Webcast Presents Latest Update on Staff Hiring Plan

Staff and faculty are invited to participate in a candid two-hour webcast from 10 a.m. to noon April 27 to hear about the staff hiring initiative, also known as workforce planning, to ask questions and to offer additional thoughts and feedback. That feedback will be incorporated into a final report to be presented to senior leaders in May.

The interactive webcast, hosted by Chancellor Dorothy Leland and moderated by Associate Chancellor and Chief of Staff Ed Klotzbier, will include presentations by each cross-divisional working group — Research Excellence and Academic Distinction, Student Success and Organizational Efficiencies and Sustainability — followed by an invitation to viewers to submit anonymous suggestions, comments or questions.

The campus’s youth, Leland has said, puts it at a distinct advantage over more established universities when it comes to making strategic hiring decisions. Even with limited resources, there is opportunity to be more nimble and flexible in the organization of how work is accomplished, providing a first-rate education to students, supporting faculty members with their research and keeping staff members fully engaged in the pursuit of these activities.

“The planning effort that we’ve been undertaking is really different,” Leland said. “It’s an effort to create a multi-year staff hiring plan consistent with the resources we estimate will be available for new hires.”

The workgroups offered progress reports to Leadership Council in March and Division Council in April, honing their focus in response to feedback from those audiences. For example, after Leadership Council’s interactive exercise, the workgroups identified the following common themes among all priority areas:

• identify, streamline and analyze current business processes;
• establish, create or identify metrics, best practices, and service levels to drive decision making;
• engage with staff to find ways to use or organize existing staff creatively; and
• technology considerations.

Working group leaders — Sam Traina, vice chancellor for research; Charles Nies, vice chancellor for student affairs; and Michael Reese, vice chancellor for business and administrative services — agree that the most important goal of the initiative is to create a hiring plan that reflects our mission, the academic success of our students, and support initiatives related to working more efficiently and generating additional revenue. 

An intentional approach to budgeting, hiring and the collective work done by the institution relies on the active participation of both faculty and staff in these discussions. It’s with this goal in mind that a webcast has been chosen as the vehicle for communicating the latest information on the hiring plan initiative. A link for the webcast will be emailed out 24 hours before the April 27 event takes place.

Given the importance of this exercise to the university’s future, Leland encourages managers to make reasonable accommodations to allow staff to participate during the full length of the event. Supervisors can reserve conference rooms to allow for teams to view the webcast together.