Student Engagement Overview
Over the last 20 years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for leadership positions. One of my favorite questions to ask is why candidates think they are successful in their current role. Typically, I hear personal responses – I am a hard worker. I am passionate about student experience. However, the response I’m looking for is something extensible beyond the personal – something that translates to leadership of people, process, and systems. Whether you are a new or tenured leader, the ability to create and lead a high-performing team boils down to following an organized framework for operational excellence. So, how does a higher education leader create an environment where advisors thrive and students succeed? Metavasi Partners’ Student Engagement Framework is the answer.
The four components of the Student Engagement Framework have been refined at multiple institutions and are rooted in a deep understanding of student engagement drivers. The following is a high-level preview of each component.
Student Contact Strategy: This is your opportunity to verify each touch point with a student is valuable and efficient. Spend time making sure you have a complete view of every event that triggers contact with your students. Every interaction should be intentional, consistent, and leverage the most appropriate channel. You may be asking, “isn’t this a student journey map?”. No. Student journey mapping is a great tool if you want a nice visual of the student journey to share with leadership or stakeholders. However, it won’t help you operationalize the strategy and make it a reality. What good is a fancy journey map that doesn't evolve with changing student populations, operational demands, and new initiatives? The Metavasi Partners’ approach creates a living breathing document containing all student contacts. This document is constantly reviewed, tweaked, and improved to ensure your strategies evolve over time.
Tactical Work Cycle: Creating the mechanism for identifying and delivering work in a scalable manner guarantees advisors’ work leads to a consistent, high quality experience for students. This is another area where the Student Engagement Framework is different from student journey mapping. The student contact strategy is leveraged to identify the work that must be generated and routed to staff consistently. Successful institutions will not only track for completion of tasks, but validate them independently. If you are fortunate enough to have automation complete tasks, you still need to have processes to validate successful completion of the work.
Feedback: One of the most important uses of a leader’s time is collecting feedback from all stakeholders. No process, however well thought out, is perfect. Listening to your stakeholders and identifying ways to improve your process is a critical component of the Student Engagement Framework. Even if you hear positive feedback from your stakeholders that doesn’t mean their sentiment won’t change over time. Also, data collected must be qualitative and quantitative to provide the leader with a balanced view of the opportunities.
Operational Excellence & Governance: I haven’t talked about data much yet, but it is present throughout the Student Engagement Framework . The opportunity to improve student engagement comes from your ability to synthesize the various data in your processes and objectively evaluate your effectiveness. Create a culture of continuous improvement by identifying and prioritizing the process improvements that will generate the most improvement to your strategy and operations. For implementing change, I recommend the ADKAR Change Management methodology from Prosci. Their approach will cover everything from building awareness with stakeholders to reinforcing and sustaining change.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Student Engagement Framework or support Metavasi Partners can provide to your organization, I encourage you to complete our request form for a complimentary performance diagnostic of your student engagement strategy. Metavasi Partners is passionate about helping institutions execute transformational change. This framework is one tool we leverage to do that. If you are like us, and are interested in new ways of looking at things, I recommend following Sahil Bloom, and subscribing to his Curiosity Chronicle. He inspired us to share our framework with the higher education community.
