The discipline of continuous improvement
Implementing change is a journey – a long and often difficult process of change and development. So why do we do it? We want to change so that we can operationally improve and achieve better outcomes for our students and staff. As higher education professionals, we continually adapt our strategies to evolve with changing student behaviors, shifting operational demands, and new organizational products and initiatives. Having navigated this journey many times in my career, I was excited to partner with my colleagues at Metavasi Partners and share our Student Engagement Framework, focusing specifically on ensuring our strategies evolve and meet the ever-changing needs of higher education. This post will focus on the final two components of the framework. If you haven’t read our first two articles on this topic, be sure to check them out here.
Feedback is one of the most critical tools a leader should use when searching for ways to continuously improve a process. No matter how much effort you put into defining your strategy, it simply won’t be perfect. You need to establish a regular cadence for continuously monitoring your strategies and gathering input from staff that engage students directly. Coupling staff input with student feedback brings reality to the forefront and illuminates how our strategies are truly felt by the most important stakeholders. Feedback can be obtained through a variety of channels, whether it be through surveys, regularly scheduled staff meetings, focus groups, or Q&A with stakeholders. What’s most important is creating feedback channels that are regularly used and provide you rich information to glean insights for evaluating the need to adjust.
With feedback coming from multiple channels and stakeholders, it’s easy to feel like you have “feedback fatigue”. Categorizing your feedback into qualitative and quantitative categories can quickly help you organize and assess feedback. I’ve found that clearly understanding and classifying feedback is a step in the feedback process that is often missed. Businesses tend to move fast and often lack the time, effort, and resources necessary to organize data; however, this is key to determining a strategy’s success. Your quantitative data can be standardized into KPIs that can be leveraged to measure value and effectiveness over time. Are you contacting a student too often? Do you need to reevaluate whether a channel for communication is still effective? Is the content conveying a strong call to action? You can identify the answers to these questions by systematically monitoring the data and feedback on a regular basis.
The final component of the Student Engagement Framework is Operational Excellence & Governance. “We is better than me” … It is crucial to establish a multidisciplinary change council to govern your strategy. If you don’t have a structured approach to implementing change, you will quickly find teams straying from the strategy and making changes without the appropriate assessment. It is nearly impossible to establish a consistent and successful strategy for the entire organization if various teams stray off course from the governing implementation and measurement strategy. Operational excellence creates a streamlined and overarching process for collaboration, open communication, evaluation, process improvement, and overall engagement.
The Student Engagement Framework is the organizational process that provides structured continuous improvement. Organizations are constantly changing. Adopting frameworks that regularly assess change allows us to proactively make adjustments rather than react when it’s too late.
I encourage you to reach out to Metavasi Partners through our request form and leverage our complimentary performance diagnostic. We are passionate about providing support to institutions that will help execute their missions through engaging students.
