Board of Trustee’s Planning Retreat

The meeting with the Board gave me insight into what influences the strategic planning goals for a community college board. As you can see from the agenda located here, the college wants the Board to combine their knowledge with current and projected college data, and then merge those things with external trends and analysis.

The meeting was very successful, and the WPI application beta release is now on several people’s radar. The local Employment Security Commission sees our county in the middle of a small business boom with steady growth in those companies with 20 or less employees. This means the college must do a better job communicating with those businesses and making sure we can provide them with employees. This situation is much more difficult to get a hold of than when you just have a few, large employers to keep a relationship with. This a challenge the Board must address in their strategic goals as well as in their dealings with the college and the community.

The down-side to this meeting was the trip. I drove 5 and a half hours to do a 45 minute presentation. Unfortunately, we could not have the meeting in an Information Highway room, but I will try to move towards that in the future. In the meantime, trips back to the college are costing the institution about $400 for a one night visit. I think there is a better way.

First Visit Back To Campus

I had to travel back to the college for a presentation of the Workforce Preparedness Inventory (WPI) to the Board of Trustees during their annual strategic planning retreat (Covered in the next post). The trip allowed me to not only talk to my peers face-to-face about how they felt about my work situation.
All of my peers commented their only negative comment would be the phone calls that are sometimes dropped due to bandwidth. Otherwise, most said they could not tell the difference from me working off-site. During my trip down, I reflected on the communication pattern discussed in my post Keeping in Touch - Is there anybody out there? where there are different levels of courteousness based on the communication medium.

What I have noticed are these levels, ranked from highest to lowest, of inter-personal communication and the corresponding attributes, benefits, and complications.

Face-to-Face
Attributes: Participants are in close physical proximity to one another. Offers the best opportunity for communication because they must survive the encounter (get out of the room) with each other’s ego intact.

Benefits: Participants are very aware of the other’s body language, mood, and attention.

Complications: The physical meeting has a separate layer of thinking where the individual is trying to maintain decorum appropriate for the conversation. This monitoring may alter the conversation in order to ease or expedite the end of the meeting (i.e. make it out of the room).

Phone Conversation
Attributes: Much like a face-to-face meeting, but facilitated over the telephone.

Benefits: Location of the conversation can be in a neutral or more comfortable location for both participants.

Complications: Participants are less formal and congenial. Without body or environmental langue to assist in the conversation, some context or meaning may be lost. Because the reaction cannot be measured, there is also less attention to framing the conversation towards more positive “feeling” reactions. Participants are less personable.

Email/Memo Correspondence
Attributes: Written communication via email or physical means.

Benefits: Email- Instant delivery of message. Memo and Email- Clear communication of reason for communiqué. Reader can interpret the message and respond accordingly.

Complications: Communication is one sided. Sender does not have to have any concern for recipient’s response to reading the message. Messages can be ignored or not opened. Messages can be short and quickly written; therefore lacking in the proper format for concern over the contextual interpretation of the message.

Instant Messaging
Attributes: Quick, information specific conversations using a messaging client of some type.

Benefits: Quick communication from almost any location with a variety of devices.

Complications: Instant messaging has an anagram language not know to everyone. This format also is the most impersonal form due to the quick nature of the conversation, which may or may not be performed during other work or social events.

Of course, none of this is backed up by any research; these are just my observations on the different forms of communication available in the workplace.

Creating a Distance Working Culture

I am not sure as to what my part was to making this happen, but this week my college sent out a new “Telecommuting Policy & Procedure.” Employees can petition for a review of their job and duties to see if they are suitable for off-campus work. One of the biggest influences on this situation is the speed and response issues of our curriculum course management system, Blackboard. This term is the first where the service is hosted off-site. This is great for providing high-speed communication to our off-campus students, but when our faculty are on campus, they cannot communicate with the server efficiently due to the college’s low bandwidth.

The impact of allowing faculty to work from home is wide-ranging. The institution would no longer have to buy a PC for them to use, provide electricity and facilities for their offices, and the administrators gain a little more trust from their subordinates because they are showing they trust and respect their staff as professionals. The policy is slightly different from my contract as it establishes protocols for checking email and voice mail, and times the worker should be available. Because of my equipment setup here, I am connected just as if I were on campus. I don’t foresee the college pushing out IP phones to people’s homes.

I do wonder about tech support issues though. If your computer breaks and you use it to do college work, who fixes it and upgrades the software. How will remote users get to their network files, and if they use the VPN like me, who will trouble shoot that? This is where we will begin to see the economic and HR issues begin.

While there have not be any takers, yet, I will be interested to see if there is any financial impact of telecommuting reflected in the budgeting decisions this fiscal year. I also wonder how this will affect the organizational structure of the departments if they are broken up with some working from home and other, either less tech-savvy or apathetic traditional workers staying back on campus. What will department chairs do to keep themselves in the loop while giving the faculty or staff member the freedom to work remotely? I also wonder what this might do to the endless strings of meetings we have grown accustomed to.

Keeping in Touch - Is there anybody out there?

Being a technical person at heart, telecommuting would seem to be right up my alley. The majority of my work in on a computer, but when someone needs to talk to me or when I need to keep my peers up-to-date on projects I am working on, it becomes challenging to have a virtual “pop-in”. I have also discovered another challenge to telecommuting, especially when you are the only one, is finding creative yet modest ways to remind your co-workers and administrators that you are in fact still being productive.

I have discovered two technologies that have helped my immensely in these areas: Wikis and video conferencing. I am currently working on a “Workforce Preparedness” project with our President and Director of Community Services, which aims to show the relationship between education and job placement. My involvement in the project is to create an application to collect information regarding employers, industries, and occupations and match those to our programs of study. Before I left my campus job, the President would ask about once every two weeks the status of the project. I would attempt to communicate the small but significant accomplishments towards completion, but I knew that she was not catching everything. Because telecommuting can amplify these communication breakdowns, I started a new page on my personal research Wiki: http://research.pbwiki.cn/WFD-Project to catalogue each milepost in the application development process. Using this site, the President or anyone involved in the project can see the day to day progress (recall the previous post on day scheduling) on the project including screen shots and the current “To Do” list.

To help keep my personal relationships with my coworkers, I have implemented the use of video conferencing using a very simple free video client and PC-based web cameras. For larger scale needs, the software allows up to eight sites to connect at one time, making it useful for future telecommuting projects. I use video conferencing for my weekly one-on-one staff meetings with Geri and have attended several SACS meetings remotely. The one major hurdle in using this technology is the resources needed to adequately send and receive video and audio. At my home, I have a 3Mb DSL connection; however, my college has a similar speed connection with 500+ pieces of equipment competing for bandwidth. The video sessions can be clean one day, and unusable the next. The college plans to upgrade to a 40Mb connection soon, which should resolve these issues. On a managerial note: I have noticed a difference in the meeting content with Geri when we use the video conferencing as opposed to telephone conversations. We both seem to be much more personable and attentive when the other can see us. This, to me, speaks to the personal connections that are needed to work successfully and professionally. I will have a video post demonstrating the application soon, but for now, here is a screenshot of this week's SACS meeting.

Multi-Tasking vs. Multi-Threading

It used to be, the way we were encouraged to take on our jobs was via multi-tasking: switching from one thing to the next when our attention was diverted so that everything got attention… and we were busy as can be. This work style lends to piling on work, moderately giving attention to each new thing while old work is sifted to the bottom of the pile. At the end of the day, I really felt unfulfilled with my progress on projects because I was never paying total attention to anything.

Enter multi-threading: focused time and energy to one task, with a set queue for other items. I have split up my day into the three major tasks of my job: Data Mining, SACS committee work, and the Workforce Preparedness Application. By focusing on one job aspect at a time, I have found myself to be more productive, positive about the tasks, and objective about what I can accomplish in a day.

Of course, this schedule is not for every day. I still have to attend meetings and produce emergency "ad-hoc" data and reports, but having this to help me on days where I feel aimless is very beneficial. Before telecommuting, my days were intersected with drop-in meetings, coffee machine talks, and post-meeting data requests. Without these normal "ticks" to break up my work activity, having a set schedule for work keeps me on task without allowing me to spend all day on a problem that could be solved with a good night's sleep and an fresh set of eyes.

A brief Google on the idea of multi-threading reveals it to be descriptive of the "Nonlinear New Student":

The new students perceive text-based, visual, and multithreaded multimedia "as a single entity" ("monomedia"), and they need an "Integrated Environment" including "Multi-threaded stream of discourse". http://www.rzuser.uni-heidelberg.de/~x28/en/36.htm

To summarize: Blame it on Nintendo. The gaming culture, of which I am a part of, has conditioned me to think on several levels simultaneously, but to see them as one experience branching off as needed. As applied to my work ethic, my goal- completion of my daily tasks, is accomplished by direct attention in lieu of broadcasting or multi-tasking.