Staff Senate Meeting Minutes
March 8, 2018
In Attendance: Chris Ballard, Dave Beard, Emily Berry, Eric Gumm, Kathy Redman, Scott Delony, Stephanie Woodlee, Tina Chisholm, Will Wyatt,* Ex Officio – Prentice Ashford, Cindy Gravitt, Grant Abston, Steve Rowlands, Jill Fortson, Aubree Browning, Shannon Kaczmarek, D’Angelo Sands, Debbie Stewart
Call to Order
Prayer
Approval of Minutes
Old Business
V. New Business
About my role exercise – Jill Fortson
History of career services – priorities change from time to time. Career Center does not “get students jobs”, they do not “place” students because there are actually schools getting sued for “placement.”
Career center has to prove their ROI. They report outcomes and how students are doing, which is difficult once they have graduated. The government is also using that data for their “scorecard”.
Help students create resumes, but also help them gain needed skills by integrating into the faculty. Skills such as agility.
Gen Z is coming in now and they have different expectations than millenials.
Alot of people don’t understand what we do. New students sometime don’t even know there is a career center.
It’s about students thrive while they are here and when they graduate. We also work with alumni and provide services for online students also.
Online students are often career changers.
Aubree – I get to see how many people come to interview ACU students because they appreciate the quality of ACU students. They have developed awesome relationships with companies that often end up hiring ACU students
Handshake is our new software and will filter experiential learning really well.
Handshake is a network created by some students from Michigan Tech to even the playing field for students from smaller schools. We increased our job postings by 255% and have 3500 jobs posted right now. It has streamlined our processes
How many people in your office? I report to Chris, two staff members and a post grad intern. Two undergrad students that run the first desk.
Handshake is on the career center website and alum can have access. It is single sign-on and they can change their email address when they graduate.
B. Recognition and Development
Letter from employee shared asking about the staff senate having the backs of employees when it comes to policy/procedure.
Three faculty senate members were invited to SLT meetings beginning this year. Would they consider inviting staff senate members? Stephanie believes we just need to have a conversation about it – that is where it starts. It would be most appropriate for the chair to have that conversation. Jill – but there inlies the issue. The fact that we don’t have a seat at the table says a lot. Why doesn’t the SLT want to pursue a relationship with staff?
Debbie – It is so important for staff to have a voice is because academics has a centralized office – Provost office.
Emily – we are twice the size as the faculty.
Eric – notice the disparity between exempt and non-exempt staff in the survey results. Faculty is a unit and has one voice. One reason Faculty has a seat at the table is the issue of tenure. Financial changes butts up against tenure. Faculty is hired through a different process. There has historically been more of a staff voice, this is a time a conversation needs to be had.
Chris – I will think about how I will ask Dr. Schubert. I would love to hear his thoughts on this idea of perception.
Stephanie – We ask for the questions in advance, so please submit those before our meeting with Dr. Schubert. Does anyone have some examples of where staff had a voice? The LGBT survey was facilitated by staff, Sticky notes at Town Hall meeting.
Jill – we do have a voice more than it seems. But what is the perception out there.
Sick to service was brought to HR by staff.
Stephanie – If there are changes people want to make, I would like to invite them to serve on staff senate
Steve – THis is a good survey finding out staff needs and wants.
I am going to walk through the survey itself. Two main points: Job satisfaction and Benefits
Data has been compiled into a spreadsheet in effort to find trends. Committee was iced out when they were scheduled to meet but they will meet today to make some observations and suggestions based off the data.
Emily – 2016 would have had more exempt employees and 2017 would have an increase in non-exempt employees.
Eric – what percentage did exempt and non-exempt staff hold?
There is uptick in 2017 of exempt staff.
Steve – My goal is to analyze it to make some recommendations to staff senate and senior leadership.
Chris – do we need supplemental questions?
Steve – THere are already a lot of questions and I don’t want to ruin our data baseline. I think we could follow up with staff and ask more intentional questions.
This is an opportunity to show staff that we are looking at the data and care about their thoughts and we noticed these questions scored low – what’s behind that?
Also, i think we have a great opportunity that Stephanies whole committee is going to rotate off this year and there will be no one to lead the way for that particular
Eric – you can – you can have committee members that are not senators according to the bylaws
Steve – how do we have continuity for committees?
Stephanie – I think this is where our google drive will be very helpful
Steve – Did you know _________’s house burned down completely recently and he is living in a storae shed?
anyone know about that?? I saw a gofundme account to help with
Can ACU help out? When someone’s house was struck by lightning, ACU helped a family by letting them live in an apartment at a prorated rate.
Shannon – I think that it is an incredible way to help someone feel connected when something crazy happens and there is a repsponse.
Steve – it’s the little things that often mean alot. We are in a high anxiety environment right now and we need to pray for our leaders and the hard choices that are being made.
If you could take some time to go over this data and let me know if there is anything you noticed.
Stephanie – I am not sure what our policy is through HR to help raise awareness for fellow employees when crisis occurs.
Steve – I don’t know the criteria
Stephanie – I don’t know why staff senate couldn’t be an avenue to raise awareness for staff members in need.
Steve – I think the question is always how much to communicate.
Stephanie – faculty senate has a newsletter. Could we have a newsletter?
Eric – they have had one this year.
Stephanie – I think we should start a staff senate newsletter and that is where we can share these things.
Ben – What if it was part of the HR newsletter and there was a link to the newsletter
Steve – I want to appreciate how busy we are and it is difficult to take on alot of these things.
Stephanie – If you would forward me that link that would be helpful and maybe I can spread the word.
Chris – You have a point that new senators come through the door and we ask them what committee they want to be on?
Deangelo – maybe we could email a list of committees and descriptions prior to the first meeting.
Chris – Let’s go out and get more staff members to help with the committees
Shannon – it definitely creates buy-in
Emily – Phil Schubert meeting – based on the meeting yesterday, I am thinking that he is going to come in and want to talk about the sexual stewardship issue. And I think we have a short window of time with him and I don’t want to spend that time talking about sexual stewardship because we are going to be hearing a lot about that from a lot of other meetings. I am looking forward to meet with Dr. Schubert, but I don’t want to talk about just that issue with him.
Chris – I don’t think we got to ask a lot of questions. We need to make sure we submit questions.
Stephanie – Submit all your questions to Chris two weeks before the meeting on April 18. Should we open this up to all the staff and ask them to send us their questions so we can relay them to Dr. Schubert?
Eric – I think the key is to think about what are the issues that staff is dealing with that we would like to put before him. For example, the outsourcing. That will potentially have a huge impact on staff and on the campus
Will – Grounds, IT, food services. It was interesting to me that we spent 45 minutes talking about sexual stewardship and 1 sentence about outsourcing half the staff. THis will impact Faculty as well. People have an expectation of what it means to work here and the coworkers you have and it’s being significantly shaken up. Yesterday, they were pushing hard to implement outside companies the beginning of April.
Is April 18 too late for our meeting with Dr. Schubert?
Stephanie – I don’t know what our meeting would impact regarding this.
Eric -Would our meeting be better to focus on dealing with the fallout of so many staff being let go
Emily – I want to feel like I am allowed to challenge this and we are just now asking these questions because we have not been communicated with.
Will – 77 employees represent a number and they may find that number by outsourcing a significant number of staff.
Chris – If we can do it earlier, i think we should do it earlier.
Steve: I think our goal needs to be to get information.
Ben: Can we have a meeting with directors with departments that need to outsource?
Will: this started being talked about in November and it will be decided in two weeks. Hindsight is 20/20 but we should have been talking about this long before now.
How are we clarifying expectations with new departments.
Will: I would encourage you guys to reach out to John to find out the details of the RFP
Stephanie: There are 3 different bids.
Will: That is the kicker, they may not take any of the RFPs but they still have to find that 77 number somewhere. If IT doesn’t get outsourced, that is a much shorter runway and much more abrupt.
Chris: I think it is our job to communicate with both leadership and staff
Emily: share the perception – this may not happen and we may just start firing people in two weeks.
Will: I have a department of two. I feel we are not staff, we are a dollar amount. We are interchangeable. My wife who is faculty does not feel that way.
VII. Adjournment
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