Mhm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right
, thank you all for coming. Um This is
on behalf of the Office of Assessment and Evaluation Division
of Student Affairs and University Libraries. So, um
this is our third day of a four day events
. We are speaking with the fifth day of the
popcorn and posters, which will be up on the
second floor across from the circulation. So, we
hope to see you there. That is from noon
to two on friday. Uh huh. Today's speakers
are Ali Cross use using net promoter score to measure
customer experience and exports. And I'm sorry if I
flub up these names, uh Sandy Braughton and Patti
Smith along with Dag Yeshewa.
And Michael Vittock. Um and they're going to talk
about communicating with students. And then um actually,
Van Coble is going to be going second using student
perceptions of teaching to improve academic spaces. And then
you Yohna. I knew I was gonna get that
wrong. Chambers using human resources data to inform multi
level decision making. So uh without further delay,
let's get started. I know Ali has another meeting
. So all right. Let me just start this
. All right. So um I am Ali Cross,
the associate director for the campus direct department or recreational
sports department. And um and today I am here
to talk to you guys in the title is about
the net promoter system that we use to measure customer
loyalty and customer satisfied not satisfaction really customer loyalty.
And um specifically today I'm gonna talk about the wreck
facilities. We do use the same system for all
of our programs that we have as well. But
today I'm just gonna focus in on one of those
and talk about our facility management. Um so our
facilities that I'm gonna be looking at, we do
manage a handful of facilities. War Memorial hall,
McComas hall. We have some fields up, we
call on the south rink arena, so the S
. R. A. And it's our sport club
fields and our intramural fields and then um some tennis
courts. Um The two that we have spent our
time assessing recently are the two indoor facilities, so
McComas hall and more Memorial Heart, those are the
ones that I'm going to focus on today and the
system, I don't know how familiar everyone is with
the net promoter system. Um So I wanted to
kind of give a background on what this is and
where it came from and why we selected it and
why we're using it. So just a little bit
of background. Um This was introduced by fred Reichheld
and with bain and company and you may have heard
from um sat metrics. That's also a company that
they had worked in partnership with to um to produce
it. It was something that first fred was the
author of the article was called the one number you
need to grow. And it was in the Harvard
Business Review. He published it in 2000 and three
in december and once he published it, he did
make it open source. So anyone can use it
. You don't have to pay anything to use this
system. You can use it. It's a very
simple approach to assessing customer loyalty and it's not just
customer satisfaction because many satisfied customers, because I can
also deflect business to you and say this is about
really delighting your customers. And um, and I'm
saying customers because that's really the way that he introduces
it to us. Um, it's students, employees
, It's all of our Virginia tech patrons is who
we serve and that is our customer base. So
I'm gonna use that word because that's the way the
net promoter system speaks about it. Um, it
speaks about your population and, and he currently has
a book. This is the most recent book and
it's called the Ultimate Question two point oh, and
there's a whole lot more information in the book is
fantastic. So highly recommended if this ends up being
a system that you are interested and it might benefit
you to um, to look into. But it's
very simple. And what, what he uses,
what he suggests is one simple question and the one
question is on a scale of 0 to 10.
How likely is it that you'd recommend and you fill
in whatever service or facility or program, whatever it
is, you feel that in to a friend or
colleague. And so for us we would fill in
McComas hall or war memorial hall And then, and
then your users are going to answer anywhere from Missouri
to 10. And then the idea is that they
will be categorized depending on how they answer into either
being a detractor, meaning they may say anywhere from
0 to 6 and they'll probably, if they were
on the street talking to someone, they probably say
I wouldn't go to war memorial Hall, it's too
hot. And so what they say, they would
probably follow it up with something that's gonna detract people
on that. That person may never go to War
Memorial hall because they now know it's hot. Um
If the answer is seven and eight are considered a
neutral and how that might end up looking as they
might say, oh it's great because you don't have
to pay this, you don't have to pay that
it is hot. So then your next customer,
potential customer may go may not. It's really unknown
. They kind of give you a little bit of
good, a little bit of detraction. So They
end up not being part of your formula. And
then the last, um, the last way they
could answer is a nine or a 10 and just
the nine intense or considered your active promoters. And
if they are promoted, they probably answer. Um
, you know, you should use to try to
go to war moral of the amazing fitness classes or
something like that. And they would say something that
would then attract more customers and they help you advertise
what you do and help you bring in as satisfied
or a more loyal customer base. So that's the
premise. And then to calculate and, and walk
away with one single score. You take the average
of your detractors and you take the average of your
active promoters. Your neutrals do not go into the
formula at all. And you subtract your detractors from
your, from your promoters and you walk away with
the score. And I've had many people ask,
so what's a good score? And it's really industry
specific. So it's not, it's not like I
can say 70 is the score you're aiming for.
Um, if you look at companies like amazon and
Southwest Airlines, actually, they're, they're higher.
And I think, um, I think amazon's was
in the upper seventies. And, Um, and
then if you look at something like airlines, the
norm for them is probably more in the 20s.
Um, and so, um, so some of
it may be predictable, may not be, but
you can't compare to different industries. You have to
stay kind of more industry specific. And then,
and where I work in our industry, we have
not in higher education really looked at ourselves this way
. And so not many other campus recreation, actually
none at this point that I know of um used
the system, so all that we have used it
for us to compare to ourselves and to strive for
a higher number every year. And that's been extremely
beneficial for us. Um, so the purpose of
what we did, um, and it's, it's
really focused on what our department is here to do
in one of our major departmental goals is to provide
the best service, to create an experience. And
it's really about delivering a service. We do want
to make it an experience and ultimately build a healthy
, healthy community, but also build this community at
Virginia Tech, so that's one of our departmental goals
. And so the outcome that we're using to show
whether we're doing that is that net promoter score.
That single number is what we're using to give us
feedback. And um, and so the purpose of
this assessment project was to capture the NPS score and
to um, to use that to reflect um,
the quality of our service. So the methods that
we used is, um, it was a web
based survey. Um, we send it out and
, and this has been something now. We're on
our fourth year, going on our fourth year.
And so, um, so we've kind of consistently
adopted the same methods for the sake of, of
getting a trend that we felt like we could rely
on. So in the fall we collect our population
and I'll describe who our population is. And then
in the spring we actually run the survey. The
survey does go out via email to this one population
that we've identified. And we, we leave it
out, we do about two different email attempts to
see if we can get people to fill out the
survey. And um and so the group of students
and faculty staff and employees that we have chosen to
be our population are people who use our facilities frequently
. And so we have an incentive program called slight
sweat and win every time people come in, they
have to check in with their hookey passports. We
are able to identify people who use our facility three
times or more. And so once for any given
week in the fall semester, if they've come in
more than three times or three times or more than
they go onto this list. And that list is
the list that we used to send our survey two
in the spring. Um And so what we've done
um for war memorial and this is just now capturing
last year's survey, we had 573 people who fit
into this white suit and when um Category and with
McComas Hall users was 4,397 participants. And that was
who we used for our survey. The survey itself
had four questions. And this is the other thing
that's beautiful about it. To our, to me
who has to look at all the information is that
it's very simple in terms of how to digest the
data that you get. Um So what would you
, it starts with the wood. Would you recommend
question and the beauty to it is we haven't asked
previous questions like what was the doorway like? What
did the signers look like? What it was the
staff member? So we haven't put anything in their
mind. It's whatever is already in their mind.
So no other questions other than would you recommend.
And then we followed up with why did you answer
that way? Or an open comments? Um section
so that whatever, however they answered it immediately to
capture why um is that? And then um we
do like to questions just for sub grouping. So
later, if I want to look at how,
how did the males and the females differ? If
I want to get a score or NPS score for
the different populations and same thing with employees grad students
undergraduate, I'd like to look at those differently and
see if we have more loyalty um and one group
or the other because the needs are different and that's
what we found. So for the McComas Hall survey
, 22 responded to the survey. Um 63 female
, 37 female majority obviously were undergrads is 82 13
grad students and five and I clumped faculty and stuff
into the same when I look at it on the
survey that we do look at them separately. But
and then with my War Memorial 61 um responded from
our 573 and then a little bit more males than
females, pretty similar to the McComas Hall response and
um, which is interesting just to throw this out
. And a lot of the other programmatic surveys,
we usually have more females answer. This survey tends
to be our a very high population of males have
opinions and you wanna maybe it's because it's short and
um I don't know why they, they're willing to
commit tickets during the survey, but um and then
most of them, 52% were employees and then we
had 32 or undergrad, 11% grad students and then
five or other and I can expand on who those
others are. More memorials complicated um in terms of
who can actually use it. And and one other
thing I mentioned on this slide is once we get
we can easily calculate the score and then I go
through and usually calculated score for all of our subgroups
and then we look at all of the written comments
and start to categorize those. So the trends that
we found in this past survey change your two year
. But the past survey, what we found was
exercise space and equipment. There was a lot of
comments related to that, a lot related to access
and ours. Um Several comments about staff interactions and
then locker room facilities was was another major category.
So what we learned um I'll start with just basically
what our NPS score was For my commas it was
51 And and then more memorial with seven and I'm
just gonna throw this out to this group. Um
and whoever else is watching this, that this is
the first year ever that we've been in the positive
with more memorial hostage. This is actually an excellent
score for us. We started our very first year
at a negative 38. So um and based off
the written comments, I think that, I mean
it's it's steadily gotten a little bit better, a
little bit better but still negative, a little less
negative, a little less negative. And we did
some major repairs to our locker room last year.
And then the written comments reflected that they said thank
you for finally doing this and thank you for that
. And so it to me it looked like it
was an obvious link to the work that we did
there, which gives us hope that we know we
still don't have air conditioning there, we know we
still have some major things to do, but to
build that customer loyalty and the appreciation is we're doing
things and they're noticing. And so um so that
made a difference and I won't go through every single
thing just because I know this is brief, but
we did end up walking away with um and I
give some examples of things that we learned and so
maybe I'll just throw out 11 category. But for
the exercise space and equipment for McComas, we found
a lot of comments related to how speedy are repairs
were, they don't want equipment sitting on the floor
that says, you know, out of order.
So a lot of those are actually positive comments.
They were compliments about how unlikely it is that you
find things that are out of repair, but that
was one, just a general theme. Um They
want us to enforce rules about cleaning after yourself.
People want clean machines, um more open floor space
, moving equipment around to maximize the newer trend and
exercise, which is bodyweight stuff and jumping and moving
and having space to do that. And then just
, I can't even begin to list um the number
of specific pieces that they want more kettlebells more this
more that just a lot of individual pieces and then
War Memorial, the the most dominant comment is about
where fans should go. People are helping us coordinate
where we need to place um fans and how we
need to go about cleaning the basketball floors because it
is so hot, they do sweat, they become
slippery and and then just a number of requests about
specific pieces so each area has items like that that
we read through all of them. Um And what
we've really walked away with is that this this is
the method that we're going to continue with. We've
done many secret shopper efforts. We've done long extensive
satisfaction surveys, trying to figure out what people really
want from us. And this has been the most
direct action oriented, less analysis, more action oriented
type of assessment that fits our need and it's what
we do. Um So it's short, it's simple
. Um I feel like we're getting the in the
parking lot conversations, the things that we need to
hear that people are saying them anyway. And now
we're actually getting them to us where we can do
something about it and it gives us some qualitative but
also so that quantitative number that we can really strive
for and set goals and and then get some positive
feedback when we did something like it is nervous that
it is making things better for our users. Um
and then we have a variety of approaches that we
can use to look at that information if we're really
trying to prioritize our grad assistant or our grad students
when you really want to pull them out and what
are their needs? Are they different than the other
groups? And so we've got some ways to subgroup
that I would love to subgroup it a little bit
more in terms of um skill level and interest in
exercise and how comfortable they already are in the jumps
I think would be interesting to hear from beginner exercisers
and split that at this point, I haven't done
that. Um and that might be something that we
that we change. So um I'm not sure if
I have time for questions. Yeah. So,
um, so if anybody has any questions have one
minute for questions, If anybody has any questions for
me, I think she has to say population that
you did as a post large looking meat from last
week. Our original decision to use that group.
Our decision right now has been that's who we have
used for a couple of years and so I wanted
to keep it consistent until our department really bought into
what the Mps project would do for sort of the
system would do. Um The original reason was when
we did another needs assessment, a lot of people
that were on our list when we just did a
random sampling were like, I don't know, I've
never been in there and they didn't have opinions,
but they felt compelled to try to write something on
there. We also, because of the random random
sampling that we did, this is about seven years
ago we got a lot of people that didn't actually
work on camp or they weren't on Virginia Tech's campus
that they're like, yes, we need a rec
center and northern Virginia. And so we got comments
that were kind of all over the place. I
wanted to focus on people who they use, what
they use the rec centers and they have opinions and
there are loyal customers that are coming back and they
want something and we want to make sure we're giving
them what they want. So that was the reason
. Um I do think there's still voice out there
, so there could be potential to, to explore
more. We do have an advisory board in our
advisory board. We have obvious a lot because of
the format, a lot more opportunity to expand on
some of the things that we learn here. And
it's interesting because that's what we are hearing from them
is complementing exactly what we're hearing from the open comments
. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah
, people I really liked the simplicity of, you
know, just asking would you recommend us and why
? I mean, I think that really tells a
lot. So, um, I wrote it down
. Maybe we'll steal that. Yeah. Okay.
So now we have Van Koval, is that one
yours? All right, Great. Yeah, yeah
, sideshow, do you do speaking? Thank you
. Sure. I'm van Kabul. I'm an architect
and I've been with the university for almost 10 years
and I've been in the provost office for the last
year and a half as an assistant provost for academic
space. I'm primarily interested in classrooms, offices and
class labs. We have a certain amount of funds
. It's not a lot of money right now,
it's half a million dollars a year, but we
expect that to increase that. We allocate among requests
for improvements to classrooms. A lot of those requests
come from colleges and departments, but we started looking
at the spot data, which is the survey that
students fill out now. That's the last question on
those surveys asked about the environment that they're in and
it gives a ranking component and then in addition,
it asked for comments. So in analyzing the spot
data, we looked for the classrooms with the worst
ratings first and then we drill down into the specific
comments when I did that there were different categories of
comments, some that weren't really things that we could
address. For instance, if a classroom was too
far away from a department, that's really something for
the registrar's office. that's that's not something I can
deal with. And if it's something to do with
the classroom being too hot or too cold, that's
kind of a facilities question. Usually that's too expensive
for us to deal with, but if it's something
like the seats are falling apart or or other concerns
, uh that's what we tried to deal with.
So We, last year we worked on about 14
projects and several of those were spot related, so
that's kind of what I want to show you today
. Um Mhm. Where is the image that's associated
with? It's not showing up. Okay. Sorry
. Okay. This is, it's actually Pampling 1001
and it has a funky configuration of seeds and they're
also tears. The problem is that the seats are
, they're dangerous right now. They're screwed to a
wood floor surface and there's a lot of screws that
come out and they're kind of wobbling around. But
so we did a survey based on some comments and
we surveyed all the all the professors who use this
room for their comments and suggestions. We gave them
three different options for ways to improve this space.
And what we landed on was you see how the
teaching wall now is not the long wallets. The
short wall, the door in the far corner,
that to the right of that, that's the long
corridor wall. So these were some of the comments
that we had. Uh huh. This is uh
we're finalizing the design right now. The plan and
the lower left hand corner shows the room with the
current teaching wall. At the top of that plan
. We're going to reorient the teaching wall to the
corridor while on the right hand side, and we'll
put in um flexible tables and chairs and we're taking
out the tears entirely. So this will, uh
, but it will be a more conventional classroom and
offer flexibility and the A. V. Component.
Okay. Yeah. And so that's that one.
We'll go to another project and Randolph Hall. This
was done over the winter break. The one in
Pamplin will be done over the summer because that takes
a while. Um, this was, is a
large classroom. Currently it's a long, deep room
. Originally it was to classrooms and it was combined
at one point, the comments were the people in
the back and we're here in the back. Now
in this view, they can't hear and they can't
see what's going on on the blackboard. So,
um, with, with the, the engineering department
that uses this classroom, we came up with a
solution which, over the winter break, we took
out another teaching diocese. We reoriented again to the
long wall. We put in two screens and two
projectors and they put in a completely different furniture.
So we hope they like this. Uh, we
don't have any data on that yet. Um,
now this is another one we did over one or
break. You guys are familiar with these, uh
, tablet arm seats all over campus. We have
thousands of them. Nobody likes them. Uh,
so we frequently surplus them and replace them with desks
and chairs. And that's what we did in this
room. The comment is, we don't have the
money to do this universally at this point, but
we do it selectively. Um, so, and
these are the typical replacements that we get from,
We buy them from Virginia correctional enterprises and they're,
they're nice tables, they are flexible. They have
wheels at one end so you can pick up one
end and move them around. Now this one is
a for us, a major project angle to 23
. It's a large classroom in a single, which
is right near frailer. It seats about 150 people
, seats are in really bad condition. Springs are
popping out of them are really noisy whenever anybody moves
the day. Is that the teaching, the end
of the room doesn't work very well because the restaurant
unit is off the dais. The professor has to
get move back and forth between the restaurant unit and
the blackboards. Uh, it was originally designed to
be handicapped accessible the day is, but it isn't
right now, the, the railing is not stable
. So there are a lot of common. This
is one of the worst classrooms on campus. One
of the worst. Um, and that's ken smith
my boss there, he's a vice provost and he's
wanted to address this classroom for quite a while.
Yeah, okay. Of course. One of the
common complaints is not enough power for lap times.
That's everywhere. That's tough to deal with. Um
, This is the solution, we're going to go
with. The seats were trying to maintain 140 seats
in this classroom, we can't get 150, but
we're trying to, you can see how they're skewed
a little bit too oriented toward the front. If
you look at the lower left, you can't really
see it. But there are two projectors and two
screens. Now the restaurant unit has been moved to
the center of the Dallas and the Dallas is lower
. Now it's just one small step, it will
be lower and it will be, it will be
accessible. So this is kind of a major project
. One of the things I forgot to mention is
uh, the reason the seats haven't been replaced is
because the floor is hot right now. It's asbestos
tile and Mastic underneath that. So that's probably why
the seats were never replaced. We'll have to deal
with that. So this is a summer project.
Yeah, Okay. This was one we did over
the winter at the armory. If you're familiar with
that on draper Road, it's a really great space
. They built a mezzanine in at a couple years
ago. It has three large studios, uh,
fine art studios. The problem is the walls don't
go all the way up to the deck so the
sound bleeds between these three classrooms and it gets really
chaotic in there. So they asked us to fix
that problem. And what we did was we,
over the winter, we had a contractor come in
and extend the walls and actually doubled the walls and
installed acoustic bats in them. So we hope that
that solved. We were never going to get it
perfect because it's an existing space, but we're worked
with the H V A C ducks and everything and
we hope it's better now. They say it's better
. So, um, so any questions? Yeah
. Hey, I'm wondering use this party that kind
of ignite some areas that you think are dark,
interesting areas that suits identify as need replacements. Do
you use other like, I don't know, research
to inform the changes you make beyond the student suggestions
. I'm just wondering if I would love to target
the professors, you know, but I'm not sure
that there's a mechanism right now. We should do
that if there isn't because they always have, they're
not always uniform and their response, but it would
be good. I'm just wondering if ever a student
suggests there has an idea, but in practice is
a conducive to learning. It wouldn't be, you
know, if there's any way to test that,
I don't know what happens real. one of the
comments we had is that, you know, when
you have a distance learning situation, um, they
, a lot of times the students would complain that
they can't hear or if something's coming in or that
there's a, there's a problem with the interface,
like say with nova or somewhere. Um, thank
you. Yeah, thank you. Yes, thank
you very much, man. It was very good
to see all of the changes that are happening across
campus. Okay. Next we have Sandy, bratton
and Patti smith along with Dag don't tell me here
she was. And Michael Vick to, so thank
you very much. Uh, we're here from the
communications and innovative technologies department in the division of student
Affairs. And what we're talking about is the student
communication advisory board affectionately known as scab. Um,
last fall, the vision of student affairs department established
the Student Communication Advisory Port. So we could take
our ideas to the audience we wanted to reach most
, which is students. So through this group we
can gauge student awareness of interest in and reaction to
our communications and marketing efforts. We talk about digital
signs, emails, social media, websites, newsletters
, a frame spanners, flyers, podcast, videos
, advertising. As a group. We think creatively
about all the different ways. We can get our
message to students and increase awareness of the division of
student affairs programs, services and events. So we
started recruiting members for scab in august 2014. And
we got recommendations from the division of student affairs faculty
and staff from the college and department, faculty from
other students. Some students nominated themselves. The applications
were reviewed by our staff and the 16 members selected
to serve on scab are a very diverse group of
students with equal numbers of males and females. They
span all years of the undergraduate experience with three first
years, one sophomore, nine juniors and three seniors
. We have 12 different majors in a wide variety
of areas, including engineering, business management, marketing
, finance, dairy science, human development, english
, computer science, public relations, environmental resource management
and business information technology. Our board also includes on
and off campus students in scaB meetings, which are
conducted once each month. Students give us feedback on
our current promotional campaigns and then they also give us
ideas of how we can better communicate with them each
month. Each month. Each month we engage in
dynamic discussion about how information is disseminated to students and
whether that information is relevant to their experience at Virginia
Tech scabbed meetings are led by a facilitator and note
taker who are consistent from one meeting to the next
topics are defined prior to the meetings and an outline
of ideas to be presented and questions to be asked
is developed. The facilitators guide the discussion, but
we are very mindful of giving plenty of time for
the conversation to sort of evolve organically with ideas shared
and different viewpoints expressed meetings are invariably lively and fun
with great participation and attendance. Even during final exams
, the scab members take their work seriously. I
think their contributions to our work are invaluable. Um
, Michael and Dagger. Here they are. Our
scab members. Um, joining us today. Michael
Vitek is a sophomore majoring in marketing dad. Yes
, she was is a senior majoring in computer science
. And they're going to tell you a little bit
about how they heard about the opportunity and why they
chose to participate. Okay. Yeah so uh I'm
dag and I've been a director for Reading Check union
for a couple of years. I worked really closely
with student centers activities and just under division student affairs
. Um I was recommended to the student communication advisory
board by Sienna, who's the communication specialists for S
. C. A. And so I thought about
this kind of uh like involvement being like really beneficial
for myself. And I also thought from my experience
with student outreach and trying to go into uh like
different departments and try to reach out of students and
get our events out. I had a lot of
experience and I could also learn a lot from other
students who are kind of similar positions on campus and
might have uh different like experience. So I wanted
to share my experience and also gain more insight and
just try to uh create a system where we could
all better enhance the division and student affairs. Uh
My name is Michael Vitac. I'm a sophomore marketing
major and Pamplin. Um I heard about it because
I'm a part of the innovate living learning community through
my house supervisor who's on S. G. A
. And kind of came through the different email listservs
I applied and was accepted. So then I kind
of decided to go with that because part of prison
which is Pamplin, reinventing social media were the marketing
agency for the college and we have a couple of
private clients as well. So I kind of thought
that I could bring a little bit of that social
media experience and side we do a lot with marketing
the college to students. So I kind of get
a different viewpoint because it's a similar audience and that's
kind of what I've been focusing a lot with the
scab is the social media site and graphics. Hi
, I'm Patti smith, I'm gonna talk a little
bit about the topics that we've discussed so far at
the student forums. I mean at the advisory board
, the first topic which was very high on our
list to address was Dr Perilla, the Vice president
of student Affairs student forums, which are were created
to have once a month to reach out to all
students. Especially Dr Parella wants to make sure she's
being hearing from the less engage students because she sees
the more engage students in all the different committees and
activities she's involved in and she wanted to create a
space an area where she could hear from these,
less engage students. But what happened is the attendance
was pretty low, and although they were advertised through
our group, she wasn't getting the kind of participation
she had hoped. So at the first meeting,
we introduced this to the scab and and asked a
lot of questions and the feedback was so rich and
helpful that dr Perriello came to our second meeting to
talk to the students directly. And um, dad
is gonna tell us his student's perspective about the student
forums and what happened at those meetings. Okay.
Yeah, so, um, the student forms for
me, I've seen them advertised on campus and I've
only seen them visually, but when it came to
us, during like one of our scat meetings,
we were able to discuss a lot of different factors
that kind of deterred like students and ourselves from actually
attending the student forums. One of them big,
the big things that we talked about for a while
was actually the name. Student forums and the formality
of the name can actually deter students. And it's
also hard to understand what a student forum is.
It's an opportunity for students to go talk to dr
pillow and engage and create discussions that might make changes
on campus, but you don't really get that from
just that name. So we wanted to make it
more of like an informal thing where people can just
go in and sit with the vice president student affairs
and like talks with Patty was one suggestion that we
had, and so that might just engage more students
. We also thought that uh, instead of having
these, these student forums be like overarching forms about
everything under the division of student affairs. We thought
if they were like issue related, uh, that
more students would come out and see how they could
actually make a difference. And so we could say
that one meeting might be about dining halls, another
might be about like exports. And uh, we
also thought taking that into consideration. We could combine
it with dr polo going into like different residence halls
or dining halls or recreation is like war memorial.
And someone wanted to talk about how hot it is
over there. They could just tell her in person
. Um, because just seeing like how she engages
with students, helps students, engaged with hurt,
um, seeing like how she came to the second
scab meeting that we had about it. I felt
like we could actually make a difference because we could
actually talk to her. So things like that.
And we just wanted to students like, uh,
see it as her being more approachable. And we
also thought that we could have a bigger like social
media outlet for the whole student forum and see if
like, if she was on social media more like
most of the student population here, um she could
reach out easier. We talked about her having like
live twitter conversations where she could talk to students and
get their responses instantly and then maybe create a form
after that kind of like results. And so those
are some of our considerations and uh one last thing
that we thought could make a big impact is if
she took ideas that were presented at past student forms
and showed how they could, they've actually already made
changes, then that might inspire students. That might
have the question like, can I really make a
difference because I'm only one person, um they might
see that someone else has brought ideas system form and
it's made changes before. So things like that.
Thank you, dad. Yeah, another topic we
raised as the division of student affairs has uh social
media presence. We have a facebook page, we
have instagram twitter accounts and we're always trying to reach
students where they are, where they live. Uh
but are we? So we brought that to the
student communication advisory board and Michael is going to tell
us a student's perspective about what happened at the meeting
. Sure. So they asked us, I think
social media was the second or third meeting. So
they asked us to start following the channels a month
before and kind of just see what kind of content
is on those and how it's portrayed. So I
kind of looked at it through the lens of what
we're doing with Pamplin and how we're growing in different
there. And we had a similar issue that with
C. And Pamplin that it was a lot of
dry content and it was a lot of just,
hey, we're having this opportunity come like out to
the multipurpose room, the library in here, people
speak And it was hard to portray that in a
fun and engaging way to students on social media and
especially the constraints of Twitter 140 characters. How do
you convey like a student forum in 140 characters to
see how those benefits are portrayed? So at that
meeting, we talked a lot about using imagery and
like memes and fun content to engage with kind of
bland copy. So we worked with through a couple
of points of that. And then we also decided
to do a lot more fun and engaging content to
build that following just on a daily basis, when
there's not like a true um impactful message that's on
the drier side, like almost today's meeting, um
not to engaging with students overall, so trying to
find a fun way of engaging the audience on the
off days, and then we really need them to
show up there, their and they're already following the
channels, looking for something meaningful to come out on
those channels. And then even the just voice of
the channels being more kind of a student young audience
wording and not so much slang, but just approachable
, not using the least source all the time to
solve conflicts, phrases and everything. Um to just
keep it very simple, something that they can digest
as they're going down there news b or checking the
latest tweet, and then also reaching out to the
major student organization on campus via twitter, facebook,
social media in general to engage with their followings,
so then they retweet and other things like that,
that we're building the content just as almost an ecosystem
, not so much as each channel siloed, trying
to send that content out and then then that equal
balance of info and fund was just the kind of
overall message that we got out of it from students
giving to the T. S. A. Was
just that it needs to have some fun elements to
the channel. Thanks Michael, another major uh initiative
that the division of student affairs has embarked on is
something called the Keystone experience, which is a co
curricular experience that was developed to keep students engaged and
give them a framework to make meaning of their outside
the classroom experience and track their engagement and end up
with a transcript of their out of the classroom experience
here at Virginia Tech. It was softly rolled out
this fall and we're gearing up for a major roll
out with a full marketing plan in the upcoming fall
semester. So we have brought the last two meetings
, this um initiative in front of the scab to
get their feedback on all things communication and marketing related
and a little bit about the program itself, which
is not our main thing, but they're so helpful
, we get their feedback on everything. Uh look
for all the marketing materials coming soon because it's heavily
influenced messaging and everything else, even down to the
little giveaways and just so, you know, t
shirts and sweatshirts are your highest valued items by students
. They continue to be uh very prized. Um
We have one minute left, so we're gonna go
real quickly. Um the student advisory uh communication advisory
board has quickly become the go to group to get
frank, articulate insights into student attitudes and preferences and
as such. Um Were never at a loss for
topics to discuss and we can send you a list
of topics that are coming up. But Patty is
going to address some of the changes underway as a
result of scabbed feedback. Briefly the the biggest change
is going to be with the student forums. Um
They Doctor Perla is changing everything about it based on
their feedback. I'll finish okay? Uh Just keep
looking for that and you'll see it. Thank you
. Wonderful. Wonderful. Yes. I love the
student engagement aspect. That's so wonderful. And if
I may never get this computer back up again,
find it out. We broke it. Yeah.
Well I guess I can't go. Yeah. No
sorry you don't get out of it. Yana.
Sorry. So you see I got it back up
. Thank you. And now we will have Yana
. Chambers speaking to us um about using. Thank
you. Thanks for letting me be here. I'm
Yanna Chambers, the assistant vice president for human resources
here at Virginia Tech. And what I wanted to
speak to you today about was the employee climate survey
Um in 2009 was the first climate survey that human
resources distributed to employees. And um that was all
full time employees. With the exception of of a
group that I'll talk about later that we learned that
we needed to add. Um and uh so we've
done the survey three times. We've done it in
the fall of 2009, the fall of 2011 and
the fall of 13. And believe it or not
, we're getting ready to do it again in the
fall of 15. Um, so here's some information
about that. It's it's given to all salaried employees
and we're asking the perception of the work climate.
Uh there's about 80 questions or so on the survey
and it's typical kind of like what scale they're strongly
disagree disagree somewhat. We had a 42 response rate
this last time which we were very, very pleased
with the ratings. Three and four were combined for
the positive aspects of the survey. And then there
were two open ended questions that we added um specifically
related to diversity um and then about inclusion. Both
of those are very valuable. Now if you know
that we're going to the new Inclusive VT diversity model
and and we've been able to use the survey data
to help develop some of the programs and lead us
in that direction. One of the things that we
do with the survey results is um how urban who
is the Associate VP. Of HR. Will take
the survey data and go meet with Dean's about their
particular unit and share with them kind of the top
10, the bottom 10 the most changed aspects of
what the employees in their particular area said about the
survey and in units where there is a really small
employed population, Well of course combine the data and
meet with several folks. So it's not to identify
someone. Um and what I wanted to share with
you is these were the survey results which you probably
can't see. But the top 10 most positive items
from our last survey. Um Starting with the most
I take an active role in making others in my
department feel included. Um and good relationships with coworkers
, relationships with others at Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech
a good place to work. Um That's good.
Uh People in my department are committed to doing quality
work and you'll see the others their access to information
, equipment supplies, good relationships with supervisors and understanding
the roles and responsibilities of others in the department.
Um A lot of times what departments will do with
this particular information is do somewhat of an affirmative inquiry
to kind of dig deeper and maybe talk to the
leaders in their area to say, hey, here's
our top three, top five, top 10 areas
where we rated the highest in our department. Tell
me what you think, the reasons are behind why
we rated so highly and how can we improve on
those to begin to, to make the workplace even
better. Instead of looking at the bottom, Look
at the top. And let's see how we can
make this even better. And also to use when
we have vacancies, um job vacancies to announce an
announcement. So we use as recruiting tools, here's
some of the things that the co workers, I
would say if you join our department And then there's
the bottom 10. Um This is the opportunity where
you're looking at, Gosh, what did folks say
? Um They wish was most improved in their particular
departments. And um and how do you improve on
those and hear from a university perspective or those most
negative responses? Um individuals in my department made accountable
for poor performance. Um I'm not sure if any
of these might resonate with you, but accountability of
Virginia Tech for discriminatory behavior. Um Department sufficient staffing
to do our mission always to hear we're doing more
with less. The state continues to reduce their funding
for us. Conflict is not resolved effectively. Employees
are not necessarily treated fairly with regard to sexual orientation
and and so forth. So again, these are
given to um department to Dean's to to use to
identify what areas can we improve upon within our unit
. Again, you might talk with focus groups within
your department, you might pull your leadership together within
your department and talk a little bit about, Okay
. Um folks, these are the areas that are
co workers. Um you included, I completed the
survey um have identified are the areas of opportunity for
us to work on and then you begin to whittle
away at what can we do to improve that?
Why might this be with their particular incident? Um
What about performance evaluations when you're looking at performance?
Did we complete our performance evaluations on time where they
truly meaningful or were they merely just going through and
checking off, you know, the blocks and things
like that? Any questions so far? Yes.
So For instance, was a division, like the
division of student affairs where there's 23 or 24 departments
at any given time. Um Do you meet with
each department head or do you talk to someone about
the results as a whole? Or do you only
bring it up if there's a problem? So,
so the meetings would occur regularly and I believe I
can't speak specifically. I know we met with patty
and talk specifically about that. Um Ted's area,
for example, dining services. Okay. Big area
covers a variety of positions. Um That might be
one where we can slice and dice a little bit
more because clearly you couldn't identify folks in that and
sit down and talk with Ted and Gary Shapiro,
the HR folks there and say here's generally um you
know what, what folks have said in dining services
and here's how it's ranked out and here's some opportunities
for you and we do have the ability to kind
of slice and dice some of that data. So
so folks have found that helpful. Um uh here's
the most significant changes from 13 and 11. The
changes morale among employees at Virginia Tech is good,
it's up 19 um gay. Uh and morale among
employees. My department is good, Virginia Tech rewards
the efforts of employees and then and then you'll see
the others. So those are the things as a
human resources professional that you want to see increasing in
your organization. Um It's things around which we decide
we would add more resources. For example, would
we um put more communication around spot reward programs?
Do we want to communicate to departments that um and
and for example we'll use dining services. For example
, let's say they created a reward and recognition program
specific to dining services. They saw, what we
would attribute is a direct correlation. Folks believe they're
being recognized and rewarded for their good work. We
may say then to another department on campus facilities for
example, you know what dining services did this program
? We've seen turnover go down, we've seen retention
go up. We've seen people generally say that it's
a better environment. This might be something for you
guys to talk about. We pull the folks from
facilities together and dining together. Perhaps Robin baldy HR
person there and we'd sit down and we all talk
about it. What can we do that might work
in your organization? So that's some ideas about how
we might share the knowledge. So I'll be transparent
and share with you what we said in HR.
Um and our survey results, one of the things
that we did is we looked at okay where did
we have opportunities for improvement within our own unit?
Um And these questions were the ones that stood out
for us that we could create opportunities and and how
could we address those one is I can trust others
in my department. Um morale being transparent is not
pretty, I never said it was pretty um morale
among employees in my department is good and I'm recognized
for the contributions I make to the department now As
an HR professional, those are not necessarily the things
that you want to see among your co workers.
But nevertheless it's what folks think. We have about
65 full time people in HR. And and I
think we had a really high participation rate. And
so so to us as the leadership myself to colleagues
and how we thought, you know, I value
my folks tremendously. Um why don't they feel that
, you know, what can I do to let
them know how much I value them? So in
good fashion we did focus groups um which is what
we do and we decided let's pull some teams together
and we call them climate teams. And one of
the things that we did, what we kind of
parched people out based on their interests and where they
would like to participate is we sat down and we
talked with folks represented from all the areas within HR
and we try to identify some of the things that
may have been comments, some of the the narrative
comments as part of the survey and some of the
things. This is what we heard, data collection
um to know exactly what what trust issues are.
Okay. What does trust, what does that mean
? Does it exist? For example if you know
, HR were divided like staffing and recruitment compensation performance
employee administration service centre that we have equity and access
that we have you OPD so we're all over the
place. What does this mean to our folks?
Is it trust within their units within the silo units
? Is it trust between equity and access and staffing
? Are you O. P. D. And
performance, you know, where does that? So
we began to break that down and and you know
um record what we thought were the cases exit interviews
for folks who leave and take a job outside of
HR or who leave the institution. Um And and
not not a punitive collection of that information implement career
advancement programs. Um Many many folks in HR have
had the opportunity to move up. Kathy Petrie,
my colleague here um has had opportunities that she began
in HR to move up through the organization. Um
I myself 26 years ago started in HR um as
a front desk receptionist at M. D. Anderson
Cancer Center. So granted I've had to move around
, but I've moved up through the organization and the
structure of the office. Some of those suggestions were
frosted glass. That means a lot to people who
are coming to talk to about employee relations when other
employees can walk up and down the hall and be
seen. So we had some recommendations from that,
the second morale among employees in my department. So
what we did was we have um Earth committee um
to generate birth and joyfulness. Um but seriously it's
fun. You know, this is a group of
people who are kind of representative all of the department
of created opportunities to engage, be social and laugh
because um uh salary equity. We looked at salaries
not only among the folks in the department, but
how do we compare to other universities are size and
then use the talents and members of the uh within
HR if you've ever heard the phrase, you're never
gonna be a profit in your own backyard. Um
Lots of times we would find that departments may bring
in a consultant to provide HR services that we would
do for free. So um so that's something that
we addressed and then recognizing the contributions. What we
did is we created a reward and recognition program and
we identified a dollar figure. We have individual awards
as where as well as team awards for the folks
in that department and then creating promotion opportunities. We
have hokey huddle. Every other week, we meet
as a group in the morning to discuss what's going
on. And then um we created a scholarship program
for each person in the department to have access to
uh 2 55 105 105$500 to each person can
attend. And the new A. P. D
. Provides each employee in Hr 750 to attend one
of their programs. So that has been very helpful
. And then the areas of strength is how we
rate it out in HR opportunities for career growth and
promotion. And then performance reviews on how well folks
feel like they're receiving good solid honest feedback on their
performance evaluations. It was very fast. Um Any
questions I noticed that you alluded to this but you
did not include wage employees on the climate survey that
you're planning on it in the next one. I
don't know that the group that we most recently added
was research faculty. They had not been included previously
. So they were they were not included in 2009
. We included them in 11 and now and then
in 13. I don't know if we'll include wage
employees or not. There has been some discussion around
that because you might because there are a lot of
wage employees um and because their wages, they don't
get benefits right and they might be feeling disaffected.
You don't care what they think, right? That's
a good point. Thank you. Yeah, because
de esa hires lot absolutely poison. Some of them
are fairly professional positions, but just don't have you
know what that makes. You can cause some disaffection
because some of us here, okay, thank you
. Other questions or suggestions. Have a question.
Yes. You kind of talked about the Mirth Committee
and I noticed that it was you know, are
the screen said it was no longer, it had
it had fallen off? Is the difference between that
and the social committee? Like what was the difference
in their charge or what they were? So the
Merced Committee has uh, Gosh, the committee originally
was volunteers um like we would volunteer and then appoint
people within the rules volunteered for it. And what
we found was the same group of individuals were repeatedly
volunteering. And that kind of created frustration in the
department because people felt like it was the same group
of people every year that we're focused on us and
, you know, it was supposed to be a
all inclusive type of environment. So with the recommendations
that we did, we basically appointed individuals within the
office spanning across all the different areas and different teams
that are within human resources to ensure that there was
adequate representation from each of the teams. And that
when events were planned, we were taking into consideration
what deadlines were coming up or conflicts that might have
occurred. So we have re established that we just
did it in a more formal process. And the
other thing that we did two is substandard. So
in a department are size, you know, we
do birthdays kind of altogether. So every month there
is a group that's divide that do birthdays. That's
important to folks. You know, it may not
be important to me, but it's important to folks
. The other thing is, is for events like
births, showers, marriages, on marriages, um
, you know, uh, deaths. Um,
you know, all the things that you would find
then, that, that folks, let's say in
, in one area that maybe had more employees would
have a bigger deal, uh, you know,
a bigger, you know, bouquet of flowers or
whatever it might be that maybe another area. So
we standardize those things so that no one felt marginalized
or less than in any way. And, and
it's made a big difference. So thank you.
Yes. Can I take her question? Okay.
You're just a hand sign holder. Okay. It's
quick. I'm not sure if it was this particular
survey, but one of the things I've noticed with
surveys on campus is, especially with the smaller department
. If you ask my title, you may not
know who I am. Yeah. I don't think
that's when asked title. I think it ask your
employee type, like a p instructional research or staff
. Yeah. Yeah. And that's one reason why
we don't for smaller units. We, we combine
them. I just can't remember. I feel like
I didn't fill it out, but I couldn't remember
. But that was just something 42%. Looking at
this room, you probably so thank you. Yeah 1128 --> A:middle L:90% .