Question 4

Posted on Saturday, August 31st, 2019

If you were the President, what is the one thing you would focus on first?

• Focus on quality and our people/ capacity.
• **Focus. **Our priorities.
• The business model for sustainability; the investments to support this model, this sustainability.
• Transparency in decision-making.
• Order of operations.
• Lens of the Learning Development Plan.
• Strategic planning from a business acumen perspective.
• This should motivate our decisions: ‘How does this support the learning of our students?’

• Fix Workday. It’s a great tool. We need an alignment of process to technology to use it.
• Student Information System. Insight. We need to prepare, to use new systems effectively.
• ****Wealth of experience. We need to revisit credentials for full-time professors (e.g. PhD not necessary for applied teaching).
• Integrate and value Part-Time Instructors to ensure longevity. Need better benefits.
• Co-op for instructors. Delineate student co-op opportunities from those for instructors. Embed instructors in industry placements.
• Diversity. Very good focus.
• Drive innovation with collaborative spaces for instructors. Create ‘cool factor’ for instructors.
• AC strategic lead for AI, new areas learning, research.
• Keep engaging faculty and staff.
• Emphasize entrepreneurial skills as a character mindset (is it kindness?). Emphasize these skills to help student success at work, not only for them to achieve the grade/high grades.
• Leverage part-time faculty entrepreneurial mindset.
• Keep up employee engagement.
• Support external project engagements. Help set expectations to support better outcomes, data, learning environment (e.g. Siemens project).
• Budget for faculty research with ARI. Need easy way to create projects for faculty, staff or employees with industry. Not paid to develop projects or to prepare grant applications. We need to log these hours (e.g. SWF). Need to standardize, support project development.
• AC subject matter experts need to be interviewed by media (not only university professors).
• Great at start-up, incubation of new initiatives; poor at follow-through.
• Offer full support, encouragement for the mental health of employees. Invest in the mental health of employees; don’t do this halfway.
• Employee survey.
• Learner Driven Plan.
• Need to be best in Canada. Create cross-disciplinary projects.
• Hire people based on subject-matter expertise and skills first and then on credentials where it is not required by government regulation.
• Continue the “cleaning up” activities (e.g. painting, small repairs, washrooms, signage, etc.)

• Continue our contribution to the climate crisis.
• *Scheduling alignment; create the opportunity to review current state and align across academic areas, across all areas College.
• *Differentiate. Invest in unique differentiation. Pick one.
• ***We need 3X the student supports than we currently have here.
• *Take risks in management – push the boundaries. Increase capacity.
• Have Student Success Committee meeting with the President’s Coffee Break visit here (at regional campus).
• ***I would be the President I would want to follow:
  • Stay connected, local, visible,
  • Be the most recognized, each of us has chance to get to know the President,
  • Fair, ethical, no after-thought for our campus, no distance.
• I would move the President’s office to Pembroke.
• I would take risks. I would be willing to let employees fail.
• Create project with programming across disciplines (with time and resources).
• Support staff and students’ cultural sensitivity training. We have a growing number of international students. We need to prepare first.
• Ensure role clarity for communications across the organization.
• Have all staff and faculty tour Pembroke.
• Be open, Pembroke and the local community have equal voice. Our involvement not delayed.
• Military connection, perhaps there is new opportunity for an open house in Petawawa?

• Improve the academic structure of the College (e.g. introduce new programming of interest tot he market, enable collaboration across disciplines to improve programming) .
• Improve Human Resources systems, due diligence of the administration department, create/clarify policies for decision- making; help employees of different departments overcome trans-boundary issues and clarify priorities (what to exclude).
• Important meet with employees, the different people on different levels and collect feedback to create an action plan on table; I would focus on how we reach our goals (day-to-day operations) and branding.
• Our product is the student: there are different types of services for our different students and different program deliveries; our priority is to make our students ready (with our programs and services), to then dispatch them to the community (for their/the community’s prosperity).
• We need to remove barriers to decision-making. We need to help with processes for decision-making.
• Teaching Excellence (including Universal Design for Learning-UDL)

• More parking. Remove the cost of parking for staff.
• Bring back the air-bands. Increase employee engagement. Taking a look at how support employees in positive ways to relieve burnout.Increase engagement, energy of employees.
• **Priority planning as a corporate strategy project. What comes on and what comes off our list of activities, prioritized by the whole College (college-wide). Corporate strategy for project prioritization. Before we dedicate funds, look at corporate planning (College-wide) perspective. Too much is done on the fly without prioritizing ideas across the College, not just by an area.
• What is the priority and focus? No tie back to corporate goals. How do we grow staff to prepare for the future? It is difficult to position staff to be ready (for implementation of new plans). What is the priority? There is pressure. Each priority comes for the money.
• Human Resources, how grow staff to deliver on our plans.
• Project management (PM).
• Implementation management (implementation science). Plan how operations will succeed with implementation. Full implementation, evaluation, post-implementation plan. Understand how operations will succeed and how to move these big great ideas through the organization.
• Planning and implementation of new ideas (in the business, on the business) without burn out!
• Speed up the redraft of our strategic plan! Refine it. It’s about the employment of graduates.
• **Business transformation. Move to business transformation teams, business process integration teams. Scan the environment for business transformation success, competitive intelligence for business transformation. Look for references inside and outside the college system. Consider success in the private sector. Define the organizational structure for success.
• Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Ensure UDL is fully delivered across faculty, across campus. Keep UDL rolling; get fully accessible. What’s good for one is good for all. Be forward-thinking.
• Mentoring/Shadowing/Time with the academic area.
• Service/Administrative employees need to be more involved in the academic side of things. Look at ways to encourage, be enthusiastic about opportunities for services people to be with academic people. Need integration. Need to break down the silos for all learners.
• We are reinforcing silos with our decisions. Chairs and managers are seen as different, yet work is similar. Our work is interdependent. Session should have had chairs and managers together. Change listening session design to integrate employees, be more collaborative.
• The language we use reinforces our silos. Change this. Start saying we are all partners across departments.
• Pay-for-Performance (PFP) system for managers. Understand what is needed and change it. We are reinforcing certain work. How can we use PFP collaborative work?
• Responsible Centre Management (RCM) provides autonomy, encourages competition. How can we encourage collaborative work instead of competition? Let’s invest in collaboration.
• ******Force active students to use their AC email. We don’t have the College wide policy for it. Need policy. Multiple email accounts create confusion, delays in/loss of communications.
• New ways to recognize contributions of our employees in more of a day-to-day. For example, the ‘Golden Apple’ idea (purchase to give to an employee, donate to charity on their behalf). Create random acts of kindness.
• Increase employee engagement. Avoid work burnout. Increase energy employees.
• Increase visibility of the entire leadership team; interactions should include all executives (e.g. Coffee Breaks, First Day).
• Engagement with quarterly coffee breaks should be Inclusive, for all employees.
• Do we need all of our meetings? Decrease the number of meetings.

• Call the President.
• Clean up the “garage”. Finish what we start. We are full of initiatives; need a way to start cleaning up. Can’t move forward. A lot are fed up. Get the clear picture. Then we can start moving.
• Reassess priorities. Align with the next generation needs. How do we be proactive? Evaluate our initiatives!! Move what needs to move, assess what hasn’t worked, and move on. Everything is priority and full speed ahead. Reactive instead of proactive. Prioritizing – can’t be everything all the time. Does it make sense? Are we moving in the right direction? Evaluate: pause and breathe.
• Focus on quality. What is the most important thing we do? Must be one thing that sits above the most important things. Quality flows from having really solid and relevant programs. Has to start somewhere from top.
• What is the priority? Our quality. Our programs. Quality speaks to that. Programs speak to that.
• *Ask every department, strategy for the student experience. What have you done to better a student’s experience? First day, collect from every staff member.We are all here for the learner and the learner experience.
• Listen to employers.
• Do a listening tour. Listen.
• People First. People are the priority. What is the pulse? Lots of change. Morale down. Seen more grumbling and negativity in the last while. With all of the changes and events in the last while – tap into the people at two levels: what’s said, and not said Sense of something of getting lost in the shuffle. Make time for conversations.
• ***Need for clarity.
• Employees need some reassurance about change. This is a change management approach. Acknowledgement of the issues. Answer questions. With all the change, we need certainty. Need guidance. “Hate to find out by way of engagement survey. Its concerning. We are waiting for a tool to understand.” Not the systems, there is a lot unknown. We do not communicate the work (e.g. scheduling mismatch across College activities).
• We were listened to but weren’t heard. Make people feel heard.
• President 20 years of experience at the College alleviate stress in immediate years. Expect/need more transparency.
• ***Need acknowledge lots of change. The stress. Be heard.
• Unknowns from the strike. Ensure from the unknowns. There are challenges to acknowledge.
• Pause strategic plan to complete operational plan. Operations 80% . There are gaps between strategic plan to the operational plan. Strategy falls from executives, flows to tactical (mangers/Chairs) for operations. Tactical level is wafer thin (management). There are gaps between strategy and operations in past 15 years.
• **Improve alignment. Creative realignment. Realignment of operations to alleviate issues.
• Fear of the unknown, uncertainty. Full-time faculty have anxiety: anxiety of jobs, hours etc. Less hours and people. Need broader approach to communicate, alleviate fear. Academic Vision for decision-making, not just framework.
• Explain decision making, not all based on financial.
• Fill-in all positions. Fill-in acting roles.
• Consolidating the operation of the college to make sure we can support all the initiatives that has been started and will start within five years. Replacement of HRIS and BUS, has thrown the organization in a “process chaos.”
• Make sure that as a college, we focus on the main purpose of an academic institution: Academic learning. Learning time for the term: we now have 14 weeks instead of 15; we lose two Mondays of learning during the fall, a Friday in winter and two Mondays in spring. We lose a full day of academic learning for AC Day 1, a few hours in winter and spring. All this is not counting the unpredictable missed days that a student or a professor might have to take because of illness. The learning time for a term can be very short, we are limited in hours in the program.
• More coffee?
• Resign, too much stress.
• Creative thinking with the town.
• Housing e.g. computer programmers, need space/buildings to house 25 people. Housing for corporate training.
• Remind everyone (less so here) who we are working for: the students are the boss!!
• ***Conduct a cost/benefit analysis on housing, on transportation. What is best?
• Communicate the vision for the future. What is AC 2050, AC 2100? What is our plan to get there? How will we engage employees, students, alumni, industry, and employers?
• Think! Reflect! Watch what we do. Observe first before putting out fires.
• Focus on employment and job training. Industry employers are groups to watch. Focus on inclusion for job training and employment in our vision.
• Higher enrolment.
• Increase care of our international students: deliver what we promise for them. Maintain or improve our quality. They have big expectations, recognize it.
• Housing in Perth a challenge. Desperate state – students want to be here. Find space, build on it! Utilize it – could be a revenue maker. Find a residence corporation and private developer partnership (like Pembroke).
• Perth vision. Projections for a strong future. Our future. What is needed?
• Fact-based decision-making. Evidence-based decision-making. We evaluate with anecdotal evidence. It’s an echo chamber. Let’s look at the facts.
• Creative thinking for our structures. Evaluate cost benefits for transport vs housing. Partner with private developers. Find the right partner.

• **Listening.
• Injecting yourself (the President) into programs or classes. Especially those that may have issues. Become part of atmosphere.
• Make PD integral (mandatory) to rejuvenate and refresh to new ideas. Encourage a sabbatical every X years to improve engagement. Both really helps engagement and innovation – bring new ideas.
• More PD for support staff. Around Kaleidoscope, should be a balance for support staff, part-timers.
• Emphasis to take time away (or ‘turn off’). Encouraging work-life balance. Work life balance is important. We are great at going fast, we need (permission) to take care of ourselves.
• Technology, online importance. Need to advertise our focus on hands-on learning, our human connections/ interactions (in our space, and class size).
• Increase meeting spaces – hard to find. Huge issue for booking spaces.

• We’ve lost a bit of our community. For employees, we’re not as tight a community. Hear people saying ‘I don’t know people anymore’. Employee engagement. Bring back humanity and family.
• Departments not to have anonymous emails! (Pet peeve).
• Need cross Campus type of events such as air bands. Don’t know why we don’t.
• Brand for internal employees is not as strong as before. Need to build reputation internally.
• Form a committee to work on support for international students. One simple start. Clear cut objectives, formulate a report, meet with students, support staff – come up with concrete recommendations to best support international students.
• Support Staff, Faculty model. The same idea. Empower them to figure it out (e.g. timelines, scheduling).
• Throw a big party! Build engagement.
• College support people with young families. Flexibility in how we come back to work. Makes difference in how College feels about us. A lot of our faculty and support staff are affected by that.
• Design a plan for multi-level parking lot between soccer pitch and triple gym and then an access tunnel or walk way to classrooms. There is a hot black-market on parking passes! Let’s prepare for growth!
• Coffee Break. Would be nice to open doors for all faculty, all employees, executives. Casual conversations, important for the President to be approachable. It shouldn’t be a public relations stunt, needs to be a genuine opportunity to converse.
• Open President’s Office to students. Could be Student President and College President in a shared space.
• Follow-up with each area and go in to see what the culture is like. There have been periods of change from work stoppage, with the new 14 week cycle, 7:1:7, Workday, summer teachings; check-in how it’s being communicated to us and how everything is going. Get a pulse on what is going on in each individual school.

• Free parking.
• Change coffee.
• Student Success Specialists. At least two per school. Always a lineup out of office. When she’s not here, it’s felt. She’s overwhelmed. It would help with student retention and success. The need is increasing. Students are changing.
• Learner Driven plan, and Design for learning; students need more guidance. Assistant or new job created to assist with these needs. Help the students that are here. When we get tapped out, there is only so much we can do; only so much SSS can do.
• Sustainability, at a high-level focus on 10 years from now. More foresight. What will learner needs be? Awareness of change, let’s be ready for it! What is our model? Lifelong learner: how do we help them? What does it look like in future, heighten awareness of change. Need nimble and flexible strategies.
• Industry is bringing in information. Do we know how to teach it? What are reoccurring themes from secondary schools to anticipate. There is a massive disconnect from secondary to post-secondary.
• Focus on this summer and the transitions. Be laser beam focused on how this goes.
• Think bigger. Imagine and share what your industry would look like in a carbon neutral sustainable future. If you can’t, it won’t happen (you can only impact 1/4, 3/4 is up to industry). There is potential for sustainable change in the careers of our learners. Teach our learners to get there. What skills will get them from here to there. How to train them. Every industry will need these experts. United Nations has Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), how we relate to them?
• Walk around the campus. Look at infrastructure. Take note of usage. Water bottle filling stations? Increase water bottle stations and add electric car charging stations. Small Big Idea. Clean up infrastructure, messy. Fancy equipment behind our dirty walls.
• Light Rail Transit (LRT): Make sure it happens on time for access to campus.

• Give raises.
• Concentrate on a couple things at a time, instead of a lot. If workflow goes beyond 9-5, then it is too much. One project at a time. Focus. Not enough time to connect. Can’t stop what they are doing, there is no backup. People had to cancel attendance here.
• Focus on workforce planning. Where do you put all people? Who do we need? Re-grouping of people for different projects. Staff, faculty mobility.
• Student listening tour, after this tour. Gauge what matters to them. We are here for the learners. Could help lead budget and expenditures
• How do we get better KPI scores? If our department gets a better KPI, we don’t know. Share them! Lends to better overall experiences.
• Simplify the hiring process, and fill vacancies everywhere.
• Review credentials for positions. Consider credentials or equivalency. Evaluate education and experience – experience has been removed. Add the equivalencies.
• Education for children of employees is free.
• We graduate students and they don’t qualify to work here. Creates embarrassment. AC grads are not qualified for an AC job!?!
• Focus on employee engagement. Clients don’t come first, employees come first. Foster employee engagement and we will all do a better job at helping our learners. Need to feel valued. Need recognition. Say Thank Yous. We know you exist. Need random acts of kindness.
• Workday. Need to consider processes, how long it takes to complete processes.
• Orientation for new employees. New employees don’t know the benefits – didn’t get any packages. Need more information such as how to transfer pensions? Orientation was better before Workday. Need better training.
• Concentrate on our technology. We invest so much, and currently struggling with it. Increase efficiency. Not just tech, but actual tools. Making sure we have the tools, and know how to use them.
• Connect more with each other through the day. Build relationships. Appreciate the Not Myself campaign.
• Be more progressive in allowing employees that can work from home (work virtually). Research shows it provides increased efficiency. Fosters sustainability. If properly scheduled, it could solve the parking crisis.
• Multi-level parking.
• Initiatives for incentives, for wellness. Encourages people to take care of themselves.
• Make sure the gym rates don’t skyrocket.
• Add more charging stations for electric cars; electric cars are increasing.
• Get Green Bin program. Compost. Create in house composting – on site, indoors.

• Make the gardens, grounds outside look better. We look like a wasteland. Attract people by making it look better. Don’t just patch stuff, make it right. Respect our spaces.
• College vision. Communicate overall vision to employees. Present the college-wide priority list. It helps us put things in perspective, and will give us a reference, how to direct our efforts, make decisions. Help us see ‘what are the tactics for next year’. Identify these yearly tactics for us. Provide a nudge on the strategic plan, give us a condensed version, what to do.
• Talk to people. Understand their pain points, and see how we could move barriers (e.g. listening tour). Happy employees, happy students.
• Contract people. Look at how many contract workers we have, how many years/long have they been here. How do they stay? What is the path? Do we want them, or not? Too many resources to find, train talent.
• Write letter to the province.
• Ask management to not just manage, but lead. Leadership is lacking. Inspire people to do job well. You can see the difference between those who lead, and those who manage. More time investment needs to be spent with managers to educate them, to coach them how to engage their employees.
• Let us do our jobs. Need more trust in employees – trust them do their job well.
• Release a President’s report periodically. Let us know what you are up to. Give us a brief recap – don’t wait.
• Work on the College culture. Our culture – we spend a lot of time talking vs doing (there’s too much talk and meetings, and not much action). Meetings are time wasters.
• Human Resources (HR) College-wide. Help relationship problems within the College. Councillors (Mediators) could alleviate communication problems. Wanda is well liked across the College. The approach could be incorporated into manager training, coaching managers.
• Ted Talks or Professional Development (PD), these type of groups and seminars that provide motivation and inspire are great.
• Put y/our face out there: internationally, locally in our community.
• Thank the students for being here, for choosing us.

• Strengthen employee engagement. Keep them happy, and keep them here. We need to be successful and happy, and it’ll emanate.
• Parking
• Go to industry and strut partnerships in Canada and US. There’s value to bring collaboration, more talent. Create bigger market share, revenue stream.
• Extend our reach to employers
• On-boarding of new employees.
• Going around and talking to students. Listening, talking, getting conversation going.
• Information systems. SIS. Data is king. Can’t make any decisions without. Evidence based decision system. How do we use that information?
• Alumni database is different than the other databases. Who has access, what are the rules of engagement?
• Our website – improve. Information is outdated. Presentation is not great. Navigation. Best practices.
• Visit, say hello. increase interaction.
• Listening to everyone. But there has to be some action, we need outcomes from engagement sessions.

• Brightspace: education on use/ refreshment course for professors. Calendar: we have a quiz and two or three will pop up. Creates panic. Leveraging the system
• Bigger picture. Students are here, developing our community. Business development: bring in people from different fields to come in and talk about what you are going see, how it works. Events to get us introduces, see student success stories. Encourage them to come, invite them to job fairs. It’s very motivational. Developing the college: success is seeing your students working. A great reputation brings in bodies. This is how we measure if it’s working
• Collaborate with other universities. Get guest teacher for a week, a teacher exchange, to talk about their research. Talk to us how they manage their labs – what skills they may need for current projects.
• More table space in library. Hard to find space within library.
• Listen in on Directors or VPs monthly meetings to find out what they are up to. WE can never make everyone happy, but great opportunity to see then talk out our problems, and see how ideas are being implemented. ‘See how difficult their job is’ to understand implementation.

• I would develop entrepreneurship and development committee / innovation committee. Hire more full time people. Hire the long term contractors
• Review portfolio of initiatives and find focus – put some on hold
• President giving service to college – it’s an inverted pyramid style
• Revamp hiring process on part time and impartial loads
• Fix Workday. Infrastructure of college, it has to be top priority. Processes start, then forever changing. Doesn’t work if you have multiple contracts within college. Can’t submit hours when off campus. Visibility of process. Clarity and accuracy of the information coming out. Documentation. Leverage the superusers as champions.
• Park everything that doesn’t impact employees. If I treated them well, they would take care of the students. Priorities employees – trust the professionals that I’ve hired to do the right things.
• Relationships: improve and develop relationships. College and unions, different schools collaboration. If that was a priority, everything else would follow.
• Look at resources that are currently required by our priorities; a capacity evaluation.
• Applied research under academic area. Business development formal processes across all areas.
• Looking at the most hot topics and fixing those processes and then work forward; follow-through.
• Find top priority and fix it. DONE! Get a visible win.
• Diversity and inclusivity – utilizing resources within the college and equip faultily and staff to deal with these set of learners. they come with a unique set of needs; how do we address these new needs. adapting with them and not putting up barriers.
• Integrate international and domestic students. Foster relationships. Can be mutually beneficial.
• Create a sense of accountability on higher levels. To enforce follow-through. WE should all be accountable though, not just the higher levels.

• Looking at what has been funded in the past but has been cut short, great initiatives how do we make it work
• Electric height adjusted desk in each class + ergonomic chairs for students
• Workload capacity. How we can alleviate and accommodate with more hires
• Tuition for students. Where can we make it less expensive. Opt Outs. Justifying why it’s expensive for students.
• Grass grows greener at the farmers feet: meet with staff and or student for a chat time to time. find out what we do and who we are. build those relationships
• When you cut the fees, you cut services. Build relationships with community donors or external funders to give back to students and scholarships.
• A lot of middle positions that come and go, and change throughout the years. Work from ground up, thing about student first. money has to go to those who offer services and support to the students first.
• Go the area and have further conversation to really understand the capacity issue, etc
• Qualitative data and statistical data : how are we looking at it and capturing both to make decisions. Qualitative vs Quantitative.
• Build more employer partnerships . Publicly introduce more programs to meet demands.
• Growth: be able to take imperial data to make sure we are better aligned for next term . align resources to the growth, based on that data
• Information at our fingertips. Policies are out of date – information we have needs to be up to date, makes sense, and worded for all (students included). retroactive policy would be great.
• Keep the discussion going.
• Negative stuff: procedural changes become negative when people don’t have the proper information. Make sure those affected are better informed .
• Clearing up grievances that have built up.
• Undercover boss type day. Blend in and see what’s going on.
• Workday!

• People! Focus on people. Inside out philosophy – were if were are happy, students will be happy.
• Looking at resourcing.
• Understand what we do now (current state) and how we could improve based on that. Our processes , our systems, what are we doing now and how we could make improvements on that.
• What is the outcome we are looking to achieve. In service levels, or employee engagements. Strive for a goal, or get a real time knowledge of objectives and goals, and access how we are doing.
• What seems to be a challenge: academic and other side of house do not understand each other, they are not collaboration, see each other points of view. They have a similar struggle. Get them coming together. Compassion, empathy.
• More collaborative structures, instead of silos. Overall. Structure it differently to allow collaboration more naturally.
• Own the problem. Admin vs Student vs Faculty. Remember what’s important: the team. It’s not serving our overall business goals
• Physical structures to allow that natural social collaboration.
• Comfortable working space for people to chat . Enjoy the environment we work in. Create the space, bring the support. Currently we don’t have the space to grow
• Alignment of services that are offered to all across campus. One stop shop for employees.
• Environmental efforts.
• A way to focus on front line leaders. Celebrate managers and chairs doing good job with their employees. They are the pressure point, manage down and not up.
• Bring relations with the academic union to be similar with the support staff union.

• Reaching out to students who are having trouble coming to school. People not wanting to go, having a hard time. Encourage them to come.
• Integrating colonial way and Indigenous way of doing things. Teaching both sides.
• I would make this space bigger for more of us to come. Add to it. A whole building. Indigenous is a huge term. A whole floor for counselling. This small room is not going to be able t support all of us.
• Open more to us.
• This room location feels like we are pushed to back (of the College).
• Make the centre hours longer. I’d like access to come here after a long study day. Having it close at 4:30 doesn’t fit in our regular schedules.
• Put out more advertising for this Centre. After 2 years I only knew this was here recently. Putting something in place to let students know this space. Should be more people here.
• Having a discussion with us about the future plan.
• Ongoing conversations. Need to be continuously listening. Problems are ongoing. You need to have both going. To plan for future, you need to see how past was involved – what about students who are coming up and haven’t been given the opportunity to have representation.

• The people inside. Building the community. Getting to know those people across the college. Out of silos, cross departmental events- get together.
• Flexibility. Work from home may be feasible, look at options. Could it work, who could do it, what is the policy? There’s a lot more flexibility in the work force, look at it here. We do that for students, what can’t we do that for staff as well?
• Give transparency to all people who work here. There is no insight to how all processes work. More understanding gives more appreciation. See the experience of others and the processes. Helps with understanding. Open doors for Algonquin employees. Release the front line staff so they can attend and not close the doors on them.
• Open house day. Round tables among employees/areas – get to know the College.
• Focus on education: how to make it affordable. Sometimes the fees are too high for students to achieve. Find better ways to reach out to those individuals, need to support that. Education can change the world. How do we bring the ones in need in? Accessibility. Access institution.
• Should be a centre on teaching portion of curriculum on ‘learning how to learn’ as an essential skills. Gives employees/students/graduates thirst to upgrade skills and know how to adapt. We have the opportunity to look at education differently here – prepare for the job, and how jobs will morph throughout a career.
• Be clear. Clarity is kind. Too many things that are unclear: are we making that decision or not? Removes a lot of the side desk work. We are waiting for others to make that decision. We don’t get the definitive decision, cycles are too quick – can’t get 100% consensus. There is opportunity to align, say ‘this is the thing!’ and ‘unequivocally GO!’.
• Balance of goals and costs. Define what that balance might look like. Focused initiatives: drive business or people? What value are we placing on our business and our people? It can be equal.
• Think creatively. Focus on people is the caring piece. Working from home could be our sustainability.
• Tracking students – where have they been, resource accessed, in their student life towards career: to try to track earlier to avoid students at risks. Proactively identify the behaviours that are trending downwards (e.g. wellness, attendance and more) to support these students.
• Focus on our employers the same way we focus on students.

*asterisks note agreement among attendees.

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