David Keymer on Student Affairs: Making Alliances to Enhance Services

There was a concern on our campus with the time it took students to register. We were just going into online registration but as helpful as it was in speeding the process up, it didn’t solve everything. When people have problems, they want to talk to people, not a machine interface.

I made an alliance with the manager of the business office, Becka P., and the associate VP for facilities and planning, Carl C., both great people. “Look,”  I said, “The President’s on our butts about the length of time people stand in line on registration days. We have to do something about it. Now.”  Every registration day, I was out in the halls outside the registrar’s and financial aid offices. When the lines started backing up, which they always eventually did, I would go inside and ask the supervisor, “Who do you have who’s not working a window? Get them up there so students don’t have to wait.”

My goal was no wait longer than ten minutes. We didn’t always make it but everyone knew I’d be a pain in the neck if they hadn’t tried. I mean, students are in high stress at that time. We’ve all been there. We know what it’s like, so why wish it on the students who are our responsibility?

But there was resistance to changing things. The offices and staffs worked in silos –one for registration, another for financial aid, a third to pay or receive money. And the offices reported to different supervisors in different supervisory lines. So if we wanted to change things, we had a lot of persuading and to do because people tend to fear what’s new. Carl, the buildings man, and Becka, the business office one, and I talked through a plan to coordinate offices, at least as far as front-end services went.  Then we did a dog-and-pony show—actually, I did most of the talking in it—with selected audiences on campus, showing what we hoped to achieve.

First off was the President’s Executive Council. Second was to the Admissions and Records, Financial Aid and Business Office people. Third was a general presentation to the campus, aimed primarily at faculty and staff in other offices.  One of our concerns was staff burn-out. Front desk jobs are high stress jobs and the people who did them had limited opportunities to move up or over to new jobs when they grew tired of what they were doing. So, we worked out a plan where all of the people in admissions and records and financial aid were cross-trained. Then we redesigned the whole area so there was much more front area and many more windows to go to.

At the same time, we enhanced the computer backup. And then what we did was, during peak periods, almost all of the workers in those offices worked in front for half of the day and then in the back for the other half. That meant the people in those offices now had two career paths open to them instead of one: they could move out of admissions and records to financial aid and back again, even over to the business office. It also meant that students were dealing with people who weren’t burnt out by a week or two of eight hours a day straight answering the same questions and dealing with the same issues. 

But by the time we got around to actually implementing these changes, we had gone through three rounds of explaining what we wanted to do to different groups of people and levels of staff to convince them it was the right thing to do. And we listened to them and incorporated their ideas in the final design. It was worth the effort.

That’s what you do as a senior student affairs officer. I never thought I‘d be a salesman but that’s what I was for that project. Because good sales is informing, explaining, listening. We’re in the persuasion  business. We have to communicate a vision to the people who work for us so they in turn can communicate it to the people it affects. We definitely have to communicate to our peers as senior administrators because in the end, when the pot gets divided up, they’re the ones who vote on it.