to library resources for students on our
Health Sciences campus, and giving a little bit of Tlc.
To our physical collections to make them more usable
The second team that we have in our plan is develop quality, documentation and training to improve service quality.
Better empower staff and decrease onboarding time for new staff members and student employees.
This really focused on developing documentation and consistent training.
So we already had a lot of documentation on a wiki space, but we wanted to create enhance that documentation create consistency within it and make sure that the documentation and training that we were providing we're in alignment
with one another
Our third theme focuses on student and the the student employment arm of our operation, and it delves into improving student employee performance, while also getting our full time staff members more comfortable with their work that intersects with
our student employees.
The fourth area of our plan here focuses on the technology that drives our operation in our services.
It contains the stuff that we just had to do because we we really didn't have a choice.
We were migrating for all from olive to Alma, we were scheduled as one of the last institutions to migrate to Oclc's new inter library loan system.
When they were still talking about phasing out Iliad, and and we were teetering on the brink of an unsupported version of our electronic reserve system.
And the final area of our strategic plan focuses on modernizing our circulation, billing practices, policies, and procedures which included going primarily fine fee fine free for our users.
We had been in the practice of charging daily overdue fines on everything in our collection, and we also had replacement costs that we were dealing with processing fees.
So we wanted to really refocus how we were dealing with this
So overall, I think, that the process we embarked on went pretty smoothly, but it required a little bit of work to maintain flow, and to keep everyone engaged in the process.
At this point what i'd like to do. is just share some of the tips that I think will help others succeed if they decide to embark on a similar process ahead of this I had individual conversations with most of the access services
staff members before our stretch before our first strategic planning meeting.
This was helpful because it's able to learn about staff members previous experiences with as well as their attitudes towards the strategic planning process.
Some people had negative thoughts based on the recent planning experience they had with the university and with the libraries, and others had negative thoughts from past experiences, with strategic planning.
The negative thoughts from the past. Strategic planning experiences really centered around lots of effort and exciting excitement.
Going into the early stages of the process, to have nothing materialized in the end, or to develop a plan as and essentially shelve it.
So given that information. I knew that I had to lay out the process, and it's timeline from start to finish.
So everyone understood the entire process upfront and create some accountability for making this process move forward.
I outlined an aggressive timeline at the start of the process, and we weren't able to stick to that timeline.
But that was that was fine. I updated the timeline as we went, and I communicated out about the adjustments, and the reason why we needed to adjust that timeline.
That communication was really helpful and just keeping the process going and maintaining engagement among the staff.
I would also encourage anyone embarking on this process. To set up ground rules for meetings, to encourage staff members to share ideas, to foster collaboration and create a safe space for all to contribute inclusivity was a core
principle guiding this endeavor, So our rules were fairly simple.
One person speaks at a time. no interrupting. All ideas are welcome, and no one is allowed to critique or express judgment on what others are contributing to the process.
Tying into that rule that all ideas are welcome. When we were grouping our ideas into themes and discussing I which ideas to move forward.
There were some things that didn't make it into the strategic plan.
We talked ahead of time ahead of that meeting, and agreed that we would take these and spin them off as small projects.
That staff members could tackle. I keep a running project list. In the event that we have some time that we can fill with extra staff work.
We put a lot of content on this project list and we've been chipping away at it. This is a nice way to add a little variety to staff members workloads when they have some free time, and it ensured that some of those
contributions that weren't necessarily considered strategic but just good ideas of things that we could do would actually get executed at some point.
There were also a number of ideas generated that fell outside of our department's preview that i'm sorry purview.
So we made a list of these items, and I agreed to share those as constructive feedback and ideas with those who had control over the services that were associated with those ideas and concepts that staff brought forward something that is
frequently noted in the strategic planning literature is the importance of discussing the concepts that don't make it into the final plan.
And that's exactly why We went through this process it's really important that people understand that their contributions were heard that their ideas are valued and understand the rationale behind.
Why particular ideas don't make it to that final cut I felt that this was really key to instilling trust, and a sense of inclusivity in the process when it comes to the actionable items.
I would encourage everyone to aim for using smart goals.
For anyone not familiar with smart it's an acronym that stands for specific measurable attainable relevant, and time-based. smart goals will guide the work. they'll help staff accomplish the
nitty, gritty, and I really think that the smart goals are what separate a good strategic plan from a list of good intentions, and then, wherever possible, tie your departments.
Plan into the parent organizations plan. So if your library has a plan. Tie your department strategic plan into the library strategic plan, tie your department strategic plan into your university strategic plan.
Really work on making explicit connections to any of the themes, objectives, or goals that support or relate to those parent organizations strategic plans.
It's not going to be possible to tie everything into the parent plan.
But whenever that connection can be made include a citation in the department plan.
This helps everyone notice those connections it's useful to the staff involved in executing the plan, and it's also helpful for administrators to see how all of this work connects.
And then, of course, it's important to show that we put work into developing a plan, and that we're serious about actually working the plan.
So once we had our final plan, I worked with the department managers, and then the larger department staff to determine which actionable items we would attack.
First we set up the projects and timelines associated with these actionable items, and then we moved things along, and then finally, keep it all front and center.
Make sure that the plan remains visible, reference it frequently make sure it's seen as a relevant document and maintain a little bit of flexibility and update that plan as needed.
Avoid the process over product pitfall. I guess is really what I'm getting at here so much time and effort go into generating these plans.
So take the product, run with it, and make sure it doesn't end up forgotten or collecting dust.
And again, This is something that will instill trust in that planning process with staff
There are so many demands on our time nowadays.
But when we wrapped up this process and had our first few projects queue up to go, I sort of remember this moment of clarity, thinking, you know, we made it through this process, and gosh!
It just looks like It's gonna be so much easier now to chart our departments path forward.
Going through. The process itself was a really big success for our department, because it provided a small morale.
Bump staff members wanted more opportunity to participate in charting their destinies.
The group meetings were fun. everyone contributed, everyone contributed, and we were able to make connections to the university in the library.
Strategic plans. So Staff helped assemble this, and could see their work and contributions in this plan as well as the parent plans.
So this was a huge, huge help for our clerical staff, and some of our professional staff, too.
We were also able to get everyone on the same page when it comes to our priorities, while there's still probably some disagreement with what is, or isn't important amongst staff.
In our department. at least we have. We had the realization that the process was fair, and everyone got something that they wanted. in this plan.
We built it together we were able to achieve consensus and that in and of itself was extremely valuable.
I'm gonna give some props to the painter Bob Ross, who was an advocate of happy accidents, and we have definitely had a few happy accidents with this process.
The first thing I wanna say is that we've done a good amount of hiring, since rolling out our strategic plan and having a documented plan has been a huge asset when interviewing job candidates our ability to talk about
what we're working on as a department and how individual positions fit into our department.
Strategy has led to some really fruitful conversations with employment.
Interviews. Interviews go both ways, and I found that this really helps demonstrate that we have our act together when we invite people to interview for positions here.
Shortly after we finished crafting our plan, our campus made a significant change to the hiring process on campus and attempt to write a very large deficit.
If anyone has seen the list of Sunni campus deficits, you'll see all Albany is pretty high up there.
Staff lines and budgets had always been managed at the college or the division level.
In other words, Deans and Departments had a significant amount of control over hiring and replacing staff.
When there was turnover, but given our budget shortfall, any lines that were vacated were now being returned to the campus.
We had X. we no longer had access to salary savings.
We could no longer rehire. When somebody retired or left, we had to actually request to rehire or create a new position Anytime we had a vacancy.
There was a lot of paperwork that was tied into this process, and one of the forms required was a detailed explanation of how a requested position supported the university strategic plan.
Well guess what I had at the ready. I had a position with work attached to strategic department goals that were directly connected to supporting multiple parts of the university strategic plan.
We were able to get every single position that we requested, and I think there were 4 or 5 positions that we requested up until Covid hit, and then we had a very firm hiring freeze on campus and then this has also
been a huge asset when it comes to communicating up i'm able to share with my director what we're working on.
Why, it's important what our timeline is and what kind of resources we need to accomplish our work.
This past spring The University libraries were also asked to provide an overview of what we do to our relatively new provost. in our strategic plan.
Our department strategic plan provided a good starting point for crafting a message and delivering my part of that presentation to the Provost We also have an interim.
Dean, who started over the summer, and we were asked to provide a list of strategic initiatives.
Our departments are going to work on again. This was a super easy lift.
I was able to simply copy text from our documented plan and paste it into an email message
And kind of going into the next steps of this process. here.
The pandemic has really rocked our world.
I think that goes without saying it's it's been a huge disruptor for everyone.
It's changed what we do and we also have a slightly different staff now than we when we rolled out this plan in 2,018.
We've had some turnover we've recruited new positions, and we've welcomed other units into our department.
At this time i'm looking at our current plan and having some conversations around where we are, and what we're doing with it during our upcoming winter intersection.
I plan on working with the department that can continue assessing our plan.
This is the ongoing Look at what have we accomplished?
What is underway right now? What haven't we started Yet where are we being successful with this?
Are we meeting our goals? There are a handful of action items that are either in progress right now, or they're unfinished or not started yet.
So it's really decision time with some of these we need to look at all of our timelines for wrapping up this work, and we'll make some decisions about scrapping ideas that are on our plan if they no longer make
sense. i'm also starting to plan for our next planning cycle.
We had a false start, a little Oops. Sorry about that.
We had a false start a little bit earlier this year.
I kicked off our next planning process so that we could have a plan ready to roll out before we finished our current strategic plan.
But shortly after that kickoff we learned that we are going to be embarking on a library.
Wide reorganization, and that's likely going to affect the makeup of my department in some way.
So we're gonna delay the start of that until the library-wide reorganization is complete.
I shared this information out with my staffs that everyone is aware that we're not giving up on this we're just going to delay again.
That communication is really helpful to, and still trust in this process.
And then when we, when we get to our do over for that kickoff I do plan on using the swat again, and the same approach that we ran internally.
But I'm gonna expand this to include our student employees in the process because we rely on them heavily to operate our libraries, and their feedback is really invaluable.
I also want to provide opportunities for external input In this process our current plan was very much internally driven.
So what will we do is survey library staff at our department and I'd like to also seek input from our Student Advisory Board and Teaching Faculty.
This latter part is going to be a little bit challenging in terms of getting feedback.
That specific to the department as opposed to library wide feedback from these user groups.
But we'll see what we can do and as we begin developing our next swat.
We will definitely refer back to the last swat inventory that we created, and we'll ask, are any of these items. still strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, or threats Have any of the items on this inventory
shifted in terms of the category under which they fall. and in the meantime we're going to be working through some group reads so that we can familiarize ourselves with the environment, and that way.
We're ready to roll when that next round comes comes our way, and that that is what I have. i'd love to entertain any questions that people may have, and I wanna just thank everybody for joining me today.
Thank you, Cable. That was excellent I took a ton of notes, and i'm no longer a library director.
But, man, I wish I had watched that So folks feel free to either raise your hand or through a question in the chat.
And maybe i'll just start to get kind of the conversation going.
Just a comment. First, I wanted to say All this is often asked by directors and others about how to advocate for positions or for resources.
You know, when when things are scarce, which pretty much is universal.
At this point. and I think this is an excellent example of how you can do that.
You know, don't just say I need a position have this, you know really robust documentation about the department in the position and everything you do.
And I really like that. You also tied back to communicating with applicants.
You know, I think someone coming in with know exactly what it would be like to work in your department.
And you know what their job role would would look like.
That was just a comment. my question is how has this been received either in your library like with other departments, or with the administration by the administration.
If they've seen this i'll be honest I I was very careful with how I I walked this forward with our administration.
I did not initially call this a strategic plan when communicating it up.
I called these a set of strategic goals, and then just gradually changed that language over the course of about 4 to 6 months, and shifted to using the term strategic plan instead of strategic goals.
So I was. I was testing the water to see how that worked, and how receptive or not receptive people would be to that.
But overall, I think that you know my director and the Dean at the time were very receptive to this.
It was extremely helpful, being able to communicate these concepts broadly and have something to point to.
And the staff were very receptive to it as well.
Yeah, and Just one comment Brenda had in the in the chat.
She said, very impressive engagement with the support staff.
And I I think, yeah, I wanted to echo that this is excellent that you included everybody's voice.
Everybody's, input and i'm sure they felt value In that .
We had a question from Holly. did you have a facilitator for the Swad meetings?
Or do you act in that role? We We Did not have a facilitator for these swap meetings. So I took on that role.
But if we're able to obtain funding to get a facilitator in the future, i'd i'd very much like to do that.
I think having someone in a leadership role also trying to facilitate these sessions can be a little bit tricky.
There's a power dynamic there that i'd really like to avoid.
So there was a lot of work ahead of time that I had to do to try to ensure that we could gain trust and make sure that everybody had an opportunity to be to be heard.
And I was very clear with the staff you know tell me what you're thinking.
Don't tell me what you think I want to hear and just hammering that and and driving that message I think helped a lot.
But I would. If you have the funds to get a facilitator, I definitely recommend doing that, or if you can partner with someone from another organization.
And, you know, do do a trade facilitate for them?
Have them facilitate for you to avoid that financial burden.
I think that's a great approach to tackling this as well, that's an excellent idea.
And I will share a recording link after this. But would you find sharing your slides separately?
Kids capable And I just had another question.
You mentioned your planning cycle you had plan to get going on the next one, and then you're putting a pause on that.
How long is your planning cycle that you had The The planning cycle that we underwent was a 6 month cycle.
Originally. I wanted to accomplish it in 3 in 3 months, but that was just way too aggressive.
And I wanted to. We just had to stretch that out to make sure that we had a good amount of time to get people contributing.
Get people in that mindset and develop some ideas and thoughts that were were useful.
So I think we will probably look for another 6 month process in the future.
And Holly asks, Did you consider using sore rather than swapped?
You know, I I did not consider using sore well actually no i'm i'm sorry let me rephrase that I did consider using sore, but I decided to use swat because of the staff's familiarity with that
approach. So I I didn't have to deal with a learning curve there for our clerical staff members who had been involved in swat processes before, and our library had done previous iterations of strategic plans Yeah, and I
just I again wanna say I think it's great that you empowered all members of the staff.
I think some stuff up and field up to, as you said when you interviewed regarding the last strategy plan, and I love the idea of bringing in the student workers on my former campus student workers were a key part of our team
and we we didn't necessarily include them in planning So I think this is that's an excellent idea, and they're also, you know, a great reflection of our library users.
Too. Yeah. often the highest users. Anna asks, How did you get all the staff? buy in to have a strategic plan from the beginning a lot of one on one conversations with with people before we started the
process. I approached them and would talk to people just one on one, and i'd say, Hey, you know i'm thinking about doing this.
What What are your thoughts on that explaining you know we've got these issues right now with the university's plan with the libraries plan?
There's a lot of stuff that's coming our way would you be willing to contribute to this, or or play a part in this.
There was some skepticism with that approach at the at the start.
Some people thought that it was coming from above, and that every single department was going to go through the process of creating a plan.
Even though the library had just created its own strategic plan.
There was also some skepticism just about strategic planning in general.
Oh, so we're gonna go through This process and Then create a document and do absolutely nothing with it.
So there were some hurdles there to to kind of overcome, but those one on one conversations were were really important, and I think I probably took about 2 to 3 months to have those, you know, water cooler conversations conversations and
passing and I I do try to meet with all of my staff members all the staff members in my department.
Not just my direct reports at least twice a year.
And that was another opportunity for us to have some of those conversations.
Is that does I answer your question? Yeah. And I said, Thank you.
So so and lauren is just has a comment that she's thinking about
You know how to do it. They I think her campus is much smaller, and so they don't have separate departments in the same way.
Yeah, I think that's you can maybe take this in and adjust to different campus sizes.
Oh, absolutely yeah. I think it's it's just really important for you know any, any campus, any department any unit, you know, even if it's just a 2 or a 3 person unit, even a one-person unit think strategically about what it is you need
to do. Polly asks about the idea of the home for the items that that didn't make the cut, and I I took this n down to Holly.
How do those action items get assigned or do people self select?
It's a little bit of both when we're going into a slow ish time of the year, or if we're noticing that patron traffic is down on particular days or at particular times.
We'll talk to staff about, hey? you know I notice it's a little bit slow.
Let's let's find a little something for you to do just to stay active.
Is there anything that you'd like to do we have a list of projects here, anything on there that you're interested in?
They sometimes will have their own ideas about stuff that they'd like to do, which are really helpful, and if they're engaged at that level, we'll let them run with that.
Sometimes having or looking at that list of projects that we have kind of gets the gears turning, and then they're able to select something from there.
And we do have some folks who just say you know I don't care.
Just tell me what to do, which case we'll go through and just think about You know. what can we line up?
That'll work well for this person given the time that we have so it's a it's a little bit of all of that.
We have some people who like to choose their own adventure, and we have others who just want to be told what to do.
And I just had 2 other notes. not really questions. but I love that in time.
Your strategy plan to the libraries or the universities.
You use citations. I think. just brilliant and I don't know why I never thought of it as a librarian.
And then also this documentation and training that you developed.
I wrote down. I think that could be really useful for secession planning.
Also when you do get new staff in, or as people just sending out.
And have you found that we? Yeah, we really have found that
When we, when we dealt with the pandemic, we lost all of our student employees.
We had an operation that had about 60 to 70 student employees at the time, I think, At the height of the pandemic we were down to 7 student employees, and this past fall Semester we bounced back
with a grand total of 2 returning student employees.
So we have pulled in about 40 students, this semester, and having training guides available to work through consistent training, was extremely helpful.
It also is allowed us to line up student employees or new staff members with a variety of our existing staff, and we can guarantee that everybody's going to get that same consistent training experience.
It's really lowered the bar when it comes to train the trainer, and it has definitely helped with our secession planning and hiring same with the documentation, too.
We? we maintain that on a wiki space and ensuring that we have something that's easily accessible has been has been great with both our students and our our full time.
Staff. Yeah, I think there's a ton of valuable ideas getting pulled out of this. Any other questions from our audience.
I want to thank everyone for attending. I want to thank you, Cable.
This was an excellent presentation, and recording will be made available.
Let me have 3