Abstract
“Buy-in” is one of the most common challenges in student affairs. Whether it’s residential curriculum, assessment, or new initiatives, staff are often told they need to “get others on board”—but rarely given tools that actually work on a Tuesday when they’re trying to do their job.
This session reframes the conversation. Instead of focusing on convincing people to care, we’ll explore how everyday work can be designed so that key priorities are easier to follow through on—and harder to avoid. Participants will walk away with practical ways to build expectations, simplify processes, and reduce friction in their own roles, regardless of position.
Outcomes
- Explore how everyday work can be designed so that key priorities are easier to follow through on – and harder to avoid.
- Utilize effective strategies to build expectations, simplify processes, and reduce friction in their own roles.
Presenters
- Erin Simpson (she/her/hers), Assistant Vice President and Assistant Dean of Students, University of Oklahoma
Date Of Recording: 9/24/26
Music: Firefly by Yan Perchuk, Shutterstock ID Z38FTVHOVGITU1GY
Watch the Video:
Links and References:
Transcript
Amanda Knerr:
And now I’m really excited to introduce today’s featured speaker, Erin Simpson is one of our Roompact fellows, and she’s an Assistant Vice President and Assistant Dean of Students at the University of Oklahoma. She’s going to be leading today’s session. I’m really excited about it. The Myth of Buy-In: Designing Work People Actually Do, where we’re going to be exploring buy-in tools that actually work on a Tuesday when you’re trying to do your actual job. Erin, thanks for joining us today and sharing your expertise with the Roompact community. It’s all yours.
Erin Simpson:
Thanks, Amanda. I really appreciate it. And thanks to all of you from all over the country who are joining us for the next little bit. I know that some of us are live here today and we’ll be able to interact in the chat. I hope you will do that. And some folks may see this on the website in six months when you’re trying to motivate your RA staff to show up at a staff meeting. So shout out to you, too, in the future who are watching this recording at two and a half speed at three o’clock on a Tuesday. We appreciate you as well.
My name is Erin Simpson. I work at the University of Oklahoma in the Division of Student Affairs. I grew up in housing and residence life, so I spent the first 12 years of my career as a resident director, a hall coordinator, an associate director of residence life. I really credit my ability to work divisionally to that upbringing in Residence Life. I also used to run the university’s Gender and Equality Center here at the University of Oklahoma, so gender-based violence prevention, LGBTQ programs. And now I work in student affairs broadly and my portfolio includes orientation programs, Greek life, campus activities, assessment, planning, advocacy and education, the food pantry, really the wide gamut of a student experience.
I’m a huge Roompact fan. I’m constantly… Matt Unger, if you happen to watch this webinar, please make Roompact for everybody and not just housing folks. Just kidding, just kidding. But I do remain pretty jealous of the tools that I had in Residence Life that simply aren’t as available across the division and other areas because Roompact really made those possible. And it’s actually one of the things that I thought about when I was developing this session today.
I think buy-in is a pretty common challenge in student affairs. So it’s something that I hear about a lot at every conference I go to, “How will I generate the buy-in for that?”
Whether you’re talking about building a residential curriculum, you’re talking about assessment, a new initiative, staff are often told that they need to get others on board, but not as often talked to about how that work will actually then function. I know that every time I’ve experienced resistance, it’s been because someone doesn’t understand how this fits into their job. How does this work on my already full plate?
One of my favorite phrases is how does this actually function on a Tuesday when there is a flood upstairs, when I have a roommate conflict in front of me, I have three parent calls to return, and oh, by the way, your assessment plan for the month was due a week ago. When we introduce new systems, are we thinking about them in the context of all of the work that everyone is already doing? So for this session, I wanted to reframe that and instead of focusing on convincing people to care, I want to explore about how everyday work can be designed so that our priorities are easier to follow through on and harder to avoid.
A little bit about what we’re going to do today, articulate why buy-in as a goal isn’t necessarily… It kind of often fails. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. We’re going to be really honest, painfully honest about that part. I want to identify at least one friction point in a process that you may own and think about what some design-based fixes could be. I want to talk about some expectation setting and default behavior strategies that work in real life, and then maybe name some specific ways to simplify processes so that our staffs are more likely to follow through.
So my friends that are here with us live today in the chat, if you wouldn’t mind, just so that we start thinking about this, what’s one initiative in your area right now where you’re hoping you can get people on board, something that you’re thinking about buy-in around. You joined this webinar today with this topic on your mind. So drop that in the chat and we’ll see some of the things that we come up with.
Yeah. Seeing some student engagement in general, buy-in. Yes, that is one that I’m hearing about broadly across the divisions, all of those pieces. If I pronounce your name incorrectly, I apologize, but thanks, Liza. I appreciate you dropping that in there.
I want to talk about… Before we do a whole lot more, feel free to be dropping those things in the chat, you all. I will be paying attention. Oh yes, Liza. I’m glad I got your name right. Let’s set a general understanding of what I mean by buy-in. So this definition is rooted in some educational literature that centers organizational change. So Hubbard 2022 defines buy-in as, “The context of organizational change can be considered an honest, reciprocal agreement between leaders and members or stakeholders of an organization to work together to navigate a successful change initiative.”
So we generally understand buy-in to be about an agreement between decision makers who may be in a different room. A decision got made possibly somewhere else. So we generally understand it to be about an agreement between decision makers and stakeholders, people who made a decision and then people who have to do some work around that decision that generates some sort of change action.
Some of the examples that you all have been talking about is, we talked about affinity groups. Thank you, Kimberly. About people understanding administrative processes and how they actually matter. They do. They do. Goodness loves an administrative process. We’re going to use a lot of examples for that today. Some other examples that I’ve largely seen are you have an institutional strategic plan that impacts the goals that you’ve set for yourself. Your residential curriculum is either being developed or needs to change in a revision. Your legal counsel has said you need a different form to do student notifications of any kind. Conduct changes its platform from Maxient to something else. You have a million things that could rely on really needing buy-in to go well. You have a million things that a decision maker and a group of people are going to have to come to some agreement on.
I think about this a lot and it’s because of this number. Now, friends, I really hesitated about this 70%, because it’s an often fought about number. But same dissertation, Hubbard 2022 says that “70% of organizational change efforts fail and a leading reason for that failure is a lack of stakeholder buy-in.”
Now, there’s a number of publications that cite that this percentage of org change failures could be inflated, that that’s possibly not it. But Gallup, which is one of our leading organizational change, big research think tanks, says that, “More than 70% of organizational change initiatives fail because they’re done at people rather than with them and they fail to properly engage and focus on frontline staff.”
Well, the point that I really want to make here is that we recognize that organizational change is really a hard task. And we talk about the motivation of our teams and what leaders are doing to engender overall buy-in. We talk about that all the time, and we frame this as appealing to some sort of intrinsic sense of motivation. Every time I have been asked to go get buy-in about something, it’s been about convincing someone. It has felt sort of transactional in some way, shape or form. It’s been about talking about values alignment or it’s talking about… Kimberly, I think you nailed it here in the chat about understand that these things are really important, convincing someone of the importance of something. I’ve had to often really feel like I was trying to sell an idea to people who the framing of the conversation felt like they just weren’t motivated to do the change.
But I want to flip it a little bit. What if the problem is process overall and not necessarily will or motivation? Currently, buy-in framing puts the burden on motivation. It assumes that the work itself is fine, that the thing that we’re asking for is fine, and that the people part of the equation is the problem. So this is where the myth of buy-in comes in for me because I’m not convinced that I have always put forward good processes and that they haven’t been part of the problem. I want to name my own agency in that. I’ve absolutely had to go out and convince a group of RAs to do something for me. And with some hindsight, I’m not convinced that the thing that I was asking them to do wasn’t the problem in and of itself. I think sometimes it’s design.
So I get to work with brilliant higher education teams. I now get to have this 30,000 foot view of my division and the work, and I work with brilliant teams all day long. From my vantage point right now, the friction, it comes from navigating our structural processes and not motivation. The people that I work with do genuinely care about the things that we’re trying to do. I’m not trying to convince them that something is a good idea necessarily. I’m trying to get them to follow a process that might not have been created with them in mind.
So the question for me stops being, how do I get people to care? It’s what would make this easier to do rather than to not do? So there’s this concept, it’s called behavioral economics, and it recognizes that people have really limited attention, time, energy, and a willingness to make decisions. I think about this a lot when I get home and the concept of deciding on dinner feels like a mountain I would have to climb, because I have already spent all of my decision making power throughout the day. So if we agree that people have limited attention, time, energy… Yes, Liza, decision fatigue. Limited time, attention, energy, and a willingness to make a decision, then every additional step that I put into a process or to a procedure creates what behavioral economics call friction.
So as an example, how many of you have a process… I will name, I will shame the University of Oklahoma, and say that we do have processes where I have to find a form, download it, fill it out, scan it, email it, and then I have to wait for confirmation. I won’t make you all shame your own institutions, and also nobody send this to Accounting at the University of Oklahoma. But I absolutely have processes that require all of that for me. If that’s option A and option B is just hitting submit, even if people think that option A is a good option or it’s the one that they want, you’re way more likely to just hit submit, because the effort required from me is dramatically lower.
So I want to flip it. I want to flip it and I want to use a student affairs example here. So again, I’m framing this of what if the problem is process and not will? So part of my portfolio is to get students to complete sexual violence prevention training. I’m not often in a position where I have to convince people why that’s important. So if my process looked like students are responsible for completing this training, here’s a link to sign up, and I send that email. Let’s say I send that email to the 27,000 undergrads at OU that one time, and I assume that’s it.
Their process is involved. I know that I sent them an email. I know that it sounds easy, you just have to sign up. But alternatively, what I could do is I could automatically enroll students in an online training in our LMS that they’re already in every day. I could send them that direct link rather than making them search for it. I could make the very first step to get into that training the first click on Canvas. I could give them much better communications about clear deadlines. I could send automatic reminders from a system. I could make the completion status visible to them. I could remove unnecessary forms or logins because it’s already behind their single sign-on when they get into Canvas. I’m not necessarily persuading them to care more about the concept of sexual violence prevention. I’m changing the architecture of the choice so that completing the training at some point is actually easier than ignoring it. So that’s our core lens today is working on our design rather than persuasion.
I want you to think about a process that you follow really consistently. Was it because you’re really motivated to follow that process, or was it because it’s an easy process for you to follow? It was just something that that’s just how it worked and it made sense. So have that in your mind. I’m not going to ask you to do anything with it, but I just want you to think about that.
So if I’m asking us to think about the design process, and I know that there are a lot of conversations in residential curriculum work that I’m very into about design thinking, start with the end in mind. We’re flipping this a little bit and we’re talking about your levers of work design. So I really want to frame these three levers that in my experience over the last 20 years of trying to design work that makes sense to people, feels easy, feels frictionless. These are the three things that I have found to be the most important in this design thinking work. First, I want to make my expectations really unmissable. Second, I want to simplify the process itself as much as I possibly can. And third, I want to design the default, right? I want the default way to function to be the way that I want it to be.
So let’s talk about that. I want to unpack these. Let’s start with making expectations unmissable. So there’s a big difference between everyone knows, and it’s written down visible and revisited often. I think this is particularly true in student affairs culture when we talk about our… We’re really good at… Oh, sorry, went the wrong way. We are really good at creating one time. Sorry, it’s not like clicking onto my next… That’s very unpleasant for all of us. We’re very good at giving expectations once a year in a training or in a one-time email. We have a whole day of RA training in August or in September that’s dedicated to expectation setting. We even probably put it on a really big butcher paper thing. And then it either just lives on a wall in the back of a programming room somewhere or we just maybe don’t talk about it that often.
But expectations given once a year in a training or in a… I’m so sorry, I apologize for what is happening on my screen. Expectations given once a year in a training or in one time emails, those are not visible expectations. Those are hopeful. It’s hopeful that we remember what those are. So when I think about making my expectations unmissable, I’m thinking about shifting from a once a year expectation to a meeting agenda that has my goals listed on it, right? Every one-on-one that I have with directors that report to me has our shared 2026 goals on it. Every single meeting, so that at some point in that meeting we have to look at them and be like, “Are we on track? Are we not on track? What are we doing? How is this happening?”
And that’s after 20 years of me forgetting what I had listed in my January goals to get to my eval season the next time and being like, “Oh yeah, I said I was going to do this.”
Friends, that’s not how goal setting works, and I consider myself an assessment person, and was still not able to keep those things unmissable for myself until I started really thinking about, “Where do they have to live for me to see them every day, to see my expectations, to see the things that I need to do?”
So I want you to think about, maybe drop in the chat, where in your work do expectations exist, perhaps only in someone’s memory. We just talked about that at RA training, and I’m hoping they remember, but I don’t know if they do. Maybe drop those in the chat or feel free to unmute, challenge by choice. Up to you.
Yeah, I love them on Roompact, but yes, I don’t know if they check it more than once in the beginning. Yeah.
Let’s go to this next one about simplifying the process. The fewer the steps, the more likely the completion. I think about this pretty regularly that I have designed very fussy steps in my life. I remember, Amanda may remember, the very first residential curriculum I ever designed was very fussy. It had approximately 700 steps, because I was so excited about thinking through the work. I was so excited about if this, then that, and then we can do this and it was really exciting. I built probably a 500-page workbook for RAs. Oh, I was proud of that thing. It cost us a million dollars to print it. It was so fussy that about half of it got completed. The fewer the steps, the shorter the process, the easier the completion.
So every step in a process that you build is another opportunity for someone to get confused, to get interrupted, to decide it’s not worth it and bail, to make a mistake, to give up. Every single step offers another off ramp, right? And we don’t particularly like to think about that because we’re like, “Well, I designed a solid process.” You probably did. I’m not arguing that at all. I’m arguing that human behavior says that simplification is the fastest route to completion.
So I also want to be clear that simplification isn’t lowering standards. So it might be the most important sentence I say. Sometimes when I say, “Simplify the process,” people hear, “Make it easier,” and interpret that as make the requirements less rigorous. That’s not what I mean.
I’m saying… As an example, I’m not saying “Let’s collect less meaningful assessment data.” I’m saying, “Let’s collect the same data without making our people jump through a million unnecessary hoops.”
So when I think about simplifying this process, our director of student affairs and planning, the inimitable, Dr. Quan Phan at the University of Oklahoma is constantly like, “Erin, we’re already collecting that in other places. You don’t have to require 10 data points. Let’s collect 2 in this way because staff is already entering that information in 10 other systems.” So I still need those 10 data points, but stop making them put it in multiple places. Those are completely different things, right?
I know that you all have heard about assessment fatigue or survey fatigue or things like that. This is what I mean when I say simplify the process. How many places do we really need to do the same work and where are we already gathering that information so that we could do this really, really differently?
The third point here is to design the default. If doing the right thing requires way more effort than not doing it, most people won’t get it right most of the time. That’s just the reality of… And I don’t mean doing the right thing ethically. I want them to do that. That’s a different conversation we’re having entirely. I mean, following the process. If the following the process requires so much more effort than not following a process, most people will not get your process right every time. That’s not saying people are bad or lazy. It’s saying that our systems and our processes are competing with human attention.
So imagine doing nothing that is zero steps, right? Missing a deadline, zero steps. Completing a fussy process that I designed around residential curriculum, eight steps. That means I was essentially asking people to overcome an eight to nothing disadvantage competition for their attention every single time. That’s not great system design.
Instead, if doing nothing is zero step or they just get a natural consequence, but doing the desired thing, doing my process is one or two steps that is baked in and easy in the place that they go, now the system is working with human behavior rather than against it. So I think about this as opt-ins versus opt-outs is a great example. So if I send my team an email that says, “Hey, do you want to participate in this professional development workshop? Sign up here.”
You’re like, “Erin, that sounds really easy.” They just sign up and then they just show up.
But I’ve asked them to opt in. I’ve asked them to think about whether or not they’re going. I’ve asked them to think about if their work bestie is going. I’ve asked them to do all of these pieces in their head that is a lot of work versus if they have to opt out, that looks like me sending, “Hey, we registered everyone for this professional development workshop on October 15th, because that was a time that all the directors said that folks were free. If you can’t attend, click here to opt out.”
Well, now everybody feels a little differently. Participation is the default, right? The default isn’t sitting in your office alone. Participation is the default. They have to actively say no to change it, and they aren’t left confused about who all’s going. I’ve just created this entire human motivation piece and taken out a lot of the guessing game by having folks opted into something or they have to opt out rather than opt in.
So I know I’m stuck on assessment because it’s assessment season. People are talking a lot about assessment for us right now. So a real life example of application of this is in our old system, it would be something like, “Please remember to submit your assessment report by Friday.”
Besties, I never got an assessment report by Friday. I probably never even turned one in by Friday. Now, you get a pre-populated template. Your prior year data is already there. The required fields are highlighted. The submission link is in a place that they already do their work. Reminders are automatic. I designed something where I don’t also have to send a reminder. I don’t have to remember that either. The report feeds directly into a divisional dashboard. There’s no confusion about if they’ve just sent something into an abyss. I’m not asking people to become more motivated about whether or not their work… how they tell the story about their work. I’m just removing all of the barriers that made them question how to do it.
This is the kind of default piece that I’m talking about. Now, in other spaces, I can’t say Roompact helps you design the default because not everyone has Roompact, but we’re on a Roompact webinar. Roompact is probably one of the more powerful design tools for making this work. And so, in my real life example I have in my notes is, just use Roompact. Because I think it actually does those things for us.
Okay. I want to move on. I want to make sure I pause in case anybody has any questions or concerns, feelings, any pieces? Drop them in the chat, unmute, say, “Hey.” Nope? Okay, great.
I want us to do a little activity, and I’m a little worried because I can’t make the animation on my slide work, which is weird. It’s never happened to me before. So we’re going to do something called a friction audit. First, I want you all… In the beginning, I asked you to think about a process, and this is where I want you to be living on here, is think of a process that you own or co-own where follow through is inconsistent. Maybe it’s an administrative process. Maybe it is a meeting that is just hard to get on the books. Just think of something that is a process you own or co-own where follow through is inconsistent. I want to give you 30 seconds to think about that, jot it down and I would love to see… We’re going to be thinking about that for the next few minutes while I figure out what is happening. No, I don’t want that. If you’re in the recording later, you’re going to be like, “What is this lady doing?”
Okay. The step two of this that is not on your screen, and I apologize. I promise that I will send Amanda these slides and everyone will have all of these available to them. But list every step that you are asking someone to do to complete this process, including the invisible steps. I want you to think about is a step that they have to find a form, is it that they have to remember the deadline, that they have to know who to send it to, decide what counts as done. Be honest, be really intellectually honest with yourself about what it actually takes to complete this process versus what on paper it might take. On paper, it might just be like download, submit. But what are the pieces, what are the invisible steps?
For me, I’ll share my moment of vulnerability. I never know what account I’m charging anything. We have all these processes where I have to include something called a chart field spread. And I have to tell you, friends, that is my number one work nemesis at the University of Oklahoma, is my chart field spread. I don’t know what that is. And so, I am late almost every time because I cannot figure out how to include that. So that is a friction point for me in a process. So every single thing somebody has to do.
And then, what we’re going to do is we’re going to mark that step. So as you’ve listed these things out, mark any step that adds friction, but not value. So when I ask, “What does it mean friction without value?” This is a really important part because not every step is bad. Sometimes a step exists for a really good reason. I’ll be really honest, they got to know my chart field spread, but it’s still a friction point for me.
I think about when students have to submit things like a conduct appeal, and there’s an identity verification process in it. That might be a friction point, but it also might be necessary. They may need to log on to something behind a single sign-on. Is that a friction point? Yeah, it could be. But also we may really need that. So I want to be clear that not every moment of friction is a bad one.
I think about this a lot when we are… we no longer include demographic data as an example in our assessment surveys, because we just put it behind a single sign on and we pull from our institutional data. I don’t need a student every time they fill out a survey for me to fill out the same 10 questions that already exist in our institutional data set. That’s a friction point that wasn’t worth it because it added 10 questions to our assessment. So I want you to mark any steps that added friction but not value.
Okay. The next thing that I want you to think about is, does this… We’re going to go back to these guys. Which lever could you apply to those friction points? Is this about an expectation being unmissable? Could I simplify this process? Is the design not baked in? Is my default pointing in the wrong direction? Are they opted out rather than in? Apply that to those friction points.
Some questions that I typically ask myself are here. What are they being asked to do? Is it entirely necessary? I’m regularly asking how many clicks does it take to get to that? Partially because I took a universal design class that made me think about that really a lot, and partially because I think that frankly, our students don’t have the attention span anymore to click through these pieces and search for something. I’m asking constantly what information do they need balanced against, are we asking for information we already have? Do they have to leave a system and go somewhere else? Can we keep them in one place? Do they have to enter the same information twice or can I pre-populate something for them? Do they have to make a decision? This is a hard one because some people don’t love this. Can I already make a decision for them? Can I point my default in the right direction? And does this step actually improve the outcome? And if not, why does it exist?
The final question that I ask myself about every friction point is, if I removed this, would it break something? Well, what would be broken if I didn’t do this? If the answer is nothing, it would be fine. Then you’ve probably found some unnecessary friction. This is sometimes where I also find my own brain saying, “But Erin, this is how we’ve always done this. Are you sure we don’t need this because this is how we’ve always done this?”
Friends, that’s hard to resist against, but an important thing to do. Because just because we’ve always done something in a certain way or in an analog capacity or we have never front loaded the information in a way that a process may be asking you to now, doesn’t mean that it’s actually a worthwhile point of friction and management there.
I know we didn’t have a ton of time here because we’re time bound on this webinar here, but did anybody find any points in their process that they thought, “Oh, wow, I don’t actually know why we do that?” Or, “That could help.”
Or are you all way better than me at process design and running some really tight ships and we really do need to work on motivation? Feel free to drop it in the chat or to unmute and share if you’re brave.
Okay. I’m going to move on, but feel free to keep putting those spaces in there. I hear a lot about positionality as well, or I think about it a lot. It is really easy to talk about processes when you are a person who gets to design them, but I’m very aware that not every person in the Division of Student Affairs at the University of Oklahoma had a hand in designing the processes that they have to navigate. I think about that a lot.
So I’m constantly thinking about positionality from a couple of different lenses. The first one is, what’s at least one process that you can influence? I think we probably all have one process that we feel like maybe we own enough of that we could influence or change. That’s where I want to start, is I want to name my own scope of influence and strategically start there. I know that I have a lot of influence over process inside the Division of Student Affairs just based on my positionality, the positional role that I hold. But I don’t have that much power over processes across the whole institutional enterprise. So I’m constantly thinking about, “What is my own scope of influence? How can I strategically start there? And then, how do I make sure that those processes are in alignment before I’m trying to cast my net a little bit wider?”
I want to be clear that the goal in thinking about these things is not to change your entire structure in one day or after a 45-minute long webinar. That would be wild. It’s to get your team from point A to point B in a more seamless way. It’s to think about where the friction is. Could I remove any of that? And I’ll tell you another thing that I think about around that a lot is, “How do I get my team from point A to point B?”
I think this is some of the hardest work people do. I think Residence Life work is probably, bar none, some of the hardest work in student affairs. I think resident advisors have the hardest student jobs on campus. So I’m constantly thinking about, “What is a burden I could take off? What’s a point of friction that I could remove that would make all of these pieces flow better so that they could focus on the good, necessary and challenging work that is in front of them?”
When I was a coordinator and new professional, the space that I knew that I could influence was, did we need to have a 25 question long intentional interaction that I had written? I want to confess my own culpability in that. I wrote a fussy intentional interaction facilitation guide. It was a massive point of friction. Guess what never got done? Intentional interactions.
We shifted those to be really priority driven, to think about Likert scales rather than them having to type out some responses, to shared dialogues between students and staff so that students weren’t like, “Why are you such a creeper coming and asking me some of these things?” We shifted that and our intentional interaction completion rate was hitting above 90s, in the high 90s because it just made sense. I was asking for things that they already wanted to know about their residents and then adding a couple of add-ons that didn’t make their process impossible.
My point of entry as a coordinator or new professional was in documentation, in communication, how I set up student staff for follow through. As a mid-level or senior staff member, my design decisions all ripple down. So I thought about the defaults that I was creating for my teams, “Are we defaulting in the right direction? Is our default arrow pointing towards progress or pointing towards complicated systems that are really challenging for our staffs to navigate?”
So I know that I couldn’t possibly talk about process design without acknowledging that some of us are navigating processes that we are not the decision makers on, and that that is a complicated place to be in. And my suggestion is that first we start with our own scope of influence and work out from there.
I want to ask about a commitment you might want to make to examine a process. I see Tim in the chat is talking about reviewing processes every year. Tim, love that. I was often not that thoughtful about that. But I want to return to that friction audit that we tried to do a little bit earlier. What’s a change you could make this week? If you identified anything on that list of like, “Oh, this is a point of friction that may not have value,” what’s one change that you could make one week in this week?
I’m not asking you to change the entire process or scrap the entire process, but I think about process review as really like a one bite at a time concept. When I was growing up, my grandfather used to ask me, “How do you eat an elephant?” And the answer was, “One bite at a time.”
And that’s how process and policy works. It’s often not a wholesale change or review or revision. And honestly, wholesale changes, reviews and revisions are sometimes the hardest times to engender that buy-in we were talking about earlier. But what’s one step, one default, one expectation made clearer that you could make in a week? What’s your one thing? If you know what your one thing is, drop it in the chat for me.
I will share with you that mine has been a cheat sheet of chart field spreads that I made literally two days ago, which is why it was on my mind to tell you that that’s my cultural nemesis at the University of Oklahoma is chart field spreads. That’s my one thing that I did this week to simplify a process. I couldn’t figure out how to pre-populate it. I don’t have any influence over how the form exists, but I could make a shared doc of cheat sheets and I did, and it was great.
Yes, automate deadline reminders. Yeah. Kimberly, I really like your point about not over emailing. I do get it. And I want to tell you that the biggest paradox that exists for me is that I think about that all the time. And then every piece of verified assessment data that we get from our students that are like, “How do you want to hear from us?” It’s either a DM, which I’m frankly not going to do, or an email. So my paradox around email is complicated, but I really like that.
I also like a place where you’re trying to simplify a process for yourself. Friends, automated scheduled send emails and texts if you are working in a system that has the capacity to do the schedule, send, text, greatest gift to this work that I have found process-wise.
Anybody else want to share anyone or unmute and share? Feel free. No? All right.
I want to say thank you to Roompact. I said earlier I’m a big Roompact devotee. I really did feel like it changed the way that we were able to do our work at the University of Oklahoma, and so I remain pretty dedicated to that.
If you want to continue this conversation, if you want to reach out, or if you want to schedule something before I hope Amanda and I see you at the R2 conference if you’re attending that, because I know that Amanda and I both are, here’s how you find me. I forgot the P on my email, you all. It’s erindsimp, that’s embarrassing, @gmail.com. Or you can find me on LinkedIn. Happy to connect.
Thank you for being here today. I hope this was helpful in any capacity. I do have a slide of references, but I will make sure that Amanda has these slides since presenting was a challenge today. An unexpected friction point for me, you all. So on my list will be slide animations. But I want to say thank you. Amanda, thank you for scheduling and for being here and hosting today.
Amanda Knerr:
Well, and Erin, thank you so much for being our featured speaker today and for giving us so many concrete tools and strategies to build buy-in, whether it’s curriculum, assessment, day-to-day tasks, duties, student staff, you name it. There was a strategy I took away today that we can use. For me, it’s what is that one small thing I can do this week instead of overhauling the entire process? So again, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate your time, expertise, and insights. Always take a tremendous amount away when I have an opportunity to listen and hear from Erin.
I want to thank all of you for joining us today. We are so glad you’re able to be part of the conversation and hope that you will continue to chew on some of these nuggets and put them into place in your work over the next few days and weeks.
If you have thoughts about today’s session or about future topics, I did put in the chat a link to our quick feedback survey. Please take the two or three minutes to fill it out so that we can continue to provide great resources and webinars to encourage your growth and development and support you in the work that you’re doing every single day.
Again, thank you for your time for doing this survey. We do read each of those responses and try to respond appropriately in getting new sessions set up. Please know we have a couple upcoming webinars coming. On October 8th, we have Paul Brown, our very own Paul Brown, doing Roompact 201, Utilizing Tasks to Task Progress and Keep Stuff Organized. And then on October 13th, one of our Roompact fellows, Natasha, will be doing Scary Assessment Stories to Tell in the Dark. So if you love assessment and you love Halloween, you won’t want to miss it.
Again, thank you. I hope you have a great afternoon and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.
Erin Simpson:
Thank you.
