Teamwork During Uncertainty: A COVID-19 Story

After twenty years working in information technology in higher education, I thought I had seen it all. When I arrived at Susquehanna University in November 2019 to start my new position as Chief Information Officer (CIO), I felt I was thoroughly prepared for the challenges ahead of me. This was my first official CIO role, and I was excited to get acquainted with my team, build partnerships across campus, dig into the budget, and explore my new surroundings in central Pennsylvania. A few vacant positions needed to be filled, but I planned take the proper amount of time to get to know my team and fully understand our needs before moving ahead. All the books and articles I had read advise new CIOs to do a listening tour before making changes. I assembled my leadership team with the three IT directors and met with everyone in the department. Together we mapped out a schedule. We would hire to fill the vacancies by summer. We had plenty of time, right?

Pre-Pandemic

Getting to know my team members was at the top of my priority list. They had been without a CIO for over a year, and the three IT directors were exhausted. They had done a great job keeping the department going in the interim. All major initiatives had been put on hold until my arrival, and they were eager to get things moving forward. The entire team consisted of only fifteen people but offered great diversity with five women and ten men and a variety of ages from early twenties to late fifties. The leadership team and I agreed that we needed to continue to bring diversity into our team for it to be effective and sustainable.

Building partnerships across campus was also a priority. I wanted everyone in the campus community to know that a new CIO had been hired and that the IT department was available to help them. I was invited to department meetings, and each week I had lunch meetings with different department heads in order to get to know each other outside of the office. These lunches were a wonderful way to bond with my colleagues and create opportunities for our teams to work together. One partnership that was an immediate success was the one between the IT team and the Marketing and Communications team. We started joint monthly meetings and were able to accommodate the needs of both teams by hiring a shared web developer. This position resides in the IT department but devotes twenty hours per week to Marketing and Communications. To accommodate needs across campus, I plan to continue the trend of shared positions.

My familiarity with the campus community grew quickly as I became part of many campus committees and working groups. As part of the campus crisis management team, I learned that the IT portion of the campus disaster plan needed to be updated. I viewed this as a great team-building opportunity. The team and I worked through worst-case scenarios to update our portion of the plan. These exercises fast-tracked my awareness of all the technology that we had in place. Yet the process was exhausting and at times uncomfortable, including arguments fueled by frustration and the disillusionment that we were wasting our time because we would never need to do these things. Still, within a couple of weeks, we turned the scenarios into contingency plans that we all felt pretty good about. In the end, we agreed that the time had been well spent.

And Then . . . COVID-19

In early January 2020, senior university leaders put into place a COVID-19 response team. At that time, the team's focus was on making sure that those students and faculty who were abroad were safe and able to get home. Susquehanna generally has many students abroad throughout the year, participating in two unique programs. The GO (Global Opportunities) program offers a distinctive cross-cultural component in which students "GO" off-campus for learning and return to the Susquehanna campus for reflection at some point during their four years. Additionally, the Susquehanna Sigmund Weis School of Business is the only business school in the world to guarantee an international internship. The COVID-19 response team met regularly to monitor the situation and take the necessary steps to ensure the safety of our faculty and students.

As COVID-19 numbers rose in the United States, the university faced the possibility of having to move everyone—students and staff—off-campus. My team and I referred to our freshly updated disaster plans. We made tweaks and adjustments as we reached out to departments to ask what their needs would be for remote teaching and work. A key focus was preparedness. Since internet access can be a significant challenge in certain areas of central Pennsylvania, we encouraged everyone to explore options.

My team and I encouraged faculty and staff to bring their laptops home at the end of every day and encouraged faculty to put their coursework in the Learning Management System (LMS). We commandeered laptop carts from around campus, we scoured local stores, and we placed online orders for headsets, microphones, webcams, and other items that would improve our loaner pool. We purchased Zoom licenses for faculty and staff and provided training. Our biggest challenge was trying to understand the needs of our 2,300 students. Did they have internet access and computers? How would we provide access to software that they needed without compromising license agreements? Were we going to be able to provide them with adequate support? In addition, the IT department relies heavily on our student workers, and we lost that important workforce in the move to remote learning.

We also created a matrix with the job duties of the IT staff to understand what could be done remotely and what needed to be done on-site. How would/could the IT department work remotely? Certain jobs simply cannot be done remotely—or at least that's what we thought. As we moved ahead with our plans, I empowered my three directors to make decisions that could not wait for my approval. We were a team, and as a new leader, I needed to trust that they could step in and get things done.

March 2020

On the day we received word that everything on our campus was moving online, my team assembled to talk through next steps. We set realistic expectations. We tried to cover all the bases, but we knew there would be some surprises. We rolled up our sleeves, devised a plan of attack, and did what had to be done. We focused on ensuring that faculty, staff, and students had access to everything they needed, that the lines of communication were open, and that we were ready to assist.

Our helpdesk calls jumped from well under 100 to 412 in the first week. That pattern continued for several weeks. We were able to set up two of our student workers to work remotely to assist with the call volume. The team collaborated, stepping up and learning new things to help when workloads and priorities shifted.

We helped students and employees with internet issues at home, and we shipped laptops to those who were without technology. We contacted vendors about software licensing to help our students. All the while, we were holding on to the thought (though we now realize it was a disillusionment) that everything would be back to normal in a few weeks.

My team and I were trying to adjust to the awkwardness of remote meetings. This was a new way of managing people, and the work that I had done with my team pre-pandemic was in jeopardy of being undone. Important social queues that were easily picked up in person were often misread, causing great confusion and discomfort. This was especially hard when not everyone had their video camera on during meetings.

Keeping morale up was challenging as well. We had IT staff meetings twice a week in the beginning so that people did not feel so isolated. Water-cooler talk easily took over the first thirty minutes. It was good to hear the laughter and silliness that used to echo in our hallways.

Weeks Become Months

As the reality of returning to normal quickly vanished, we had to switch gears to a more strategic approach. What could we implement that would help us immediately and still provide value when the pandemic crisis faded? We applied for grants for equipment, worked with various consortia to find savings, and partnered with the campus Center for Teaching and Learning to explore possibilities.

Our campus was doing a great job trying to keep traditions moving forward.  Susquehanna celebrated "Orange and Maroon" day by creating fun videos and pictures. The Office of Information Technology produced a Full House parody called Full Quarantine. [https://spark.adobe.com/video/WYzgYwb8h8VZM]

Pre-pandemic, we had been planning to purchase LinkedIn Learning and launch it during the summer. We moved the launch to April to provide professional and personal growth opportunities to all staff. We promoted monthly learning challenges, and participation quickly grew to over 40 percent of the campus. We also implemented a video-chat platform to enhance communication. This has been widely used by the Admissions Office and faculty advising to provide an innovative alternative to conveying important messages.

By June, we knew that the campus plan for Fall 2020 was to have our students back on campus. We purchased a lecture-capture platform and had plans in place to upgrade our LMS. We made sure multiple communication platforms were available to offer choices and backup solutions. Permanent and portable audio and video equipment was purchased to provide flexible solutions in the classrooms. Computer labs were reconfigured to accommodate new seating limitations and to make unusable seats accessible remotely. The summer months were jam-packed with implementations, training sessions, and upgrades and installations to classroom equipment. With the many limitations in place for COVID-19 safety and the lack of student workers to help the IT staff, this was especially challenging for my team.

With the landscape changing, this was also a great opportunity to push forward with IT governance plans. I assembled a committee, and we put a structure in place so we were ready to review technology needs and ensure that everything we were implementing supported the mission of the university.

Return to Campus

In the Fall 2020 campus plan, first-year students would arrive first, followed by seniors two weeks later, and then the remainder of the student body two weeks after that. By October, all the  students who had chosen to return to in-person instruction were on campus. Even so, classes were structured in a hybrid mode to accommodate smaller occupancy restrictions in classrooms and to allow virtual participation by those who were not yet physically on campus. To accommodate the IT support needs of our users while keeping our professional and student staff safe, we created an outdoor IT help desk for walk-ups, while our office areas were reserved for by-appointment only. My team split into two categories: those who needed to be onsite for hands-on support and those who could still work remotely full-time. All staff members who could work remotely did so but were ready to jump back in if on-site staff got sick or needed to quarantine.

Communication remained at the forefront of our focus, and we relied heavily on the weekly campus Faculty Staff Newsletter, email, and the Office of Information Technology Facebook page. With the help of the campus Marketing and Communications team, the IT team created a "welcome back" Facebook video that highlighted the changes we made to support the hybrid environment.

Lessons Learned

As I mentioned earlier, this was my first official CIO role. Accepting the position involved a huge change for me—and for my husband. We left an area that we had lived in for over twenty years so that I could pursue my dream of becoming a CIO. Those first couple of months on the job were critical to establishing rapport with my team and to learning the Susquehanna way of doing things. I was determined to follow the best advice from the top CIOs as I read all the latest leadership books. One of my favorite things to do each day was walk through the office suite and say hello to everyone.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit several months later and the campus moved to remote work, we had to start over again. My husband and I had just turned our lives upside-down, and now the whole world was being forced to do the same. The work I had accomplished with my team in the first five months seemed, to me, to be unraveling. Everyone felt isolated. We still had staff meetings and one-on-one meetings, but they were awkward and uncomfortable. I needed to figure out what to do before it was too late. I threw the leadership advice books out the window and followed my gut instinct.

I found new ways to engage my team online. The awkwardness became less evident as people settled in to the idea of being on camera. Yet everyone felt vulnerable as time went on and the uncertainty grew. I worked hard to break down the feeling of hierarchy and to reinforce that I was part of the team and felt vulnerable as well. Communication was critical. I made sure to send email updates to my team and meet with everyone frequently. TedTalks were incorporated into our weekly meetings so that we could have group discussions about topics that pulled us away from COVID-19.

My goals for my position and my team were still clear. I just had to get creative in order to keep them moving forward.

The New Workforce

There were also many lessons to be learned for the IT team. We needed to seize this opportunity to make important, sustainable changes to the way we work. Some of the outdated processes we had grown accustomed to would simply not work in this new environment. It was eye-opening for all of us when jobs that we never thought could be done remotely were now being done remotely—and done successfully. We were figuring it out. Once everyone started to settle in to their new working environment, productivity began to improve.

The staffing plan that my team and I had devised pre-pandemic was now obsolete. We thus reviewed not only the open positions but also the job descriptions for our existing team members as a way to figure out how to use the pandemic to transform our IT service organization. One change that we made was to replace our open academic technologist position with a hybrid pedagogy specialist position. This new job title and description reflect the duties of someone who will support technology in a hybrid instructional mode. We are also creating a work model that allows staff to work remotely either full time or part time depending on their duties. This will free up office space and create shared spaces, helping to resolve our problem of too little office space.

Another lesson learned is that we need to look at how we are serving our customers now and how we can make changes to benefit our workforce. Some of our on-premise services that were very specialized and time-intensive were outsourced to firms that offer managed services. Pre-pandemic, we had been implementing a new IT ticketing system, which subsequently had to be put on hold. We were able to revise our implementation plan and kick the project off again during the fall with more self-service options that resulted from the knowledge we had gained.

Efficiency is also a growing concern. Moving to an enterprise support model is a great way to eliminate duplication across campus. Generalists can field first-level support questions for everything from submitting a request for computer assistance to registering for a class and annual open enrollment. Anything that would require an advanced level of support can be escalated to the appropriate department. This frees up time for staff to focus on higher-level work. Another benefit is that these calls can be fielded from anywhere, providing additional work-at-home opportunities.

These are just a few of the rich opportunities ahead to revamp our IT workforce. Yes, we can wait and hope that things will go back to "normal." But do we really want to?

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Jennifer Servedio is CIO at Susquehanna University.