-: Thank you for joining us.
My name is Colleen Baker.
I am here with my partner.
If I can get my slides to work.
I'm Colleen Baker I'm the co-founder
and COO of Higher Digital.
I'm also the head of customer engagements and services.
I've over 20 years of experience in various industries
but primarily in higher ed
and have focused primarily on CIO services,
enterprise applications, organizational change management,
software development and really with the perspective of
how do we change these organizations
and how we work and communicate together
so that we can collectively
and with the results in the goals that we're looking for.
-: And I'm Amy Shaw.
I'm a Senior Director of Customer and User Experience.
Majority of my career has been spent in higher ed.
I've been an adjunct.
I have created MOOCs.
I worked at Ellucian for 10 years
and I ran the global user experience and design team.
And now I'm at Higher Digital
supporting a lot of higher ed clients
with research, testing, design
but also kinda digging into diversity
and accessibility and things like that.
So got a lot of higher ed in my background
and always interested in learning more from the community.
-: So we're gonna be talking to you today
about cultivating a culture for change within higher ed.
And so just a little bit more about Higher Digital,
we are a global consulting company,
we specialize in higher ed, this is all we do.
And so everyone that works for Higher Digital
has either had the pleasure of working within an institution
in various roles, faculty staff, and student.
We all have that experience as well as
working for suppliers and vendors
who support our institutions as well as communities
and supporting institutions
from the community perspective as well.
And so we help our institutions confront their toughest IT
and organizational challenges.
And what we mean by that
these are the things that are complex
that they cross multiple work streams.
They cross multiple departments
really tough challenges that when we say change
it has downstream impact dependencies.
These are very hard things that for an institution
to just kick off a project on their own,
it's very difficult to do.
And so this is in fact
it's from these types of enterprise wide
complex cross work stream.
That is from the lens that we'll be speaking from today.
And this is also where culture, the good, the bad the ugly
raises its head.
It's in these really complex areas.
And now not to say that there's not culture challenges
just all the time.
So we know that.
And we also know, even with COVID we've been challenged
in different culture aspects.
But this in particular is gonna speak to some of the things
that we've learned through our consulting years
of working with different types of institutions.
From campus-based to online, to communities,
to community colleges, campuses across the State.
We work with State funding accreditation.
So really having perspective
from so many different angles is what we're thinking about.
So when we think about culture and when we see culture
and what works and what doesn't work
we're thinking about it from that perspective.
And what we've noticed is when we talk about culture
and we go to take on something like
a digital transformation that really transforms the student,
the faculty or staff experience and life cycle
these are the things that we can notice very quickly,
either an institution has what we call a fixed mindset
where they are just fine with the way things are today
and they don't need to change,
or they're okay with you over there
changing the, "don't touch my stuff."
And then we have the open mindset
who use the champions of this change,
who want to see the change and who are supportive
and who have clear direction
and clear goals around this change
and so this is what we see almost immediately.
And what we learned from COVID is the need to learn agility.
And so business agility and technical agility
really what we mean by that is how well can we pivot?
And so whether that be a change that we asked for
or a change we didn't ask for like the pandemic
how well are we able to pivot through that change?
Can we take that fixed mindset and say,
oh that's not working anymore.
And then pivot to an open mindset to allow change to happen
or are we gonna fight it?
And typically you're going to see a little bit of both
in an institution, but in the higher ed in particular
when we say business agility, we have other challenges.
We have a lot of responsibility as institutions
across the US and globally for that matter
to support our communities.
We bring learning opportunities and education
that lead to employment, that lead to better ways of life,
and these are really important things.
And so how we are structured as an institution
to support that is important.
So the efficiency and stability
that we had as an institution,
we don't wanna ruin, we don't wanna lose that,
it's important we just wanna improve upon it.
And we wanna think about it in terms of
where do we have opportunities within our institution
to perhaps move at a little faster pace.
So when we deem it priority
and we determine that collectively
this is something we want to do, we want to invest in,
can we do it?
So what about the things that we did want change for?
Can we change?
Do we have speed of innovation?
Are we able to pull out
a group of folks from all of that efficiency and stability
and say, all right let's focus
and let's get this out the door
to improve that students faculty, and staff experience.
And so what we see and the challenges with higher ed
is really just our structure
and trying to move from that strategy of change.
This is something we need to do,
we want this strategy to execution.
And partially
because you gotta go through so many of those layers,
trustees, president, provost, deans, VPs, directors
all the way to IT to actually execute that change.
And we also know that
much of the change in configuration
this day and age is happening on the business side
and so our staff folks are making the changes
within systems today it's not even necessarily IT.
And so to complicate matters,
we also have a multitude of vendors,
and this is a 2018 snapshot.
So times that by three, multitude of vendors that we have to
continue to keep up with understand their changes,
communicate our goals to them,
manage the communication, all the way by directionally.
And so we have to facilitate that all the way through.
And so how we do that as we think about this
from a technology, operations, organizational perspective
but what we learned through time
'cause this is how we started,
we're all common, we to have a process
by which we follow to help us and to help institutions
break this down into something manageable.
And so technology operations organization,
we think through this,
that people process technology common,
but culture is what determines the success or failure.
And so it's that fixed mindset versus growth mindset,
immediately we can see.
And so when we are asked to help an institution
on whatever change that may be
so I want to upgrade my SIS, I'm moving ERP systems,
working with the board of directors,
I'm looking to educate my board on emerging technology
and what's happening in higher ed.
There's all different kinds
architecture we're involved with
and looking at cross system
and downstream impact to changes.
So these are all things we're involved in,
and in every single instance we can clearly see
who's got a fixed mindset, and who's got the growth mindset.
And so we created our platform which was standard,
four steps to digital transformation,
access, strategize, transform, and measure.
And these are the things that help us
really break that work down, going in and saying,
okay what's the problem that we're trying to solve.
Then we think about how we wanna solve it
and what our options are,
and of course, all of this in tandem with the partner.
And then we begin transformation,
and all of a sudden things start going awry.
Actually even, probably before that
'cause we can tell right away
the fixed mindset versus open mindset,
who's what and where we need to focus.
But these are the things that we discover
and this is what it results in,
challenges to adopt change, and so risk aversion.
All different levels of this.
It could be someone is risk averse of losing their job
or their job changing just from that change.
It could be a change in department and responsibility
or responsibility of that manager.
So now that we're moving systems
does that mean I'm no longer needed?
Because I supported the old system.
What does this mean for me?
Change fatigue.
Often we take on too much, too much at one time.
We were trying to boil the ocean
and change all systems at one time,
and so we see that as well.
Disconnect between leadership and everyone else.
Hey, this is a great idea
and clearly feeling the difference
when we meet with everyone else.
That no one else has really bought into it.
They have other priorities.
This isn't important to us.
And so that's the struggles
with prioritization and communication.
How important is this?
No real champions
and so leaders who say, go ahead, yes, I want you to do it,
But when it comes to escalation, it comes down to it,
no one's really there to support that change.
And we have all these silos and no one's working together.
And so this is where it goes,
this is where it ends up.
And so what we see from a change
and from a cultural perspective, in terms of
how people respond to change it's usually one of two.
We have folks who are concerned about quality,
and then we have folks
who are concerned about the commitment.
And so quality meeting
let's slow down and make sure we do this right.
I want to make sure we get this,
it doesn't matter how long it takes.
Then you have folks
who are more concerned about the timeline,
and we said that we were going to get it out in June
because we have these schedules and we have open enrollment,
we have to meet this date
or we have some reason for this timeline.
And so you feel those pressures immediately
and the two are working against each other.
Amy.
-: Yeah.
So as Colleen mentioned earlier,
we came up with a solution to kinda help us
in determining kind of a baseline of where our clients are
and as you know, kind of a starting point
and we call that product SEA results,
and we have a number of different assessments underneath
that umbrella.
So we've got one for digital transformation
other about security, distance education
and recently the EDUCAUSE of 2020
we rolled out our culture assessment.
So all of these assessments are available to our clients,
they can take one at no cost.
And we found that it helps us
with our engagements with them to kind of get baseline
and the measure of time and understand
what they're going through what they're dealing with.
But it also just kind of helps
them to understand things from a different perspectives
and the questions we're asking
they might not be thinking about
in terms of culture and how that relates
to changes that they're trying to make.
So we have 300 different institutions
that have taken our assessments and are in our database.
And like I said, we rolled out our culture assessment
just in EDUCAUSE.
We don't have loads of results in there yet.
This is definitely going to change with time.
But what you're seeing right now
is just kind of a screenshot showing a bullet chart
of the the high level view across different institutions.
So these cultural assessments will give
the green, orange, the purple, the blue,
that's a representation of what that individual's score was
for that institution.
But then that black bar is
kind of the average score across respondents.
So we use a comparison across the institutions
to understand where are most institutions,
in comparison to what you're getting.
And we provide data insights
for all of our assessments based on
how those questions were answered,
and it could be across multiple departments,
the entire institution
really if you wanna send it out that far.
So if we can move to the next slide Colleen.
When we were building our culture assessment
we were looking at how did these questions
map out the organizational operational and technical,
because those are key elements,
like she shared the story earlier.
Those are there are key elements
that we build our assessments on.
But in particular with culture, we have some building blocks
for strong culture.
And so we wanted to make sure that
all of our questions reflected these areas.
So trust, collecting data and feedback from individuals
and teams.
But this could also be feedback from our faculty members
and students.
Transparency, super important for good strong cultures
to have the transparency.
Shared goals and purpose,
learning and knowledge sharing across your individual teams
and then departments and then collaborations
and risk acceptance.
So there's lot of risk aversion out there
and that could definitely be the detriment to our culture,
so that's a pretty key one as well.
We can move to the next.
So what we've got here
is just some of the highest overall average scores
and some of the specific breakdowns of the questions.
So these are the ones that score the highest,
again, this across the institutions
that have taken it that far,
this is gonna change every time.
But you could see that we've got a mixture of trust,
learning and knowledge sharing and risk acceptance.
So we have people that are saying
I have the necessary stuff to do my job
the set of a score 10, by the way.
And definitely being asked to make sure that I'm learning
as part of my job.
And I don't feel threatened by technology initiatives.
But interesting though, as we'll see later on,
is some of these come back up
and have kind of a counterbalance
with some of the other questions that we asked.
Can you move on to the next slide, please?
So the lowest overall averages
for the scores that we saw across the institutions
the lowest one is a question about,
are there website and software solutions
that accommodate users with disabilities?
Now, this might not look like a question
that you would expect to see for culture
but this relates to shared goals and purposes,
and obviously accessibility is a key initiative
that all institutions have and promote.
And so this kind of tells us a little bit about
are there some shared goals
and purposes around the conditions just like this
that everyone should have, what is being done around that.
That kind of tells us a little bit about,
progress that could be made around the shared goals purposes
and they scored very low
for the institutions that have taken it.
The next one is around the business drivers and processes,
are they being analyzed before changes are made?
So that's also very, very low,
and that can also tell us, (laughing)
that maybe questions aren't being asked,
feedback isn't being collected,
maybe some data isn't being pulled together to analyze
before those decisions are being made.
Probably there's
lot of initiatives going on at the same time,
everyone's moving at a rapid pace,
and they don't feel as though
that that's sufficiently being analyzed.
And then the learning and knowledge center
and sharing around innovation and experimentation.
We're not really surprised to see
that this is low especially during COVID.
There's budget cuts and all sorts of new issues that
a lot of new tech debt
and new issues that had to be tackled.
But this is something that we hope to see improve over time
in order to innovate
you need to really be able to your experiment, try, fail
and learn from it and proceed forward.
We go to the next one please.
So these are grouped under strategic alignment.
Obviously good strategic alignment
is gonna be good for the culture.
And then, if we see bad strategic linemen
it can be straight.
So we are seeing about middle of the road results
for some of our strategic alignment questions
the success criteria being tracked,
work priorities being clearly communicated.
These could definitely be a lot higher
and for some of our institutions
they do struggle in these areas.
And then leadership team
are they accountable for the changes that they're making?
Or are they collecting that feedback
from those that are underneath them.
That relates to some of these other questions
that we're seeing in here,
where we're collecting feedback.
Do they feel connected?
Is there a good transparency that's going on
between the leadership and those that are under them.
And do the people that are not in leadership
but there are those that are doing the work
do feel as though they have an opportunity to share
their thoughts come up with ideas.
Next.
Course correction.
So this one is around, are we learning from our mistakes?
We're learning from what we're analyzing,
are we collecting that together?
And are we be able to make a course correction
or do we have to continue down the path
that we've started just because (laughing)
we feel as though we don't have time,
the decisions are vague.
So again, we've got some middle of the road examples here.
The bottom one though, is one that showed up
as one of the lowest scoring ones we had
around the business drivers,
and is that being sufficiently analyzed?
Again, it looks as though across a lot of these institutions
that's a big issue
but as far as course, correction is concerned,
there needs to be that transparency,
there needs to be that trust
there needs to be that shared feedback,
and those are some of the data insights
that we are collecting right now and sharing.
And next.
So this is the biggest areas of learning that we've had.
And I think a lot of this is due to COVID again.
On one hand you have kinda high score for re-skilling
and learning as part of my job,
but on the low end we have I don't have sufficient time
to master new skill sets.
And I don't have that ability
to do the innovation experimentation,
it's not being encouraged.
So we are seeing kind of a counterbalance there.
There's still an expectation
that you're gonna keep those skills up get certifications
that you are going to do the work, but at the same time,
based on the results that we're getting,
it doesn't seem like institutions are supporting that
or promoting that continued learning.
Colleen you're on you.
-: Yeah. (laughing) Okay.
So Amy just shared some of the stats that we use
and what we do is we tried to use the data
to inform our planning and to form our approach
and to inform the institution
on what are the things that we should focus on,
where are the areas that we should care about.
And do we have areas of concern as it applies to culture
and in certain more than others
and are there some low hanging fruit that we can address
but it's good to know what you're getting into.
So let's talk about the skeletons in the closet
at the very beginning, let's get those out.
Let's be realistic about how successful are we gonna be
with this change if our culture is not gonna allow it.
And so what we've done is we've revised
our approach a little bit.
And so now we focus
on building that culture for change upfront.
And what we do is we're assessing from a baseline,
from a culture readiness perspective.
And so are we deliberate on our prioritized imperatives?
Do we know what are our strengths and weaknesses?
And again, that assessment,
that survey helps us determine that.
But if we don't do that,
we're going to still interview and come up with that way
approach to reduce risks through transition planning.
So that's the highest risk aversion.
It's a plan.
We need to come up with a transition.
How do we get us from point A to point B
and reduce that risk?
How do we align and build buy-in and trust by iterating?
So instead of big bang, let's do some quick wins.
Let's do some proof of concepts.
Let's do it together.
So we have that buy in and trust along the way
and then adapt by measuring adoption, providing feedback.
And guys, if it's not working change it, it's okay.
We can change it.