Growing a Strategic Enrolment Management Culture

Spring is sprung here in Canada. This past weekend, my wife and I wandered over to our community garden plot and prepared the soil for planting. Last year was our first time planting this plot and we were a bit late so we rushed things into the ground without doing much prep work. I turned over the soil with a spade and we pulled weeds, but we didn’t have time to spread any manure or even evaluate the quality of the soil. We just dug it up and put seeds in.

We were disappointed. People had told us, “Oh, you’re getting Old Man George’s plot. You’ve got great soil!” Well, maybe Old Man George had gotten a little tired and didn’t keep up with his soil because things did not grow like we expected. The carrots were stumpy little things about an inch long. The biggest potato we got was about the size of a dollar coin. The rhubarb was no thicker than a pencil.

My wife, the gardener, determined that the problem was tired soil. So, my wife sent me off to the garden centre to get some manure, sand, and other stinky, dirty, half-rotten stuff that plants like. This year I expect a great crop – Kathleen knows exactly where to start to get things growing.

Gardening and SEM

Have you been disappointed in the results of your Strategic Enrolment Management? My beef with most SEM books, articles, presentations at conferences, etc., is that they forget the most important part of SEM. If you want to get a good crop out of your strategic enrolment work, start with Strategic start with the soil – the culture of your organization.

How do you help promote a culture of SEM? It starts with good structure and proper reporting lines, but that’s just like the walls of a raised bed garden: there’s minimal benefit without good soil culture. So after creating the proper structure, people need to buy in. Why should they care about SEM? What’s the benefit? What difference will it make? What’s in it for me? What are the consequences of ignoring it? It’s our job to share this stuff regularly – to rake it into the soil so that the clumps are broken up and spread out.

Strawberries and SEM

Another way to help SEM become part of your culture is similar to my community garden. We walk through the plots and say, “Ooo, look at that nice garden! What are they doing to grow such a nice patch of strawberries?” Call it whatever you like: keeping up with the Jones’ or social pressure, but it works. Take your key influencers to see what good Strategic Enrolment Management looks like and then encourage them to tend their own culture.

Square Foot SEM

Heard of Square Foot Gardening? It’s all about laying a good plan for the garden to grow in. This is where strategy and making a plan for Strategic Enrolment Management finally becomes important. What are you going to do? Who’s going to lead it? How will you know when you’ve got a good thing growing? Get everyone contributing to this plan! I can’t emphasize that last point enough. If they’re part of the plan, they’ll take responsibility for it. No one person, regardless of title and reporting lines can do the job of SEM. A good organizational culture depends on everyone in the organization.

Weeding and SEM

Yeah, I went there!

Sometimes you have to pull a few weeds to keep the garden growing. A noxious weed can ruin a whole garden bed. I know you might have a union to deal with, but don’t wimp out. Get the right people on the team and get the wrong people off the team. If you have a union, work with them on the goals of SEM and the culture you’re after. Good ground work here will make dealing with staff much easier.

Growth of your Strategic Enrolment Management depends on good culture. It’s sometimes hard, back-breaking work, but the rewards can be worth it. Don’t garden your SEM culture like we gardened our plot last year. Last-minute, hurry-up jobs are not worth it. Work on the culture, dig it in deep, rake it smooth and water it daily. If you do that hard work, the growth will be organic and will bring lasting results. In fact, it might just outpace your ability to keep up with it. That’s a good problem to have.

Oh, and one last thing. Share the fruits of your labours. Come to the WARUCC conference in Winnipeg in June. Find me and we’ll have coffee with a bunch of SEM professionals and show off our culture calluses and share seeds of ideas.

See you soon?

Grant

Customer Service 101 – It’s All About Trust

There is only one reason for customer service: to build trust.

In the Registrar’s Office, especially on the front line of dealing with students, it means the following:

• Hear the student out. Take the time to listen.

• Acknowledge their concerns and gather all the information you can.

• Probe for more concerns and details.

• Take responsibility for solving it, or make sure you’ve passed it on to someone who can.

Practically, this means listening to the entire question before telling a student to submit a help desk request. Then ask, “can I answer this question? Can I find an answer to it more easily than the student would be able to?”

Remember, it’s all about trust – establishing, re-establishing, and building on trust.

Otherwise, why bother?

 

P.S. This post is related: The Number One Secret to Success

Who’s In Your Corner?

Every good boxer has a better corner man. Think Mickey from Rocky.

Look back over your life. Who’s been in your corner?

I’ve had numerous people who’ve believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself. A personal corner man in my life was Dr. Paul Magnus. He invited me into his life and work when I was a young student and he was a college President. He included me in things I had no business being included in. He kicked my butt when I needed it kicked, and he gave me responsibilities I felt I was nowhere near capable of handling – except that if he thought I could do it, then I’d give it my best shot. I had confidence because I knew he was in my corner.

Share a quick story with me – post a comment about who’s been in your corner.

Feel like no one’s in your corner? Turn the question on it’s head: Who’s corner are YOU in? Be someone’s corner man/woman and then see what happens.

Tell me about that, too!

Engagement

The following blog post is a guest post, written by a friend and colleague from the University of Manitoba, Neil Marnoch.

I’ve attended many conferences during my professional career and can safely say I have been nurtured by each of them. Regularly interacting with other professionals who do what I do renews my energy and focus and builds a feeling that the work I do is valued. Keynote addresses have been inspirational and informative. I always come back with a least one good idea – usually more – from the concurrent/peer led sessions. I am strengthened by discussions in formal groups, during breaks, over meals and other informal gatherings.

National and regional conferences, while both equally valued, are very different experiences. National – North American level – conferences are very large affairs ranging between 5000 and 8000 attendees. The scale of these conferences affords the ability to involve high-powered, well known and influential speakers. There are usually more concurrent sessions of interest than one can physically attend.  New attendees can sometimes feel lost in a very large crowd. You may know some of the other attendees, but with the volume of people and the expansive spaces of the convention halls, you may not see but a few familiar faces. At most national events people disperse for meals and unless you have made arrangements to meet a friend, you’re likely on your own.

Regional conferences, on the other hand, are smaller and more intimate affairs. Although regional conferences do not have the abundance of sessions and choices available at the larger conferences, what they do offer is opportunities for real engagement.  With attendees totalling 150 to 300, sessions are smaller. Breakfasts and lunches are usually included. Breaks are more intimate and it is easier to find those individuals that you really want to make a connection with.  There are lots of opportunities for those starting out in the profession to meet up with people considered leaders in the field. Once the connections are made, they carry on and you may find yourself re-connecting at larger events. All of sudden the national conferences are not so intimidating.

The WARUCC Biannual Meeting is one such conference that affords opportunities for meaningful engagement. WARUCC 2013 will be held at the Delta Hotel in Winnipeg, June 24 – 27. This gathering will mark 50 years of western Canadian registrars and enrolment professionals getting together to share ideas and provide support as we have collectively grown in our profession and the ways we serve our students and institutions. This is reflected our theme: Connect – Engage – Grow Forward. Plan to attend and participate in discussions of matters that concern you on a daily basis. Be inspired by our keynote speakers. Meet old friends and make new connections.  For further information, please visit our website at warucc.ca.

Neil Marnoch

President, WARUCC

Registrar, University of Manitoba

Recognition of Prior Learning Overview

Here is a presentation I gave to a group of Faculty Deans and Directors this past week regarding how to recognize prior learning. Recognition of Prior Learning

I have worked for many years on this topic, starting back in 1997 when Briercrest College was developing a Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition policy and portfolio system. That opened the door for my participation in a series of meetings with the Registrars of Saskatchewan and the Ministry of Advanced Education and Training for the Province of Saskatchewan, the results of which you can see here. Since coming to Trinity Western University, I’ve been involved in the development of a similar framework for a portfolio system, primarily for our Adult Degree Completion program offered through our Extension division. Here’s a short video which was part of a CKNW AM 980  radio interview “Talk to the Experts” showcasing a couple of students who went through a Prior Learning Assessment at TWU.

I am regularly asked the following question about how to recognize prior learning.

Query: “Can we transfer credits for this guy from his [firefighter training]?” [Insert whatever kind of learning you want]

Grant: Does he have a transcript with credits on it?

Query: “No, but he has all these courses…”

Grant: If there’s no credit attached to the courses, there’s no credit to transfer. He’ll have to create a portfolio and make a request for us to recognize his learning and apply the appropriate credit, if any, to it. That’s not credit transfer – that’s Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR).

What are the common questions you hear about RPL: Recognition of Prior Learning? Leave a comment.

Grant

Work and the 9-5 Job

Sir Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group, is someone I pay attention to because of his commitment to the kind of business and human ideals I generally like (fun, trust, engagement, innovation, etc.). He posted a new blog post this morning on how working life isn’t 9-5 anymore. As he says, “The world is connected” and so he likes to give people the freedom to work where they want. I have explored this model, gently, in the Registrar’s Office at Trinity Western University, and have found some success with it. There are some issues he alludes to that I want to unpack a little from our experience.

Our work in the Registrar’s Office has made a dramatic shift over the past 6 years. So much of what we used to do has been made obsolete by the internet and our desire to empower the people we serve. For example, we used to require students and faculty members to sign paper Add/Drop forms when they wanted to make course changes, which were then submitted in person to a clerk in the Registrar’s Office who would enter the information into our student information system. This meant line-ups of people and pile-ups of paper. The clerks were primarily a human link between the paper form and the database. Since we moved our Add/Drop process online and empowered students and faculty to be able to make these changes electronically, it means we no longer need clerks to be the human link.

The dramatic shift we’ve experienced is a shift from a paper-pusher to a problem-solver/consultant. But that doesn’t mean our staff can work anywhere. We value face-to-face customer service as well as mediated (online, phone, etc) service and self-help service, so our consultant staff have to have office hours. But we have experimented with connected work for the staff who don’t have to be immediately available for face-to-face service. These staff can work from home and we have set expectations of connectivity and availability by email, phone, and other means and it’s working well. We tend to manage these staff through outcomes. For example, some of them must produce a classroom schedule a month before the start of next semester. They don’t have to be in the office to do this, but it must be completed on time. We trust our staff and they have responded with trust-worthy behaviour.

However, one issue has been obvious to us, which Sir Richard doesn’t address. We have a strong office culture of teamwork and support. There are very few tasks that don’t require input and collaboration. We have found it a challenge to maintain this apart from face-to-face work. Work that is mediated by a phone or email isn’t the same. It just isn’t.

It’s not really a matter of trust, although that is a factor. It’s mostly a matter of “out-of-sight, out-of-mind.” We’ve deliberately set up our office space to be an open-concept to help build a sense of teamwork. When a team member isn’t in that space, others fill it. Unless the person who is working elsewhere has a specific role that no-one else can do, it’s easier to turn to the person next to you to ask your question than it is to pick up the phone or type out an email or send a text message. The old leadership concept of “Management by Walking Around” carries the same message. I can’t tell you how many times I have walked past someone’s office or desk only to hear them say, “Oh, there you are, Grant! Can I talk to you about…?”

So we have some work to do to overcome this, especially in our media rich, overstimulated workplaces. If you are available and it’s easy to connect with you, I will. If not… “Squirrel!”

So as much as I like Sir Richard’s ideas, there are still some issues to be worked out that depend on our office culture, our service needs, and our expectations. For example, Branson says, “Yours truly has never worked out of an office, and never will.” My response? It’s nice work, if you can get it…

How have you seen this work in your organization? Please leave a comment and let me know.

Registrars Conference

I’ve written about the importance of staying connected through conference attendance before, and I’ll say it again. If you work in a registrar’s office or something like that in Canada, you really should plan to attend the WARUCC conference in June. All the cool kids will be there.

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