A Holiday Wishlist for Less Meeting Mayhem

'Tis the season for joy, cocoa…and for policy administrators, a merry juggling act between managing policies, deciphering new laws, and reflecting on the year’s endeavors. The past few years feel like the Grinch made off with our precious time, leaving us in virtual meetings.

If your holiday wish list includes fewer meetings and more sanity, you're not alone! Let's unwrap the gift of time by tackling the addiction to meetings.

The Meeting Epidemic: A Festive Overload

Picture this: a conference room adorned with tinsel, where meetings drag on longer than Northern Ontario winters. In many organizations, it's a struggle to find time for 'real' work amidst the sea of meetings and endless video calls.

Gina-Santa’s Other Elf’s Six Questions to Rescue Your Schedule

Do We Need This Meeting, or Is It Just a Mistletoe Misunderstanding?

Sometimes, meetings happen out of habit or tradition, much like your Uncle Bob's annual reenactment of 'A Christmas Carol.' Pause and reconsider the necessity.

Can We Combine It with Others, Like a Potluck Feast?

Just as cranberry sauce pairs well with turkey, some meetings might blend harmoniously. Merge those agendas and save time for everyone!

Can It Happen Less Frequently, Like Reindeer Appearances?

Not every meeting needs to be a weekly occurrence. Embrace the magic of spacing them out to keep the holiday spirit alive.

Can We Do It in Less Time, like a Speed-Wrapped Present or a Gift Bag Express?

Challenge yourself to trim the meeting fat. Set a timer—get your point across before Rudolph finishes his annual flight.

Can Fewer People Attend, Keeping It Cozy?

Just like a snug fireside chat, not everyone needs a seat at every meeting. Invite only those who truly need to be there.

How Can We Manage It Better, Like Santa's Workshop?

Elves have their systems down—let's learn from them. Streamline agendas, set clear objectives, and be as efficient as Santa on Christmas Eve.

Conclusion: Unwrapping the Gift of Time

This holiday season let's gift ourselves, and others, the present of fewer, better-managed meetings. And to our beloved policy administrators tirelessly ensuring order in this festive chaos—take a break, too! Even elves pause for hot cocoa. By reevaluating our meeting habits and giving our hardworking teams the gift of time, we can sleigh the holiday season with efficiency and joy. If you are looking for a good relaxing read, check out the last blog post by Sara Gigeroff, University of New Brunswick Reigniting Professional Passions through Policy Related Professional Development.

And that’s a wrap! Thank you to my ACUPA colleagues for a wonderful year of knowledge and sharing.

Navigating Effective Policy Documents in the University Landscape

Understanding the Audience

Before setting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), it's imperative to identify and understand your target audience. Universities consist of various stakeholders including faculty members, administrators, students, funding bodies, and the wider community. Each group may have different levels of familiarity with the subject matter, so tailoring your content to match their level of expertise is crucial.

For instance, a policy brief aimed at university administrators might focus on the practical implications of a proposed policy, while a communication document for students might emphasize the benefits and relevance of the policy to their academic experience. By understanding the needs and expectations of your audience, you can tailor your document to resonate with them effectively.

“The idea of citizen participation is a little like eating spinach: no one is against it in principle because it is good for you.” (Arnstein 1969, 216)

Social accountability in policy writing can be achieved through mechanisms such as consultations, general feedback mechanisms, and collaboration with internal or external organizations. Social accountability mechanisms provide early warning systems for potential issues or unintended consequences. Identifying challenges early on allows policymakers to make necessary adjustments before problems escalate.

Clarity, Conciseness and Planning

In a university environment, where research and ideas can be complex, it's easy to get lost in technical jargon and intricate details. However, the hallmark of an effective accompanying document is clarity and conciseness. Avoid overwhelming your readers with excessive information. Instead, distill the key points, supporting evidence, and implications into a format that is easily digestible.

Use clear, straightforward language to explain concepts and avoid unnecessary jargon. Bullet points, headings, and subheadings can help break up the content and guide readers through the document smoothly. Remember, the goal is not to showcase your vocabulary, but to effectively convey your message.

Structure and Visual Appeal

A well-structured document is easier to navigate and comprehend. Begin with a concise introduction that outlines the purpose and scope of the document. Follow this with the main content, organized logically with headings and subheadings. Each section should flow naturally, guiding the reader through your argument or proposal.

Visual elements such as graphs, charts, and infographics can enhance the clarity of your document by presenting data in a more digestible format. However, ensure that these visuals are relevant, clear, and properly labeled.

Evidence-Based Content

Tailored Tone and Style

Engagement, Call to Action and Timing

Engagement is key to the success of any communication. Encourage readers to actively consider your proposal, policy, or message. Pose questions that prompt reflection or suggest potential actions they can take. A clear call to action will help guide readers on how to respond or engage further.

In briefing documents by specifying dates, policymakers can allocate resources effectively. This prevents resource shortages or over-allocations, leading to efficient use of funds, personnel, and other resources. Clear timelines enable policymakers to communicate expectations that help in structuring the planning and coordination of policy activities. Certain policies may have legal or regulatory obligations associated with them, such as reporting deadlines or compliance milestones. Clear timelines help ensure that these obligations are met to avoid legal repercussions.

Collaboration and Feedback

In a university environment, collaboration often leads to richer and more well-rounded ideas. Seek feedback from colleagues, mentors, and peers to ensure that your document is clear, impactful, and well-received. Constructive feedback can help refine your content and catch any blind spots you might have missed.

Policies affect diverse groups of people with varying needs and perspectives. Engaging with a wide range of stakeholders ensures that policies are inclusive and consider the interests of marginalized and vulnerable populations. This approach leads to more equitable outcomes and reduces the risk of overlooking crucial aspects of policy implementation.

Mastering the message is a critical element and creating accompanying documents such as policy briefs and communications materials in a university environment is an art that requires careful consideration of audience, clarity, structure, evidence, and engagement. By mastering these elements, you can effectively communicate complex ideas, drive meaningful conversations, and contribute to positive changes within your university community.

A strong plan and timely implementation enhance public confidence in the policy writer, and sometimes the University’s ability to deliver on its promises. So, whether you're a researcher, student, or administrator, honing your skills in crafting impactful documents is an asset for success in academia and beyond. In the words of Steve Jobs, “Master the Topic, The Message, and The Delivery.”

Making Your Policies Accessible to All Audiences

Most institutions are now aware of the need for recognizing and respecting the differences among the members of our stakeholder communities. As policy administrators, many of us are building equity review into our policy development processes.

Most of us now publish our institutions' policies online and share our policy drafts electronically, rather than in paper policy manuals or through paper documents. Just as it's important to consider adding equity review to the development of policies, it's also important that we consider how to prepare the content for distribution in ways that make it accessible to a wide range of people, including those who use assistive devices.

Here are some considerations for your institutions, all of which we’ve put in place here at Washington State University (WSU):

• Establish a policy and/or procedures for improving the accessibility of online and electronic content. As an example, here at WSU we have an executive policy and supporting procedures:
  • University Web Accessibility Policy
  • Ensuring Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility
• Require web accessibility training for all institutional online developers and webmasters.
• Provide issue reporting and complaint/grievance procedures regarding accessibility issues.

At WSU, our Web Communications unit handles web accessibility problems and our institution's ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) coordinator is responsible for managing access complaints and grievances.

Creating Accessible Word and PDF Documents

Most of us use Word to create our source documents and either Word or PDF for drafts and creating web versions of our policies. Taking in consideration of assistive devices, here's some key components for making Word and PDF documents accessible to all:

• Headings:
  • Headings create a hierarchy in the document that a screen reader can follow.
• Document Title, Description, and Tags:
  • A default document title is necessary for a screen reader to be able to scan and read out loud to its user.
  • A document description gives screen reader users a brief summary of the document they are about to read.
  • Document tags allow a screen reader to know if they are looking at an image, a paragraph, a heading, etc.
• Hyperlinks:
  • Hyperlinks need to have clearly defined labels of the destination of each link so that a screen reader is able to read them out loud when scanning the document.
  • It's preferable to embed link URLs (attach the URL in the background to a word or phrase using the Link function), also known as contextual links, rather than writing out URLs in the document.
• Tables:
  • Clear table structures and headers are necessary for a screen reader to be able to scan the document.
• Alt Text:
  • Alt Text data allows a screen reader to scan a description of tables, figures, or images that may be on the document.
• Lists:
  • The built in formatting tools of Word make it easier for the screen reader to scan the document.
• Capitalized Words:
  • Use bold for emphasis and avoiding capitalization of words.
  • Assistive devices may provide capitalized words to users by reading each individual letter, instead of complete words.
• Tab/Reading Order
  • For PDFs, identifying the reading order of a document’s text helps a screen reader present the text as it is meant to be read, rather than just as random blocks of text.
    

Creating Fully Functional PDFs from Word

With the latest versions of Word in Office365, all accessibility functionality in a Word source document may be directly transferred to a PDF version:

• Select File->Save As
• Change the file type (suffix) from the default Word Document (.docx) to PDF (.pdf).
  A PDF file created in this way includes all of your active hyperlinks and other functionality.
  

Creating Accessible Documents from Scanned Images

In order to make scanned document images accessible to a screen reader user, a few things need to be done, otherwise none of the information on the document can be read by a screen reader:

• Make or convert the scanned image to PDF
• Under Tools (in Adobe Acrobat Pro):
  • Select Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
  • Select Text Recognition and In This File, and
  • Select the pages to be included
• Under Tools:
  • Select Action Wizard, then
  • Select Make Accessible
  • Select Find Recognize Text Using OCR
• In the Recognize Text -- General Settings window:
  • Select the applicable language and
  • Select Searchable as the PDF Output Style
• Select OK
  

Accessibility Guides

The process of increasing equity in our policies and policy access is ongoing. Here are some accessibility guides to provide you with further ideas as you get started:

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
• U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) 18F Accessibility Guide
• WSU Web Communications Accessibility Guides

An Untapped Potential

In the past few years, crisis, cultural shifts, and financial woes have led to a rise of complexity in maintaining our policy systems within our institutions. Meeting all the regulations can be challenging, as they are constantly changing. In addition, institutions are feeling the pressure from regulators, internal staff and faculty, and the community at large to maintain the regulations. Challenges faced yesterday are not the challenges we will face tomorrow or next year. Do you have the confidence that your policies could stand up to regulatory scrutiny? Does this mean that we need to become even more resilient and inventive – is there any untapped potential out there?

As policy leaders we have learned that we need systems and processes to get things done. But is that enough? Even the most skilled person today is challenged with the immense workload of continuous changes and updates required for policy management. Even the way we distribute, collect, account for and present changes has undergone enormous change. It is not just a check list and process – we need to manage risk, ensure data security and privacy while balancing access and inclusiveness and external influences – it all seems daunting, and to top it all off, failing to comply with the ever-evolving regulations can lead to costly fines and lawsuits.

We are looking virtually everywhere for indicators of change, racing with time to have key policies, procedures and training completed to be compliant. Today, no one is standing waiting for the next change to come down the hall, which makes it even more important that we work with synergy across the institution.

We must support and arm ourselves with the tools, processes and technology that facilitate clear communication. We need to define the review and reflection process of our policies, cultivate open discussion and dialogue all while engaging with other departments and units about the need for change, seek an understanding of the barriers for everyone and then provide the necessary follow up to make the needed changes for lasting growth and compliance.

In September, I wrote “Don’t wait for a crisis to create an efficient policy management system.” That ‘safety net’ is one great way to engage a team to ensure compliance, a tool that builds structure – whether you are a small scale operation or a larger scaled institution, a system and a plan is critical. A plan gives both leaders and others a path forward and provides the principles needed to navigate change. In December 2022, Michele Gross (University of Minnesota) wrote “The First Element: Meeting at the Intersection of Policy and Compliance” - outlining the first of seven elements of a compliance program and the importance of the system to frame our compliance at our institutions. For those who may not be aware, the seven elements of a legally effective compliance program are:

1. Policies & Procedures
2. Chief Compliance Officer/Compliance Committee
3. Education & Training
4. Reporting
5. Monitoring & Auditing
6. Enforcement
7. Responding To Issues

GRC 20/20 Research, LLC wrote “A Tsunami of Change Overwhelms Compliance,” which states that some institutions have broken processes and insufficient resources to manage compliance. I know that there is not one size fits all -- there can’t be. This is why we must continue to evolve – we should rearrange our priorities when we have too much of anything as Sara Gigeroff (University of New Brunswick) wrote in her blog What’s In Your Closet? (Feb 2023). More importantly she states that communicating, setting boundaries, purging, and revaluating are all key elements in managing our policy framework…and our closets!

There's no time like the present to simplify. Legacy systems are expensive and difficult to use. Manual processing is far too time-consuming and in a hybrid environment its not effective. I say m ake retention simple for users and administrators, so they don’t have to interact with files in a separate, siloed repository or go through cumbersome, manual processes. We must invest in this process for it to be effective. Who can remember five-sheet carbon paper? Now that was cumbersome! We have evolved since carbon paper, but some institutions are still stuck in the dark ages when it comes to making a compliance program a priority.

Who is your untapped potential – identify them and get them on board. This process, more than ever, needs support and buy-in from our leadership and other stakeholders across the institution to be successful (more hands make less work). Beware of analysis paralysis – encourage administrators to work with broad strokes. Show them how proactively setting the boundaries for document lifecycle management, rules for sharing and record management classifications can make work simpler, more consistent and save money. If it was possible to make policies ‘fun’ I would say do that too!

Other areas that untap that potential are field experts like our colleagues at ACUPA . They are an excellent way to leverage all our tools – garner support and encourage others to join in the conversations and become members.

It only takes one incident, one mistake, one error to mark an institution’s reputation and erode trust. In my opinion, our untapped potential may simply be harnessing the power of workplace collaboration and an ability to accelerate the processes to protect our most valuable information.

Protect the Records You'll Need to Restart Operations Quickly

Disasters, in the form of fires, broken water pipes, floods, and other unforeseen natural and man-made events, can happen at any time. Many of us have been involved with developing and publishing emergency preparedness policies and plans for our colleges and universities. Many institutional IT groups already have data backup and recovery in mind as part of their emergency preparedness plans. But emergency preparedness applies to each and every one of us -- and records protection needs to be a part of that conversation.

Each one of us has records stored in our computers and offices regarding the business we undertake on a daily basis. Have you and your organizations considered what records you'd need to replace after a disaster to allow you to restart operations as quickly as possible?

If you work for a state institution, you may already have state requirements regarding identifying and protecting essential records, also referred to as vital records. However, even if your college or university is a private institution, I urge you to consider adding essential records protection to your emergency preparedness policies and plans.

Identify and Backup Essential Records

Before disasters occur, it's important to identify what records are essential, create backups of the records, and store those backups in offsite locations. Offsite backup of essential records is key to “surviving” a catastrophe.

To identify essential records, you'll want to review your records and consider the following:

• What are the functions you or your unit will be unable to perform if the record is destroyed?
• What is the need for you or your unit to perform a particular function?
• What are the consequences to your unit or institution, including loss of rights or inconvenience, if the record is destroyed?
• Is there a need for the record to be replaced or reconstructed quickly?
• What time, money, and labor costs would be involved to reconstruct the record?
• Are there replacement sources available for the record?
• What media format is used (e.g., paper, computer hard drive, digital drive or cloud, disc, microfilm)?
• What is the accessibility of the format after an emergency?

Use the above prompts to audit your records and develop a list of the essential record types that you hold. Then schedule regular backups of your essential records and store the backups in an offsite location. For example, my policy office regularly backs up our policies in-progress and policy archives, as well as unit administrative records. Because our work is mostly managed electronically, we worked with our IT group to establish a shared drive for storing our backups that's located in a server housed in a building that's a considerable physical distance away from our office building.

Be Prepared

It’s crucial to consider the importance of your records and how to protect them, as well as to consider the minimum amount of time you need to keep those records. Don't let an unexpected event stop you in your tracks.