How to Break the Workforce Cycle of Reactivity in Higher Ed

Sophie White: Hey everyone. On this episode of EDUCAUSE Shop Talk, I talked with Kristen Gay, Nicole Muscanell, and Liv Gjestvang about some of our EDUCAUSE workforce research as well as its implications for higher ed institutions today. It was a really great conversation about the two latest EDUCAUSE workforce reports, as well as some really specific strategies about how higher education leaders can support their teams, free up capacity for strategic work, help folks understand the meaning of their work, which we really see as a driver of employee retention and satisfaction. And then also where higher ed as a community can come together in order to support our workforce, which is really the future of what we do as technology professionals. So I left really inspired by even the fact that at this time where we're seeing a rapid rate of change and interruptions through AI, technology advancement, there's really an important focus on people focused leadership.

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Hello everyone and welcome to EDUCAUSE Shop Talk. I'm Sophie White. I am a senior manager of program and content marketing at EDUCAUSE, and I am your host for today's discussion. We are really thrilled to have three special guests with us today to talk about workforce development in higher education, technology, literacy, how as higher education institutions we can support our people in order to make sure that we are well set up for the future and also taking a human-centered approach to the work that we do. So I will introduce them and then we'll jump into the discussion. First, we have Liv Gjestvang. Liv is vice president and CIO at Denison University where she leads technology strategy, digital transformation, and AI innovation. Before Denison, she held leadership roles at AWS and the Ohio State University and is winner of the EDUCAUSE Rising Star and Community Awards. Her work today sits at the intersection of technology and humanity, exploring how we can embrace emerging technologies while developing the curiosity, creativity, adaptability, and human connection that will matter even more in the future of work.

Thanks for being here, Liv.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Sophie White: Great. And I love your bio. I'm really encouraged by how we can foster curiosity and connection when we think about the future of our work together. Next up, we have Nicole Muscanell. Nicole is a senior researcher at EDUCAUSE. She holds a PhD in social psychology and has more than a decade of experience in higher education, including roles in research, instruction, and academic advising. Her research examines emerging challenges and issues in higher education with a focus on how people and institutions respond to technology and change. Thanks for being here, Nicole.

Nicole Muscanell: Thanks. Always a pleasure.

Sophie White: Great. And then finally, we have Kristen Gay. Kristen is a researcher and experienced educator dedicated to advancing learning through data-driven insights with an emphasis on student needs and engagement. As a researcher at EDUCAUSE, she leverages her expertise to explore emerging trends in technology in higher education. Thanks for being here, Kristen.

Kristen Gay: Thanks for having me.

Sophie White: Great. And anyone who's watching on video, Kristen also has about the best bookshelf collection color-coded that I've ever seen. So I always appreciate that.

Kristen Gay: It's sort of like a Where's Waldo, if anyone is looking. You can see. I think yesterday someone spotted the Watchmen.

Sophie White: I love that. Classic graphic novel.

Kristen Gay: Yeah, that's right.

Sophie White: Great. So we're here today to talk about work in higher education. And as part of this EDUCAUSE release, two workforce research reports this summer. So we wanted to just start by talking about a few of the findings from those reports, and then we can talk about how this applies to the institutional perspective. But Kristen, can you start by telling us a bit about the report that you authored and some takeaways for higher ed institutions?

Kristen Gay: For sure. And I'll actually start just briefly outlining some changes we made this year because Nicole and I, as we were planning the workforce reports for this year, we're looking back at some of our findings and realizing that we're consistently hearing from IT, cybersecurity and privacy and teaching and learning professionals a really clear message, which is that we don't have enough resources. Our workloads are excessive. We're not seeing the action that we need to see on these issues to have meaningful change, and that things are changing so rapidly all the time with technology and with external forces and with budgets. And so we were curious this year less about what is happening and why, and more in how are teams actually responding? How are they navigating the sustained change and the sustained resource constraints that we were hearing about every year? And I'll start with my report.

It was really interesting. I think one finding was that sustained excessive workloads really limit a team's capacity for strategic thinking and planning. And so this sort of reactive mode that many have been locked in, and I know Nicole will talk more about that, but one of the risks here is that teams aren't able to look ahead and think about what's coming and think about refining their work because they're constantly responding to new things. And so that's been one challenge that was sort of interesting that emerged in our work. And they're kind of having to get into this operational reactive mode. Another finding that I thought was really important was that teams are really having to absorb a lot of the change that's happening internally. And so when they're not receiving more resources, they're telling us we're having to just add to our workload. We're adding more responsibilities to our plate, and we're having to reorganize our teams and our roles a bit.

But how sustainable is that? That's kind of a challenge that I think came up in both of our reports, if these teams are having to just constantly add to their plates. Because I think what we saw is that everything is a higher priority right now. And what's the old adage? If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. I think a lot of teams are really feeling that right now. And I'll hand things over to Nicole to talk about your report.

Nicole Muscanell: Yeah. I just want to say these two are meant to be companion reports. So I definitely encourage everybody to take a look at both of them. They really go hand in hand and I would say they have a lot of overlap and both of them kind of inform each other. So definitely check them both out. The second report, which is the one that I authored, took a deep dive. We basically, because for so many years in our workforce research have been hearing that same story of resources are not growing. In fact, in many cases we're losing them, but the work is growing and the complexity of that work is growing. And so we keep hearing a story. And I think the goal with the second report this year was to do a little bit of a deep dive to really take a close look at, okay, why is this seemingly a never-ending thing that's going on?

Why is this a problem time and time again every year? And why does it seem like, I want to say a lot of institutions aren't able to really make a lot of gains in this area. And so the second report focuses on what we're calling the cycle of reactivity. And it's this self-perpetuating cycle that I think many institutions are finding themselves in right now where, and this highlights some things that Kristen just pointed out, but it's basically this cycle that starts with, okay, teams are stuck in reactive mode that leaves less time for them to prepare for the future and to build capacity for the future. And then new disruptions change and new constraints come along. And now you find yourself back at square one. So okay, we didn't have time to prepare for this new stuff. And so now we're back in reactive mode with the new things and we're stuck in this cycle of never being able to improve for the future.

And the key thing here is that this continues to go on and on and on if there's no significant intervention to break that cycle. And so that's kind of the theme of the whole report, and it just takes a look really deeply at resource constraints specifically.

Kristen Gay: Yeah. And if I can just add one brief comment to that, I think we're making educated guesses about where things are headed, but I think part of the challenge and part of the reason for the perceived inaction on these issues at institutions is that there's still a lot of uncertainty about where AI is going, where a lot of budget concerns are going, even external pressures. And so I think that's a real challenge to grapple with as well, that it's going to be hard for institutions to narrow their focus and their priorities when they don't know where things are really headed. Not that we're completely uneducated there, but no one knows for sure.

Sophie White: Yeah, that's a great point. And I know that in the reports I saw a lot about change fatigue too, that staff members are really exhausted by the pace of change and how maybe you adapt to all of these changes at the same time as well as that uncertainty. So definitely a tough landscape. I'm curious, Liv, what is this bringing up for you? Is this resonating with your reality as a technology leader and as part of this community? Or what do you think?

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, I mean, I think it absolutely does. And I think that first of all, I really appreciate Nicole and Kristen, the focus that you're bringing to what can we do? Not just what is happening and what will continue to happen. But I think this has been kind of a long-term trend and I think it's accelerating. And so to me, I think a lot about the two levers that I think of that we have in this situation. And one is what is our ability to better predict the workloads going forward or try to adjust to be able to reduce some of those or staff up for them? That's tough right now on a lot of levels. The other kind of lever that I look at is what can we do as colleagues, as leaders, as a community to think about how do we care for our teams and how do we structure the ways that we work together to be able to better handle this challenging and kind of rapidly changing context?

And so I think that the truth is there are a lot of headwinds in higher education right now, and they're challenging I think almost every different kind of institution from budget pressures to you talked about AI and uncertainty around what work looks like and where and how that work gets done. So those things, I think they will be with us for the foreseeable future. But I do think that there are a lot of ways that we can think about how we better support our teams to be able to navigate through this kind of an environment. And I will say too that I think it's important that it is not just senior leaders who can influence some of the cultural improvements that I think help. I think it's really good to know that lots of people without explicit authority can show up and engage in ways that can help their communities handle these things better.

There's some things that we've tried and I have some ideas about what some of that is, but I'll just start. And I'm curious, Kristen and Nicole, and Sophie, what you would say. I think that there's a lot of historical research on this, but I think that giving people meaningful work to do, it's why most of us are in higher education, ensuring that we have some level of resources or roadway to be able to actually engage in and deliver on that meaningful work and have an impact, and then feeling appreciated and recognized for what you do. To me, those seem like really important elements of what helps keep people engaged and motivated. I'm curious about what else you think some of those kind of cultural factors are.

Kristen Gay: Yeah. And I can jump in briefly here that in our report, we found that even though there are all of these issues, overall, a majority of respondents still felt positive about their institution's direction and where they were headed. And the most frequently selected reason for that is because they felt like there was an impact on students. If they felt like there was a clear connection to the work that they were doing between the work they were doing and student outcomes, they felt way more confident in where they were headed. And so I think that's another piece to lean into. At the strategic level, having all of these priorities is not going to encourage buy-in if there is not that clear connection to impact. And it was interesting you mentioned meaningful work because we also saw that respondents who plan to stay at their institution and not pursue another job said that meaningful work was the top reason why they wanted to remain at their institution.

So those may seem like simple things, but I think they're actually very important to a lot of people.

Nicole Muscanell: Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with both of those. And I would say, and this is not something unique to our research, but I think workforce research has shown this more generally. It's good to have friends at your work. And so part of that cultural component is we know that there's better retention and better satisfaction with your job if you have some good friends that you feel like you can trust. And so I think that's definitely part of it. So team build, the ability to connect with your team and do team building probably matters greatly. And then I think another really important thing that we saw in the second report is I think right now culturally, there's not really a lot of support for a, let's have focused time to really hone in on our work and focus on a single thing.

And one of the things that respondents said that they need the most right now is uninterrupted time to focus. And so I would say if institutions could figure out how to work that into the culture where it's okay to not be paying attention to 10 things at the same time, that would probably do a lot and it would feed into the things that you all are bringing up too. So I think people would see more clearly the meaning of their work if they have that uninterrupted time because then they have more space to actually see what impact they're having and what sort of progress that they're actually making.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, I think that's huge. And this is where I think that at many levels of the organization, we can make small changes that are kind of within our power. I'm sort of a believer in when there are opportunities that you see to make work better, that it is worth just diving in and trying to make them happen. I work pretty closely with our HR team, but I also, I am a big believer in piloting, giving something a go to see what happens. And so I think at any level of an organization, if you see an opportunity where having time to, as you talked about Nicole, to be able to dig into a meaningful project would be helpful. What are some ways you could imagine that that might happen? And is that something you could pitch to your team or to your supervisor if you're part of a team?

I did started something last year in July where I just canceled all recurring meetings. So that just meant all my one-on-ones, all of our leadership team meetings are all team meetings. We had a potluck instead of an all-team meeting, which was nice. But that was incredibly helpful to me. And I think it was really helpful to the team too. I was there at work. I was fully available when people had things that came up that we needed to talk about. But what it meant was the conversations we were having were ones that needed to happen at that time. They weren't just the kind of regular cadence of day after day of meetings. And there were times where we were sitting down and doing a two-hour whiteboard AI strategy session that was actually a really different kind of conversation. So that was really helpful to me.

I did it again in December, which was nice because people could take some space to plan, wrap up the year, plan for what was coming in the next calendar year, and then just did that again. I just met with my leadership team for the first time yesterday. So it actually went into August and asked if people felt like had they missed us not being together as a leadership team. And again, we're working in the same building, we're still talking with each other, but I think there was just a tone of just a little bit more calm that I think at this time of year, it's helpful to have some time to look back at what have you done over the last year and put our heads together on where we're going. So that kind of space I think was really helpful. I have a person, Christine Buchetto-Stevens, who runs our client experience team, and she just decided she wanted to give her team time for sprints.

So they take a week or two when they have it at a time of year where they have a slightly slower cadence and people each pick something they've meant to dig into or they want to do more of, something they've tried to finish and haven't gotten through. And they report out. I think they do a daily standup and they're reporting out with each other. What are they working on? What progress are they making? But they have some set aside time. And I think that time, if you can create it, gives you the feeling of accomplishment. It allows you to focus, which is less exhausting than trying to do so many things. And it just lets people connect on delivering an impact. So I think some of these are small-ish things that just make a difference about how it feels to come into work.

Nicole Muscanell: And I love that you're. Oh, I'm sorry, Sophie. No. We're saying the same thing at the same time.

Sophie White: I think we're both agreeing that it's a great example. Yeah, I'm just thinking, I think from part of my role at EDUCAUSE supporting the young professionals community here and having some sense of agency over the work that you do is so essential too. So I like the idea of maybe there is something that you've always wanted to work on and you were able to have some say in what you use that sprint time for can be so meaningful in how you connect your work to that larger impact too. Sorry, Nicole, go ahead. I just got excited about this.

Nicole Muscanell: Oh no, it's okay. This happens in regular informal conversations, right? No, I was just saying I think it's really helpful that you're sharing a really specific examples because I just did a webinar on my report and I think what we're hearing from the community is like, okay, but really how do we get started? And especially with mine, it's like, okay, you have this whole cycle, so where do we even start to break that cycle? And there's not just one place you could start at a lot of places. So I think right now a lot of institutions and a lot of teams within institutions are like, just please help me. Tell me two spots to start. And so I think that will be really helpful.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah. Yeah. We have done, this is where when I said I don't always ask permission, we also started last year to do a restorative day. We just did it over the course of the summer where everyone on the team could take a day and do something that was going to kind of fill them up. And it could be that they were going to take a walk in their neighborhood and have lunch with their kids or somebody did some work on retiling a bathroom floor. And we asked that they share back in our team chat what they're doing, but just take a day and do recognizing that we're storing ourselves as part of the work cycle. There's a great book I'm reading called Rest, and it just talks about how we tend in our weirdly productivity. I mean, productivity is great, but in a culture that's hyper-focused on productivity, we can forget that rest, meaning time when you're not actively delivering and engaging is a really important part of the cognitive process of creative thinking and coming up with new solutions and that you need time to take a walk during the day or grab coffee with someone and ask about their life.

And some of those things, I think A, they're important so that we feel good about work and B, they do actually change the way that we think and our creativity and our ability to solve problems. So sometimes I think again, if we can acknowledge that in little ways, that also helps people just feel more seen as a whole person, which I think can help boost some of the engagement.

Kristen Gay: Yeah.

Sophie White: And that feels like something that I saw some data in your report, Kristen, about confidence in leadership being a big indicator of success, but that feels like something as a leader that you can protect that time for your team and say, "This is a priority of ours, and that can be more challenging if you are maybe earlier in your career to advocate for yourself in that rest." So that feels like a conversation that we still have to have maybe as a community and society too.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah. And I think the reality too is that this is that pressure between the workloads growing, the resources shrinking, and the importance of meaning being kind of pervasive. It's easy to say, take time to reflect and it's easy. They are great ideas, but when people feel like the work that's coming to them just continues to grow and maybe they're stable or losing resources, there becomes another problem, which is are there things that we can stop doing? And that's tough. That's really, really hard. We did another exercise that I'll give Vantage Consulting credit for. I worked with Shannon Dunn on this, implementing this model called the 25 percent plan. And Vantage has designed this model that is essentially a set of successive conversations that start with the individual contributors on your team and then work up to, if you had to look at your week and say, "What am I doing for the least productive 10 hours of my week?

What does that look like?" And then people put that in a spreadsheet. I really like to be able to engage leaders across my team in helping facilitate these kinds of conversations. So we had our associate director and director level folks pair up and facilitate conversations with each team to say, "What are the themes you're seeing when you look at this 25 percent of lower value, lower impact work?" And we were able to identify some things and then put them into buckets where we said, "Which of these do we think could have the biggest impact on our organization?" And that was really about trying to reduce workload that was less effective. And some of it is we have processes where we're asking people to report out on what they're doing that we're not sure anybody's really looking at. So do we need to do that? We had cases where people, we have people in different locations, so they were spending a lot of time transporting to different places for meetings.

So we looked at addressing that. We had a couple of technical processes that could be more efficient. And we just had a team cross divisionally who got together to say, "We're going to just sit down again for a concentrated amount of time and we're going to fix this," which no one had taken the time to do because it was somewhat complex. But once the right people were in the room, they were able to fix that process and suddenly the kind of perpetual drag of that process that wasn't efficient was tidied up. We're doing some things with meetings, meeting efficiency. So I do think there are ways that we can be proactive to say, how do we change the way we work? And sometimes are there things we're not going to do anymore? And that takes a little more leadership buy-in, but I think those are important conversations to try to have too.

Nicole Muscanell: Yeah, I think that was a very clear message in the second report through not only our survey, but also through the focus groups was we need to prioritize because I mean, even just from a realistic sort of mathematical perspective, you can't do more with less for a sustained period of time because that equation doesn't actually work. And so I think what we heard a lot from our respondents and our participants was we need to learn how to say no to some things and we just need more decisiveness from our leadership. We just need people to just help make decisions so that we can be like, "This is the thing we're moving forward on. This is the thing that we're going to pause for right now."

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah. And I really appreciate that insight, Nicole, and I think sometimes it's good to remember the power as an employee of saying that to people. I had a really interesting moment where I had been coming to my leadership team to say, "Let's work together on how we clarify our goals for the year and let's figure out what system we use." And my team at the time didn't come to me. They came to the head of the PMO and they were like, "Will you just please tell us what to do? We don't need to co-author every process in this organization. Just figure it. We need the leadership to just figure it out." And nobody had said that to me, but it totally made sense when I heard it. And this is where I think sometimes for individuals on teams, if you see something where you're like, "Tell us what the priorities are," and you have a person in your org up the chain that you can tell that to, sometimes people don't actually totally know what specific things are going to be helpful to the team.

Kristen Gay: I love that. That reminds me of my first job out of grad school. I learned a lot from this person on a team who would go to our boss and say, "I have these two projects. Which one is the priority? If I only have this many hours in this week, which one gets the most of my time?" And that worked really well. She got great answers. I know that's not always possible, but you're right that that's a sort of step that's more within our control, I think, to ask for that clarity. Yeah.

Nicole Muscanell: We had a great quote in the report. I think it was something along the lines of, "Give us clear leadership and we will follow."

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, makes a lot of sense.

Sophie White: It feels like there's a nuance there because we've talked about the value of people seeing the meaning in their work, and sometimes you have to co-create things to find meaning in it. But it sounds like a matter of knowing your staff and understanding what drives them and excites them so that you can figure out where do they just need a list of priorities and where do we want to work together on this? Yeah. I was curious, Nicole, in the breaking the cycle of reactivity, I was reading that one and there was a quote from a respondent about doing a service reduction planning activity. And that was a new phrase to me. I hadn't heard of a deliberate attempt to look at where are we thoughtfully reducing service as an IT organization and how do we communicate about that? So I thought that was interesting too, just in terms of not just having someone bring up a priority or project and then having to fit it into this existing collection of tasks, but actually looking thoughtfully of where are we maybe going to reduce some of our service and how do we communicate that to the institution?

So I don't know, I'm curious if you have thoughts on how can you do that in a way that's still supporting the institutional mission and supporting stakeholders where they need it, but also reducing services to free up staff capacity too?

Nicole Muscanell: Yeah, I think a lot of it just kind of relates back to the examples that we just shared. And it essentially is just a prioritization task. And what I do love is that there are teams out there doing that by the way. So it means that they are taking a formal approach to prioritization, which I think really is needed. How they're going about that though and saying these are. I think that person was in IT services, but how you decide on that team, okay, which IT services can we cut? I don't know that I can provide any sort of real feedback there, but I think things that Kristen and Liv just shared, it's like, okay, well, at least for this period of time, what's the lowest priority? And so just at least listing those things out and just figuring out where can we do a little give and take, I think is really good.

And if that can be a little structured, I think that's good and it helps teams really get through that in a much more organized and meaningful way than just trying to randomly guess each month or each week, this is what we're going to do and we're going to ignore all these other things. I think creating some sort of process and structure for that is probably very helpful. And that person just was like, at the end of the day, we knew we had to reduce services in some way because we just have to. It was the only way to get through the meaningful work and to make sure operations are going to still be running. And so I think if teams can get to the point where they're like, we know we have to reduce services or we have to reduce this thing, let's actually do some of this work in an organized way to plan it out.

I think that can be really helpful. And I don't know how many teams are doing that, but it was nice to see that at least some were in our survey.

Kristen Gay: I'm curious, Liv, for you in the CIO role, we've been talking a lot about how teams are handling this and what they can do, but in your role, I'm curious about maybe what's most needed or what support is most needed for making those kinds of decisions about priorities right now.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, that's a great question. I do think I'm very fortunate to work for a president and with a senior team who's very transparent and work very well together. So we have a state of a college address from the president twice a year and very regular communication about what our priorities are, why they're the priorities, how they're addressing the changing context in higher ed. So that helps our whole community see and be aligned to what our priorities are and why. So that's a huge gift. And then we work as a seniors team, the kind of vice president's cabinet to identify as in order to meet these institutional goals, what do we need to be doing as divisions? And then that helps me. And I do think it helps to draw the line for my team to say, this is where Denison is going and these are the things that we have to deliver to support those key priorities institutionally.

And now let's look at what's our capacity. And one thing I will say is we try very hard, sometimes more successfully and sometimes less, but we try hard to not plan ourselves to 100 percent capacity for the year because in any role, and especially in IT, things are going to come up. So we try to say, what does it look like to plan for 70 or 80 percent capacity so we have some room when other big things come up? And there are ways that I would say data is really helpful in this and being able to say, our community is growing, the resources technology teams are asked to provide are growing. How do we continue to. And our team has been growing some, but we are stabilizing. So how do we recognize that we can't, as you said, Nicole, we can't just add and add and add that math doesn't work on that.

How do we determine if we want to do the most important things well, that means that there are some things we're not going to do or we'll be doing everything halfway. And so being able to say, these are some things that we think we could do differently. And I'll give one example, which is that we've been looking at our software contract procurement. And for large software contracts, we do these as an institutional prioritization review. Do we have funding? Is there a business purpose? And then we go through accessibility, security, FERPA, all the different reviews. With smaller contracts that are coming up divisionally or department needs something, we are kind of doing these one-off assessments, which are growing. Are these tools secure? Are they training on their AI tools on our data? And so we've just said, listen, we have to shift the way that we look at these smaller contracts because they add up.

And my cybersecurity team can't review 40 projects a semester to see if they're secure. We have to start. And then I got with the general counsel, I got with a finance office, I got with my deputy CIO and cybersecurity and said, what's the first driver on making a decision about a contract? It should be business purpose. So how do we start by identifying, do we have a business purpose for this? If we do, is it likely we'll have budget for it? And if those things are true and we agree that it's an institutional priority, then let's kick it over to accessibility and cybersecurity review.

And I think if you have access to a team who wants to collaborate, that can be a really meaningful process because it reduces overhead for everyone. So I think those are some of the kinds of things. I think data is helpful if you have to reduce services to be able to say, we're looking at our service desk and we know that the least busy usage is during these times, we think we could cut Sunday afternoons and be pretty much fine. Or communicate openly to the community. But I think data can be great at looking at where the greatest need is. And where sometimes I do think on our teams, this 20 percent extra stuff can take a vast majority of our time. And so how we can tidy up some of these things that are lower priority, but just can be super absorbing. Knowing what those things are is a great place to start.

Sophie White: Yeah, that's a great example I think of how as a CIO, you can be a protector of your team to make sure if there's something that they don't necessarily need to go through the mental load of evaluating, you're protecting them from even being exposed to that. I'm curious, I'm thinking about the workforce reports and folks who may be newer in their careers and are really ambitious, maybe they want to be involved in some of those conversations. How do you coach and mentor maybe IT staff who are interested in growing in these positions, even if you don't necessarily have an open position or an ability to promote someone in the ways that they want to? How are we supporting our community in that way?

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, I mean, I think that growth is another huge motivator and investment. People particularly in our community want those opportunities. So we try to look at what are the ways we can invest in people's growth? We're fortunate this year to be sending a number of people to EDUCAUSE in-person annual conference, and we have a few people doing the virtual. And so we said, how many times do we send people to a conference and they're really excited and all this great stuff comes their way and then they come home and it's back into the grind and it's hard to retain? So we said we were going to do an EDUCAUSE jumpstart program. So we have our community of people who are attending virtually or in person getting together. We each have a document where we're capturing what's an important takeaway for us at this year's EDUCAUSE, what's a connection we want to make?

And then, I can't remember, there's a couple things we're thinking about in advance. We'll get together this in early September and talk as a group around what we each want to get out of the conference. We are meeting together as a team there on site. And then when we come back, we're going to talk about how we're putting that stuff into play. And so that's a small thing, but it can help people be able to go into a professional development space and actually walk out prepared to take the impact with them. And I think we can sit as a team and say, what do we as a team really need to know right now? Do we need to pay attention to limiting our service catalog? Do we need to pay attention to upskilling our entire workforce on AI? What are some of the things that can help us gather that information and be intentional about it?

This is, again, comes back to if you can carve out a little bit of time to be thoughtful about what's most important. I think it helps you get more out of the places you do spend your time.

Sophie White: Yeah, I think that's a great example. And Kristen, I know in your report, focus on professional development was definitely brought up as an employee retention priority. People want to understand that their institutions are supporting them in some way. So I love the focus on let's make sure that this is an intentional exercise to make sure that professionally, personally, people are getting what they can out of this experience. And then it's also, it sounds like, connecting back to the institutional strategic goals too.

Liv Gjestvang: Yeah. I'm going to add one thing. And then Kristen, I'm curious too about just what else was coming up in the report. But one thing around developing people is that I think that finding ways. There's two things that come out of engaging our newer people to our teams or more junior folks is that A, they often have insights that people at other vantage points don't have. And B, it starts to, as you said, Sophie, starts to develop your leaders and engage people who want to have an impact. And so I love this plus one model where rather than just. I do meet with my directors, I meet with directors and associate directors. So I spend a lot of time with leaders across our team. But what does it look like to have a brainstorming event or a discussion on a team where I say I am inviting my directs and each of them should bring a plus one from their team who should have a seat at the table and maybe normally doesn't?

And then what conversation can we have there to say, what does it look like? What challenges are you facing with balancing your workload? And then we're having that conversation at multiple levels or engaging voices of people who have a different perspective, who want to develop leadership kind of skills and have a seat at the table. So I think there's lots of ways to be intentional about it if we can find the time to carve out a little bit of space to do it.

Kristen Gay: For sure. And in the report, I think it was interesting that when we asked about the most important competencies, human-centered competencies really rose to the top, like adaptability and communication and collaboration. And I don't think that's a surprise given the rapid change that's happening right now. And I would add, I was really excited to see that collaboration was kind of energizing for our respondents. I think it could have been framed and maybe is understandably for some people as sort of just a necessity in this landscape when there are limited resources. You have to work with other people to accomplish your goals. But I think people were actually really excited about that. There was a lot of positive response to collaboration and getting to be a strategic partner with other areas of the institution. One focus group participant shared that we've talked a lot about collaboration over the last decade or so, but now we're actually having to do it.

And that's been, I'm sure, challenging in some cases, but also really exciting to get to grapple with some of these really big problems with other areas on campus that have different expertise and that come to these challenges with different perspectives. And so that was exciting to see that there's some energy there. It's not all negative.

Nicole Muscanell: I actually would love to bring in some results from the cutting room floor on professional development.

Kristen Gay: Exciting.

Sophie White: Go for it.

Nicole Muscanell: This wasn't in our report, but it's not because we didn't think it was important. We're trying to tell this really tight story, and we had limited real estate. But we did have some findings that weren't included in there on professional development. And so one of the things was the top factor that limits ability to participate in professional development was lack of time due to workload and staffing issues. So we see it there. It's like one of the big issues in investing in the growth of your workforce. It's that time and resource issue. The top type of professional development opportunity engaged in was self-directed learning. That was 83 percent saying that's what they were doing. And then the other really interesting thing is that the top reason for engaging in professional development in the past year for our respondents was to keep up with emerging technologies.

And so I think based on that, I'm wondering if we're seeing sort of the same thing extending to professional development when it comes to reactivity. So with Kristen's findings, we're seeing that they're like, "Hey, the human skills are important, communication, collaboration, maybe even leadership." But right now with some of these data that we don't have in the report, it seems like they're probably kind of in reactive mode with their professional developments. So I don't have time to do all these things. These things are important for me, but right now I just need to try to keep up with AI. And that's the only time I have to invest in professional development. And it's kind of on my own and it's self-directed and I'm not necessarily just running off to conferences and meetings and whatnot.

Kristen Gay: And again, it's a guessing game. That came through pretty clearly as well that in terms of AI upskilling, they're making investments, they're doing their best to guess at where things are headed, but it's not always possible. And so they're training for a future that they can't fully picture yet.

Sophie White: This is really fascinating. I feel like we could have kind of a meta report on the cycle of reactivity and professional development too. So yeah, it sounds like we're hearing that protecting time and having a more intentional focus on professional development and the goals for that is also an exercise that as a community we really need to work on ourselves.