How Knowing What Others are Doing Can Help You

Why does this policy have these requirements? Why does that policy exclude those? Why do we even have a policy on this? These are questions that often garner the response, “That’s just how we’ve always done it.” If that is the best answer you can find, it’s time to benchmark. This post offers a few suggestions for organizing your search.

What to Look For

First, decide what aspects of a given policy you want to review. Just reading through policies from other colleges and universities without an idea of what to look for will be a waste of your time. Consider what it is you want to change about an existing policy or what questions about a new policy you want to answer. This may include things like:

• Policy owners. Some policies have an obvious owner, like HR, IT, or Dean of Students Office. Others might be a little gray if they have wide application and straddle more than one area, like records retention or volunteers on campus. This is a data point that you can easily look for.
• Administrative structure. This includes things like whether to have a committee review something or just one person, the level at which a decision can be made, and what needs to be approved in advance.
• Scope. Which employees are covered by the policy? Does it also apply to students? Is there a dollar limit or threshold? Should the topic be broken down into more than one policy or should two policies be combined? These are just a few examples of the kinds of things that you might be questioning about your policy scope.
• Forms. Maybe you have a great policy already but need to create or update a form. Benchmarking can be used for that too by identifying which fields to include, whether to require a signature, etc.

Where to Look

Which institutions you include in your benchmarking will depend somewhat on who will be reviewing the results and how drastic the proposed changes may be.

• Your conference peers. If your college has athletics, you can’t go wrong benchmarking the institutions within your conference. This often holds a lot of water when you need to share the results with executives and/or faculty. Most schools have their policies posted online, especially public institutions. Bookmark the policy libraries of your peers so you can quickly browse to them when you need to. If your conference includes schools that publish their policies behind a login, you may need to email each institution individually to ask if they will share their policy with you.
• ACUPA colleagues. Post your questions to the ACUPA forums. Many of our members are willing to share their documents, and posting to the forums prevents you from having to send individual emails. The results can supplement the findings from your conference peers or be used alone.

How to Document

I find spreadsheets to be the best way to organize my information. Use one axis to list all the institutions and the other for your findings. Try to word the headings in a way that allows for easy comparison within a column or row. For example, using a question that can be answered yes or no makes it easy to see whether there is a strong tendency one way or another. Not all information can be answered with a yes or no, so in those cases, consider converting terminology, office names, or titles into ones that your institution uses. This allows you to compare apples to apples rather than a hodgepodge of terms. I also like to include a link to each policy as one of the columns or rows for easy reference.

Whether it’s time to revise a long-standing policy or draft a new one, benchmarking what other institutions are doing can save you time in the long run.

Learn All You Can so You Can Forget It

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of ACUPA or Purdue University.

“Jack of all trades, master of none.” That saying is one I use frequently to describe my job. As a policy administrator, I need to learn all that I can about whichever policy or policies are being developed or revised at a given time. The more I know, the better support I can provide to the policy owner with regard to language, organization of information, and stakeholder input. Researching policy topics is what makes me a jack of all trades.

One of the main ways I learn more on a topic is to look at other institutions’ policies. Benchmarking allows me to identify commonalities with regard to scope, affected groups, exclusions, definitions, etc. ACUPA forums are an easy way to get a handful of policies to review. I also have the policy websites of peer institutions bookmarked, so I can search for topics.

Often, there are relevant laws or regulations that need to be considered. I have the U.S. Code, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, and the Indiana General Assembly websites bookmarked – talk about some dry reading! Government agency and institute websites provide a fair amount of information in the form of brochures and FAQs, which makes it much easier to get an understanding of the main points.

Once a policy is approved, I move on to the next one. It’s a cycle that has both pros and cons. I enjoy learning new things, so researching policy topics gives me an opportunity to do that. What I don’t enjoy is realizing a year later that most of the information I packed into my brain has disappeared. That is what makes me a master of none. I’m OK with that, because what never changes in this cycle is that drafting and editing policies is like putting together a puzzle. I am continuously gathering all the pieces and figuring out how to put them together so that they create a cohesive image. Maybe that makes me a master of puzzles.