Update from Stacey

At the beginning of this week, I attended Zoom meetings of the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Registrars, along with several ASR colleagues. It is always good to connect with our peer institutions to learn more about how they are handling challenging issues and to commiserate a bit too. I wasn’t able to attend the full conference, but I had a few takeaways from the conversations:

• We all have increasingly tight budgets and are thinking about how to be more efficient.
• ASR is lucky to have a structure that facilitates conversations across offices of the registrar, student finance, financial aid, etc. because many institutions struggle with this.
• The University of Minnesota and ASR have more flexible work options than many institutions.
• Balancing our regular work with strategic projects and leadership initiatives will be crucial to our organizational health.

I’m grateful we are already underway with looking at prioritization and capacity planning through the ASR Operations group.

On a mostly unrelated note, you will receive a link to take the Employee Engagement (E2) survey on Monday. I hope all of you take the survey to provide critical feedback to ASR about employee engagement and how we can continue to improve. Since the October 2019 survey, we have been through a lot. I’m very interested to see how we think the pandemic and our very different working environments affect our results and how we can work to support each other. For more information on terms that are part of the survey, see the article below.