Earlier this month, Dr. Kevin McClure, author of The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation (to be published in 2025), and Drs. Aimee Hosemann and Rob Zinkan, authors of What Makes a Strategic Plan ‘Strategic’?, discussed the current landscape of higher education employer brands. The panelists examined higher ed’s inattentiveness to the employee experience and the implications for an institution’s employer brand. A recording of the webinar is also available.

·  ·  ·

Transcript

Rob Zinkan

Well, great. Let’s go ahead and get started and take advantage of this time together. It’s wonderful to be together and talk about this important topic. And to start with, delighted to have Dr. Kevin McClure join us, join Aimee and me.

For this, we’ve had some wonderful conversations and continue to see intersections and overlaps between our work. So, Kevin, great to have you with us. And I’ll ask you to go ahead and introduce yourself and then Aimee to do the same. 

Kevin McClure

All right, well, thank you so much. Good afternoon, everyone. Or I suppose if you’re joining us on the West Coast, it’s still a good morning. And it’s wonderful to be in conversation with you all today. 

My name is Kevin McClure. I am an associate professor who studies higher education leadership, management, and finance at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. And for the past couple of years, I’ve been doing a lot of work that focuses on the higher education workplace and just recently completed a book called The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation, which will be out with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2025. So very much looking forward to this conversation. 

Aimee Hosemann

Thank you, Kevin, and we are very much looking forward to that book, and we hope to touch on some of the themes that will be in that book today. Hey y ‘all, I’m Dr. Aimee Hoseman. I’m the director of qualitative research at RHB. 

I am a former faculty member in anthropology and linguistics. I’m also a former newspaper journalist. And I work across our portfolio of services, and I’m really excited about doing this important work to support the work that you all do in your lives every day. Rob… 

Rob

And, Kevin, congratulations on the book. Not to put you on the spot or anything, but I know Aimee and I and several others are eager for it to come out. When in 2025? 

Kevin

So the last update I got was summer. So, it’s in the production process. And listen, if I had a button that I could just push that would like magically produce this thing and it would be available, I would be just over here pushing it over and over again. But, so I’m very eager as well. But that was the last update that I got as we wait for the kind of final pieces to, to fall into place. 

Rob

Great, great, sounds good. Well, I’m Rob Zinkan. I serve as vice president for marketing leadership at RHB. If you’re not familiar with RHB, we work across the higher education sector now as a division of Strata Information Group. 

You see our four practices there, Enrollment Management, Executive Counsel, Institutional Marketing, and Slate and Related Technology. And I have the pleasure of leading our Institutional Marketing practice, which is really about the marketing that you can’t see. 

That being, number one, market position, helping institutions select or refine a market position, and then channel institutional behaviors, strategies and communications toward that choice. And number two, organization design and development, where Aimee and I and our team help institutional leaders answer critical questions about how an outcomes-focused, modern marketing and communications function should transform or evolve organizationally for greater capability and institutional impact. 

Our format today, we are going to walk through some slides and content to set the foundation for this topic. And then we’ll unpack some of those items over a discussion and then open it up for questions and close with questions from attendees. 

So thanks again for joining and your interest in this topic. We wanted to start with coherence, and you see there that at RHB, our counsel, our processes are founded on this principle of coherence. And it’s a great place to start because your institution’s employer brand is a reflection of whether or not you are coherent. 

So to set the record straight first about brand, when we talk about employer brand, we (institutions), we don’t make brands or we don’t determine our institution’s brand. Our constituents do, our stakeholders, others determine the institution’s brand. 

Their encounters and experiences with you, proven over time, build and shape opinions and perspectives that then define your brand. So your brand is the set of expectations associated with your industry and then with your particular delivery on those expectations. 

And that certainly applies to your employer brand. The expectation associated with working at your institution, what it’s like to be a part of your community as a faculty member or a staff member. So this guiding principle of coherence is about truth-telling and aligning what you deliver with what you say you deliver as an institution. 

And you can think of it around these three E’s, that when these three E’s are in alignment: experience, expression and expectation. And it starts with experience. What is true about your institution? 

In this case, what is true about the employee experience? Expression, what your institution says is true about itself and says is true about that experience. And then expectation, what others say and expect to be true about your institution. 

In this case, specifically current faculty and staff or prospective faculty and staff, what do they believe to be true about your institution and becoming part or being part of your institution? So if you triangulated the answers to those three questions, what would you find? 

What would that tell you about your institution and your employer brand? And again, that’s the expectation part. That’s your brand, that comes last. Something doesn’t become part of your brand until an audience knows, understands, accepts that your claim, your claim to a certain position, your claim to what the experience is like, until they accept that as something that’s believable. 

And that belief is built on your delivery of the experience and your choices about what you’re going to deliver. So I hope, Kevin, that’s a nice setup to the discussion about experience. 

Kevin

Yeah, it’s perfect and I love the idea of coherence. We’ll come back around to that because I think it’s really important, and I want to start, we want to start this discussion with a somewhat provocative idea but this is something that I have tried to unpack through my work in a couple of different ways and it’s that I think in a lot of ways institutions at best have a tradition of being inattentive to the employee experience and at worst negligent when it comes to the employee experience. 

So what does that mean or what does that look like? For me there are a couple of different ways that we might be able to get a sense of this problem, but one of the signs that I was able to find as I was engaging in my research is as we look across some of the guiding documents that institutions have constructed. So we’re talking about vision statements, value statements, strategic plans.

So we find is it’s really difficult in some cases to find employees reflected in those documents. So for example in value statements we might see, you know, a number of different values that are articulated, but very few of them have a way of referencing how it is that we as an institution want to operate who the people are that are doing the work that underlies what makes this such a great institution. 

When we look at strategic plans, for example, we see a whole range of different priorities or pillars that are articulated. Some of those even have targets or goals attached to them, and what I found in my research is that a startling lack of attention to employees in those goals and targets so much so that it sometimes felt like we were just going to be pursuing these goals or priorities magically in the absence of kind of the people that, that really make up the institutions. 

And the thing that is really interesting is even if we were to see some real targets connected to employees, for example, targets connected to employee well-being, it would be difficult to assess how well we’re doing in pursuit of those goals because we don’t collect great data when it comes to our employees. 

So we might, for example, have some good basic directory information about who employees are although, even that gets a little bit dicey depending on certain identity groups. But when we get to the question of, for example, how much employees are working, what’s their actual experience on the job, there are a lot of institutions that would struggle to be able to point to data that helps them answer those questions. 

Aimee

Thank you. And, Kevin, what you just said there about wondering, is it magic that is going to accomplish what is in strategic plans? We actually saw some of that as well in a study that we undertook in 2020, the beginning of the pandemic, we were interested in understanding, you know, what are strategic plans and what is it that they can offer an institution at this moment of massive upheaval? 

What’s going to happen to these plans, considering that so much time and institutional energy gets invested in them? So we began a study looking at 108 of them with representation of a public university and a private from almost every state. 

And we found some really interesting things, one of which being only about 16 of them seem to be strategic. Rob mentioned choice-making earlier. One of the things that is a hallmark of strategy is, are you making a choice? Are you deciding to do something different? 

And speaking to Kevin’s point here, sometimes we saw plans that had a lot of goals and priorities. However, I’m thinking here about a plan that had 22 supposed priorities. Plans oftentimes try to do too much, but with too little specification about how that was going to be done. 

So generally, we saw that plans that had about four or five-and-a-half goals as the median tended to be the most workable. And those plans that were most strategic were actually really thinking strongly and closely about the human experience. 

And one of the things that when Rob mentioned our organizational assessment work, we’re always looking for the opportunity to put the human in the role. And one of the things that we saw in the 16 most strategic plans that we looked at at that point was some of them were really grappling with this question of, what does it mean to have a meaningful work life? How can we in higher ed contribute to that? And what are the outcomes across the span of someone’s entire life, even when they’re at home with their families? If they know that their work is respected, they’re getting good feedback and they know that their work matters. 

So we wanted to check in a little bit later, after the height of the pandemic, see what was happening in strategic plans. So we visited 54 plans that were launched in 2022 and 2023 to see if there were changes. 

And we did see some changes in overarching trends where, for instance, strategic plans became strategic directions or use some kind of language that said, you know, we know we need to have a destination. However, we also know that conditions change. 

Another thing that we noticed is the number of goals included in those strategic directions also reduced. We also noticed some really interesting things in terms of what those goals were about that we’ll talk about on the next slide. 

So you can see here a list of some of the most frequent buckets of overarching priorities in these strategic plans. Now you can see there student experience and success that really made a major move forward in the plans that were launched in 2022 and 2023. 

We saw a lot more language about access, student support, things of that nature in strategic plans. Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging was also really important, but not necessarily called out by name. 

And one of the areas that we again see some movement is around the idea of thinking about: what does it mean to offer an employee experience that is valuable. How do we convince folks to be interested in working with us? 

Rob

And in terms of these overarching pillars, themes, priorities, if we look beyond the top four that Aimee just showed, we also saw a set that were not as frequent as those four, but emerged across the set of 54 plans. 

And there you see that people and well-being is among this next set of overarching priorities. And it’s not surprising necessarily that institutions would place a higher priority on taking care of their people based on what everyone experienced, went through during, after the pandemic, what institutions experience with the Great Resignation. 

Kevin made the point that employees are not necessarily visible within strategic plans, that the employee experience is a low priority. So we’re starting to see that emerge, this people and well-being priority, a little bit in these new plans. 

But I think Kevin’s point becomes more apparent when you start to dig into the content of these plans. So this overarching priority of people and well-being was expressed in a variety of ways. You can see here from valuing our people, supporting their well-being, fostering a people-centered culture, building on a supportive work environment. 

And so it’s somewhat encouraging to see some of these additions to new strategic plans. But what wasn’t evident was back to the point that I made, Aimee made about choices, that those clear set of choices to advance these, it wasn’t evident. 

The goals here are pretty vague. We’re heavy on exploration. So we also saw things like explore improvements in infrastructure, support an organizational culture that reflects a commitment to the employee experience. 

So will meaningful change come about to improve the employee experience as a result of these? And that’s something that we’ll talk about later and have always appreciated Kevin’s point of the “how” of change tends to be more difficult than the “what” of change. 

And if you look at the plans that do actually mention people, faculty, staff, it’s much more about the “what” than the actual “how.” 

Kevin

So for me, I think as we think about this idea of institutions not always being super attentive to the employee experience and maybe struggling to think about how do we operationalize some of these goals that we have around being like a top destination for talent or being a great place to work is we see some of these gaps start to emerge. 

One of them is a gap in terms of what the institution is projecting about itself publicly and then what employees are actually experiencing. And so as an example, we may have institutions publicly that are projecting success stories around better rankings or enrollment growth. 

And at the same time, it’s entirely possible for the employees at that institution to feel really stretched thin or feel that pressure has been ratcheted up. And so their feelings around that success story are very different. 

There could be a gap around, you know, how the institution is thinking about its future and the goals that it sets for itself and then how well it truly understands its own capacity to be able to fulfill those goals. 

And then lastly, there can be a gap in terms of how the institution thinks about its own purpose and also the responsibilities that it has as an employer. And interestingly, what I often see to be the case is institutions being able to very clearly speak about its purpose along a number of different dimensions, but never really acknowledge its responsibility as an employer. 

So as an alternative to this inattentiveness, this neglect, I have been exploring and promoting within higher education, this idea of talent management and really thinking strategically about talent management. 

So within higher education, it’s still the case that we even struggle with kind of a basic talent perspective, which is to say that we view our employees as assets and as incredibly valued to the organization and as such should be something that we’re investing in. 

But we build upon a talent perspective by saying, okay, we probably ought to be managing our talent in the sense of putting thought into how we are attracting, how we’re motivating, developing, and then retaining people with an eye towards, again, trying to fulfill those goals and optimizing the performance of the institution. 

And so the last layer of this is to say, okay, we are starting to get a handle on a strategic planning process and then being able to enumerate our own goals, what would it look like to then overlay on top of our institutional strategy, a talent management strategy, where we say we’re going to bring together the goals that we have for the institution and also how we’re thinking about who we’re hiring, how we’re attracting them, how we’re onboarding and preparing them for work, how we’re reviewing performance, and then thinking about professional learning and succession management. 

So all of this, I think, requires a shift in perspective, as I said, and one that really starts to take our responsibility as employers more seriously. But also taking the employee experience itself more seriously. 

So as we’re thinking about the employee experience, I pulled this definition from Gallup, which talks about the employee experience in terms of the entire journey that an employee takes with the organization. So this is every interaction from the moment that someone is hired or recruited into a role, the time that they are in the job itself, the workspace itself, their interactions with managers, and then their sense of well-being once they’re on the job. 

So just as an example of this notion of integrated talent management, this was a model developed by the University of California. And so as you can see here, they have been thinking about this kind of full cycle process of planning for the talent that they need in order to achieve their priorities, then hiring based on those needs and the planning that they’ve done around it, onboarding and integration of folks that have been hired, thinking, being thoughtful around performance management once people are hired, investing in the development of individuals, leadership development, and then thinking about, okay, how do we ensure that we have mechanisms for retention and succession planning? 

And then in the middle there, what you’ll see is they’re thinking about this idea of talent management analytics, which suggests, of course, that we are collecting data along each stage of this and looking for ways in which we’re falling short of our planning goals. Are we hiring the people that we need in order to attain our goals? Where are we struggling around this life cycle? 

I just want to share a couple of approaches that I’ve been exploring as part of this research that may just do things a little bit differently. One of those is to think a little bit more seriously about our values as institutions, how we convey those values, and the ways that we integrate employees into value statements. One of the things I found in my research is that we don’t always do a great job of articulating values in a way that suggests to potential employees that this is how we do things here, this is how we operate. 

Our value statements should in a lot of ways reference, I think, the individuals that are working at the institution, the kind of people who are responsible for the institution existing and really being able to move forward with the goals that we’ve set. 

What I’d like to see is institutions move towards value statements that have a way of integrating the employees and what they value so that we see more coherence or alignment around who our employees are, what they believe are their values and believe to be the values of the institution, and then what the institution is itself projecting outwards. 

Aimee

Thank you. And I love the coherence of Kevin’s discussion there and also thinking about what is the articulation of values, not just at the institutional level, but how does that reflect the values, the hopes, the ambitions of the people who make up the institution. 

And this is a fact that sort of is really interesting to us. So when we looked at those first set of plans in 2020, one of the things we were looking for is what is actually contained in the document? What are the parts of a strategic plan? And you would think perhaps that a strategic plan might contain evidence of the mission, vision and values of an institution. But you can see there that among plans active in 2020 and 2021, 40% included some discussion of institutional values. 

That is something interesting to think about. On the other hand, we did see an increase in the mention of values in plans that were launched in 2022 and 2023. And thinking about the disruption of the pandemic, all of the things that were happening, thinking about the Great Resignation, thinking about how are we going to attract and retain employees at this particular moment.  

It looked like institutions and leaders were going through this moment of thinking about who are we as a community, which is a discussion that everyone should be having together. How do we recommit to who we are or figure it out if we haven’t articulated it before? And then also thinking about if we’re going to plot a path to the future, even knowing that the future can be wildly uncertain, what is the core thing in which we’re rooted? What are the things that we can use as signposts, even when things are uncertain? And values provide some of that framework. 

And when we’ve done our strategic planning research, we’ve been really lucky in being able to talk to a lot of the leaders who led processes in their institutions that resulted in really strong strategic planning. And these are some of the questions that we developed based on what they talked about when they talked about how core their values as an institution were and the way that they wanted people that worked with them, their colleagues, to understand that and to understand it and to carry it forward in their own work, to love the values, to pick one up as their own and to promote it. 

And so these are great questions that apply to anyone, regardless of how they’re employed at an institution, for thinking about what are the values, how were they articulated? How can I work within those values? How do they match what is important to me? Are your values really attributes that your colleagues and campus community understand and live by? 

One of the things that is really important here is doing honest reflection. This is always an important thing to be doing when values conversation comes up. Do the values point you in the direction of where you go next? If equity is one of your values, what does that suggest to you is your path forward? 

And what invitation do your values extend, and who can be included? So when you are selecting your institutional values, when you’re thinking about what it looks like to live into your values as an employer and as an employee, who will be attracted by those values? What are they being invited to do through their roles in your community? 

And then we really want to think about how that ties into the issue of institutional culture and values and culture are often things that are laid at the feet of leadership as their responsibility, but they are also things that we’re all involved in. We are all agents of values and of culture. And when we say culture, a lot of folks are used to this definition that culture is the set of habits, beliefs, laws, traditions. This is a definition from E .B. 

Tylor in 1871, and it’s a really good definition of some of the functional aspects of culture, but it doesn’t capture everything. It doesn’t capture the fact that culture is dynamic. It also doesn’t capture the fact that we are not born into or just absorbers of a culture that exists separately from us. 

We are all agents of culture. Everything that we do as employees, every interaction we have, our language, all of these things constitute culture. And so our model here is to demonstrate that function and process, strategy, leadership, colleagues, all of these things are operating as cultural forces simultaneously. 

And while this model looks like it works at the level of enterprise, you’re actually part of multiple cultures at work. There is the enterprise level culture, there’s also your unit level culture, and there’s your own response to that, what you do with that. 

And then a final note, our model is surrounded by a dotted line. And that is because cultures give influence, they also accept influence from other cultural influences. And so one of the things that is important about this model of culture is noting that if values are something that you are trying to enact, making them part of your culture is an essential agent in causing change, in helping motivate other people. And remembering that even if you are doing something at a unit level or within your specific role, over time, that creates then the expectation that this is the way that people behave. 

And at this point, I’m going to throw this back to Kevin because he has a great example to show us what it looks like to actually put some behavior or language around value.

Kevin

Yeah, so I just wanted to walk through, continue walking through a couple of these approaches that I think do a better job of attending to the employee experience. And I said, one of these is this idea of better integrating employees into values. 

And so this is an example that I highlight in some of my work for this is Amarillo College, which is a community college in Amarillo, Texas. And I’m going to spend a ton of time on this. I simply wanted to highlight that this is an example of a group of values that were very intentionally crafted and have become embedded within the institution itself, but really stood out to me for the way in which they integrate employees and the expectations around how we, or rather the folks that work there, interact with each other, how they show up for each other. 

And so there are some institutions that would look at these values and would say there’s no way that we’re going to have a set of institutional values premised around fun, for example. But nevertheless, what this was, I think, was it was a case of a set of values that were really crafted with that institution in mind with where it wanted to go, the culture of care that it was attempting to cultivate. 

And again, it speaks to employees around what they can expect about their experience at this place. And over time, by putting these set of values in place and living those values, this became a core feature of that institution’s brand. 

Okay, so the other approach that I want to highlight circles back around to what I mentioned at the very beginning, which is even if we were to establish a set of priorities around being kind of a top workplace, for example, or really trying to support employee well-being, we would struggle to be able to assess where we’re at or what progress we’ve made because we don’t have great data collection practices around our employees in higher education. 

And so I think if we want to strengthen the employee experience, one way that we can do that is through enhanced data practices. And so this can include a couple of different prongs. One of them is this notion of data governance, which is that institutions sometimes have lots of data. It’s just in different silos. And we’re not necessarily speaking the same language when it comes to who people are or the categories around which we’re collecting our data. 

And so data governance is an idea of kind of establishing a plan for the entire institution so that we’re developing consistent, inclusive, up to date data on our employees, making it transparent around where people can access that data should they wish to use it. 

There are some institutions and other organizations that are kind of moving beyond this idea of an episodic employee engagement survey. Employee engagement surveys can be really helpful, of course. But part of the challenge is that they tend to only be deployed every couple of years. 

In some cases, there could be long stretches of time between those surveys, right. So in my research, for example, there is a whole pandemic that fell between when engagement surveys were deployed. And so they’re kind of a snapshot in time. 

And so one question for us is what would it look like to shift towards methods of continuous listening where we’re creating kind of shorter, quicker ways of trying to assess where our employees are at, what they are experiencing on the job and using that as a way to inform our progress on particular goals. 

Of course, one other challenge here with collecting additional data is whether or not we’re ready for it. And so institutionally, we have to be prepared that if we’re collecting data, we need to be able to act on it. We need to have the right people hired to help us understand and pull insights from it. And then, of course, we need leaders that are prepared to listen to the information that they receive, even if it may not be what they want to hear. 

So I think one of the things that, that we collectively have kind of come around to is this notion that an institution’s employer brand is very much a function of the real lived experiences of the people who work there. 

And so we cannot simply shape a brand out of nothing or invent a brand that has substance or meaning to it. Instead, we ought to think about how do we shape, pay attention to, give thought to the folks’ actual experiences at the institution, and then let that form the basis of how people come to understand and know the institution externally. 

Rob

That’s so well said. I think we should end there and have that be the final word for the presentation part. We did add this slide in about our, the domains of marketing and communications influence, just to pick up on that point. 

Because we have several marketing and communications leaders, professionals joining us today for this and, and that’s one of the questions here is, what is the role of marketing and communications? And certainly internal comms is a natural tie-in, and we want to talk about that more in our discussion and what internal communications looks like at a caring university. 

We would encourage marcomm teams, though, to see themselves and see their work more holistically and broadly beyond simply an execution role of internal communications. 

And these domains of marketing and communications influence demonstrate that, that holistic influence that marketing and communications can have or can help move the institution forward, beginning with the fundamental question of, around being relevant and delivering relevance and through that relevance, constituents engage and build relationships with the institution. And through those relationships, then, we begin to have the ultimate results that we’re looking for in terms of reputation and brand and in terms of resources into the institution. Reputation and brand often gets relegated to simply promote, protect and there’s a broader landscape to that: position, protect, promote and perform to the extent that we’re ensuring that the institution is performing on the promise that it makes—again going back to this principle of coherence. 

And then you see too if we’re thinking about critical resources, assets, important elements to the institution, we would naturally go to, well, revenue through enrollment, through philanthropy, but also talent. Talent is a is a key part of that, and we’re seeing more marketing and communications units meaningfully engaged in that work to recruit, retain talent to the institution and helping develop strategies to enable that, and we can certainly share some examples as we get into the, into the discussion further.

We’ll share this deck and leave these resources with you and provide them as part of the follow-up material in terms of some of the items that we’ve talked about: the book Coherence written by RHB founder Rick Bailey, if you want to deep dive on that principle. 

The strategic planning research that Aimee and I led. There’s a great handbook that is useful to those who are engaged in strategic planning. What we found from that initial study; also some great insights that we learned from conversations with presidents, chancellors, chairs of strategic planning processes from those 16 institutions who we determined had the most-strategic strategic plans. 

And then if you want something in smaller bites, you can dive into the white papers from our more recent strategic planning research of those 54 new plans and then the original studies also in executive summary form of What Makes a Strategic Plan ‘Strategic’? 

So with that, that concludes the formal part of our, of our presentation and certainly invite you to share any questions that you have. We do have some great questions that were submitted along with registrations. So we’ll get into those. And we also want to unpack some of these ideas further. 

I will get rid of the slides here so that we can, we can look at one another as we talk through this. And at the top of my list, Kevin…Kevin and Aimee is the the idea of organizational change. And again, that’s been one of the elements since Aimee and I are so engaged in organizational change work. And what has continued to resonate about your work and your writing is this point about the “how” of change and enacting change and getting really specific in terms of the strategy steps and the environment that creates change, the landscape that’s conducive to change. 

And would love to get your, your thoughts on that element, or what for those who are on the joining us, you know, if there are specific items that you would recommend or advise as they think about, okay, we’ve got a lot to do to improve the employee experience. Where do we even begin?

Kevin

Yeah, I think it’s a great question. I think this idea of better understanding who our employees are, how much they’re working, what they’re experiencing on the job is a great starting place. And so for institutions that are thinking about, I want to invest a little more in creating and shaping a positive employee experience, I would begin by asking a set of questions around, have we done our due diligence as an organization to learn? 

We cannot just forge ahead with what we are doing. And so we first really, I think, have some core insights around who our employees are, what their workload looks like, and what they experience on the job. And we have some instruments to do that. There are some tools available that help us do it. We just have to put the work into it and make it a priority in the same way that we make other areas of our operations a priority. 

The second thing that comes to mind is basically already kind of contained the question, which is we’ve gotten better about articulating what our goals are. And we have not done as great of a job of pausing to say why. Why are we doing this? Why do we think that this is an important part of our mission? How does this connect to the various functional areas that we have as an institution? 

And here’s the really important thing. We aren’t building in enough opportunity and enough time for people to make sense of change. And so we are moving forward in some cases at breakneck speed towards particular goals. And I really think that it would do wonders if we can ensure that we are building in intentional processes for people to come together to say, what does this change mean for me? What does this look like for my particular role? How does this connect to my work? 

Allow them to do that, allow them to grapple with that, struggle with it, to ask questions about it and just create just a little bit of space there for that type of messiness so that people can come around to it and say, I understand now what this is, why we are doing it, how my work contributes to it, and I’m much better able to get on board with it and wrap my head around it. 

Not in every instance, but I think by skipping over some of those things and just forging ahead and assuming everybody’s going to know exactly why we’re doing this and what it means for them and how they can contribute, we end up losing people along the way and there can be some resentment that builds up as a result. 

Rob

Yeah, there’s so much good stuff there. And that makes me think, Aimee, of what you you shared in terms of culture and values and how what we saw in the strategic planning research is that the the change that leaders and strategic planning groups were trying to lead, those were more effective when there was a clear connection to values and how this change was an expression of our institution’s values in the, in today’s environment. 

Aimee

Yes, yes. And, Kevin, thank you so much for mentioning the messiness. And a lot of these things are messy, they’re always going to be messy. That is a reason not to engage the mess. The only way out is through the mess. 

And I also really appreciate your point there about really allowing employees to sit with change and to be really curious about what their difficulties are. And, you know, we should remember that, especially when you’re thinking about someone who has been with an institution for a long time, a large part of their identity and their internal emotional life is also invested in that role. 

So as we’re thinking about change, as we’re thinking about even necessary culture change, which we’ve seen sometimes, this is a process of cultivation over time. A lot of this is very patient gardening

And also thinking about too, what are the ways that we talk about that? So helping employees understand that they will be saying or hearing something about this, about this process at, you know, a really predictable interval. So they know that every so often we’ll be checking in, we’ll be letting them know what we’re hearing, but also not give, not being overly positive. 

Sometimes when these things are major cultural shifts, especially if you’re thinking about a period of low morale or something like that, be factual, but don’t try to make people believe that something is really positive, especially not at first, give them time to warm up to that. Let them see you working through that process. And this applies regardless of what your role is. If you have folks working with you as your colleagues, that same appreciation for and curiosity about what’s happening with them, I think also applies here. 

Rob

Oh, there’s so many places to go with this. How about, I’d be curious, Kevin, any other findings that you had when you took a look at strategic plans based on what we shared that would be relevant here? Whether that is simply the point about priority overload or the fact that employees are not necessarily visible, but when they are, it’s typically not on the staff side, for example, or anything else there that you think would be important to point out and what you found in strategic plans? 

Kevin

Yeah, I mean, certainly that was there, you know, staff, to the extent that employees are difficult to locate, staff are basically invisible in a lot of these plans, and that sends a message to people about, first of all, who the plans are for, who, who the institution’s goals kind of include or do not include and whose labor is kind of taken for granted as simply being there, that they are simply going to be, you know, tasked with carrying these things out without really thinking about what additional hiring we might need to do, what additional capacity building or organizational learning, we might need to undertake. 

So that’s one dimension of it. You know, there were some exemplar strategic plans out there that I think kind of went above and beyond and really pushed themselves to say, we’re not just including this kind of throwaway line about being a top destination for talent or being a great place to work. Like, this is what we mean by that. Here are the actual ways in which we are going to attempt to pursue that. And so I really appreciated the fact that there was some thoughtfulness around we’ve got some actual goals connected to this that we are going to pursue. And those are goals that are going to require investment on our part. 

And again, that for me goes back around to this idea of institutional responsibility as an employer that as an institution, yes, we had these other goals that we’re trying to pursue around student success and operational effectiveness, but we also have a responsibility to the people that we have hired and employ, and some version of our strategy ought to include them. 

And I think the last thing I’ll say is that I didn’t walk into this process really being that big of a believer in the value of strategic planning, or I should say being a skeptic having some questions around it. But the reality is, is that there are a lot of institutions that truly do use the strategic plan as a way of making decisions about where resources go. And so some of those institutions that I could lift up and say, they have done a nice job of integrating this idea of employees and the employee experience into their planning, they also put money into it. And those changes became real and became tangible. And so again, it wasn’t just this dream of being a top place to work, they were actually taking steps towards making that a reality. 

Rob

Your, your healthy skepticism of strategic plans I think is warranted. But the point there is right on about those reflected, those plans reflected decisions or again reflected specific choices. And since you shared an example, one example that comes to mind in that regard is not the current plan, but previous plan of the University of Louisville, which had “a great place to work” as one of its three overarching pillars. 

And unlike the plans that we referenced before, once you got into the substance of that, there was a lot there, a lot of very specific strategies from creating an employee success center to how they would incentivize the principles or values, the Cardinal Principles in that case, with their, with their employees. 

So we’ve got about 10 minutes left, and we’ve got some questions here. I do want to, we promised to talk more about internal communications. So I do want to touch on that before we get into the, into the questions and want to hear about your perspective, Kevin, as it relates to internal communications. And again, the question that I posed earlier of what internal communications looks like or should look like at a caring university. 

Kevin

Yeah, so this is an area that I’d love to continue talking about and learning from other folks. I’ve got kind of a narrow vantage point on it, but from what I’ve gathered, I think we are generally putting a lot more time and effort into our external communications and a little bit less on our internal communications. 

And so the result is that there may be some blurring of the two where we are using our external communications also internally. And so our employees feel like the messaging that they’re getting is kind of marketing messaging. 

And that’s not always what they need. It doesn’t always feel authentic to them. It doesn’t reflect maybe their experience of working at a place, but rather feels like they’re being promoted their own institution to themselves in certain ways. 

So that’s one dimension of it where I’d be curious to think a little bit about like, what does it look like to disentangle those two things a little bit and think a little more meaningfully around like, how do we communicate internally in a way that’s a little more authentic to the people who work here? And it can be different from what we’re projecting externally. 

The other piece of this is there was a question that was posed around kind of the relationship between HR functions and internal communications, which I think is a great question. I have come across an institution, just one in my research, this doesn’t mean that it’s the only one, mind you, just the only one that I had come across where they ran a lot of their HR communications through the marcomm unit to help them craft that message a little more intentionally and make sure that there was some thoughtfulness around inclusivity in the language that was being used. 

I joke that I routinely get an email from my institution that’s addressed to Employee McClure. And there’s something about it that just feels very, very bureaucratic. And that’s something that I feel like we might be able to massage just a little bit with a little more internal thoughtfulness. 

So that, you know, the last thing I’ll say, I think I just said that that was the last thing I was going to say, but the very last thing I’ll say is it’s not uncommon for employees—and this was the case in my research—to learn about things through the news, things about their own campus through the news. 

And that’s not necessarily an institutional failure in some cases, right? There might be the case that a reporter comes across something and breaks it, and that story is out there before the institution is fully prepared for it. 

But there was a sentiment that, again, informing employees first was not always the overriding principle. Trying to kind of get ahead of external stories and constituents was always the top concern. And for certain issues, I think it’s really important that the people who work there know about an issue before it’s being talked about externally so that they don’t find out about something when they’re watching the news with their family. 

Rob

Yeah. Aimee, anything that you wanted to add to that on internal communications? 

Aimee

Yeah, no, I think that is such an important point, Kevin, and you’re correct. The lack of this is sometimes not an institutional failure, but I will just say we have observed a few institutions where there is exactly that relationship between marketing and HR. 

And one of the great things about that relationship is both of those entities have some kind of data on audiences. They are collecting different sets of data. Bringing those together really powerfully can be important precisely to help avoid that sort of sheen of marketing and making sure that communicators whose talents are also distinct from marketers in some way are part of those conversations so that everybody is sharing the same internal message. 

But I mean, there’s so much opportunity there. That is such a fruitful place for interaction and so much opportunity there for really making sure that employees are brought along and informed in a really timely and effective fashion. 

Rob

And your point earlier, Kevin, about employee engagement surveys and the frequency of those reminded me of Southern New Hampshire University, which I think does an excellent job in terms of employee engagement overall, but certainly internal communications. 

And they run their employee engagement survey on a monthly basis. And so constantly getting that feedback about the experience, those include questions about how well -informed they are in internal communications. 

And then to think about the value of having a pulse on that on an every month basis would be so incredibly helpful. But again, that gets back to the point of even before the pandemic, SNHU invested in those resources to be able to do that and execute that and understand the data and all the elements that come with that. 

Okay, let’s get into a couple of questions that have been submitted. “I appreciate the focus on truth and coherence. What if the truth is that we may not have the financial resources to deliver on our promise to employees, stagnant declining enrollment, recognition that we are lagging in salary, equity, etc? I wonder if leaders struggle to open up a can of worms that they can’t deliver on.”

Kevin

Yeah, I think that this is a perfectly legitimate concern. I certainly understand the desire to avoid kind of opening up a can of worms. Nevertheless, the reality is is that we are organizations employing people. 

And as such, we have basic responsibilities that we do have to meet. And there’s only so long, I think, that we can avoid those responsibilities before they come back around and actually undermine some of those very same outcomes that we are pursuing around organizational sustainability or performance, right? So that’s one dimension of this. 

The second piece of this is not all of these have to be phenomenally expensive. There are ways that we can better understand what’s important to our employees, try to identify some of them that are really important, and then we have to plan. 

So what I really get hung up on is sometimes institutions say no before I think they have meaningfully looked into this. Have you actually done a planning process where you say, okay, our employees have told us that these are the three things that matter most to them? What does this look like over the next five years? Are there ways that we can set some achievable goals over the course of the next five years? And then have a conversation with employees about where we’re at with this, okay? 

So we have heard from you, and you’ve told us that these things are really important to you. We wanna move forward with them, but we also have to be real about the fact that we’re not going to be able to do all these things overnight, and we’re going to need some help from everybody in order to make this happen. 

So here’s our first goal that we’re going try to reach. This is what we think it’s going to look like in order to get us there. And I think it makes a difference to the people who work there to say, you know what, I understand that this thing isn’t going to happen overnight, but they’re not pretending like this problem doesn’t exist. 

They are trying to put some thought into what it would look like to achieve this. And then they’re inviting us into this conversation around, could we, could we enlist some of the expertise that we have here to try to move forward with a few of these items? 

Some folks that might be really passionate about doing research around the workplace, there might be some folks internally who start that and get the ball rolling with it, for example. And so this isn’t that different from any other thing that we care about at the institution. If we care about student success, if we care about faculty research, we have to start by unpacking these things, figuring out, okay, what does this mean for us? What are some concrete goals that we can set? And then we start moving toward it step by step by step. And we don’t just assume that this is going to happen overnight. 

Rob

Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, that gets to the messiness and the hard work and the incremental progress toward that. Another question submitted, “What unique impacts or considerations are you observing in organizational culture such as communication, team cohesion, and leadership dynamics for institutions that have strategically, are strategically embracing remote workforces compared to those intentionally maintaining more on-premise workforces?” Aimee, that’s certainly something we have seen in our organizational work. 

Aimee

Yes. And there is so much variability. And one of the things that I think is operative to be asking first is, is there some sort of uniform policy around this at the institutional level? Or do managers, supervisors have the ability to determine what that policy is going to be for their own team? And how do they go about doing that? Because sometimes we will see teams where some folks are allowed to be remote basically all the time and others are not. 

So one of the things is thinking about who are you working with most closely? What is going to be making sure that you all have, say for instance, coherent core hours where regardless of where someone is working, they’re always going to be online or available during a particular time. 

Do they have time when they can just sort of chit-chat at the beginning of meetings, you know, making space to get to know each other is really important. And then thinking about leadership and connection with your teammates, making sure that folks have consistent checkpoints, and that those really are spaces where they are just locked in on that conversation with each other, know when they will have time together. All of those things are really important.

But what we have seen is we work with a lot of teams that are remotely distributed, and they are highly successful. But they’re also very, very clear expectations for how work is going to get done. There is accountability around that. And people are very clear, they work together to make sure that they understand, for instance, how to make a meeting productive, all of those kinds of things. And I would love to hear from y ‘all as well, some of the things that you’ve observed there as well, because there’s a lot of variety out there. 

Rob

Yeah, absolutely. I know we’re at time so very quickly, a couple of questions that came through during the registration process. One was, “How often do you see partnerships between the marketing and HR functions to advance the employee experience?” I would say there, Aimee and I would from our organizational assessment work and work in research across the sector, very infrequently. But again, going back to those domains of marketing and communications influence a significant opportunity. 

One thing would be that it’s certainly easier when the employee experience is identified as a clear institutional strategic priority. That certainly makes it easier to work cross-functionally when you are working toward a strategic priority of the institution. 

Another question, let’s see here. I’ll end with this one. “Are there outstanding campaigns or that you would point to for employee marketing, enterprise and unit-based?” I’d put the focus there on practices first over campaigns. It does start with the experience and the actual practices. 

In terms of a campaign, one to look at if people are looking for examples would be UMass Amherst, which launched a campaign at the beginning of the 2024 year, “We’re here for good.” And how they’ve incorporated that into their employee recruitment, retention messaging, and some campaign materials. There are some other examples too. The one thing that is a common piece across those examples is that they’ve been highly research-informed in terms of before any campaign effort is understanding what the employee experience is, understanding what the culture is at that institution is. 

Kevin or Aimee, would you like a final word to leave with people before we wrap up? 

Kevin

To say thank you for the conversation and I think there’s so many ways that we could continue exploring some of these things and so hopefully we have a chance to continue the conversation. 

Aimee

Yes, and I hope folks are leaving here with some things that they can apply immediately, and we would love to hear more if there’s questions. Definitely let us know if there’s more that we can answer for you. 

Rob

Excellent. Well, thank you so much. We will follow up with materials, the deck and some additional resources, but Kevin and Aimee, always wonderful to be with you both. Thanks for your insights and expertise and thanks to everyone for joining us this afternoon. Good luck with all your important work!