Campus Technology Insider Podcast June 2022
Listen: What Southern New Hampshire University Does to Engage a Remote Workforce
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast! I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Southern New Hampshire University is well known for innovation in online learning, so it may surprise you to learn that prior to the pandemic, the institution had less than 100 employees working remotely, and had only just begun building out its remote work policies. Employee culture was largely reliant on working in a face-to-face environment. But in March 2020, the abrupt shift to fully remote work required a new approach to employee engagement. In this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Jennifer LaFountain, director of employee experience at SNHU, about how the institution is developing a culture that allows employees to feel connected no matter where they are located. Here's our chat.
Hi Jenn, welcome to the podcast!
01:08
Jennifer LaFountain: Hi, thank you for having me.
01:11
Kelly: So I'd love to start by just having you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your background and the work you do.
01:18
LaFountain: Yeah, awesome. I have been working with employee experience and customer experience teams for about 15 years. I joined SNHU, Southern New Hampshire University, in December of 2019. I'm currently the director of employee experience at SNHU. And I've always just been kind of a, I would say, like a people-obsessed, people-first person no matter what I was doing.
01:46
Kelly: I know that Southern New Hampshire University is well known for innovation in online learning. So thinking back to the start of the pandemic, I imagine that the sudden shift to remote learning that happened in higher ed really wasn't much of a problem. But how did that pivot impact staff?
02:04
LaFountain: Yeah, believe it or not, and I think folks find this hard to believe, but prior to COVID, at SNHU, we had less than 100 employees working remotely. We had like just begun discovery work on building out our remote work policies. So even though we obviously have a very rich remote learning learner base, it was new for most of our employees. Previously, we had a, we are a company that is well known for its culture, but that culture was really fixated with being on site, particularly in New Hampshire, from an employee perspective. And so the big challenge for us in going remote really was how do we recreate what we had on site from a culture perspective, in a virtual way. I think ultimately, the impact to our staff is, was really positive, it was really easy for us to shift just tactically and operationally to remote work. And then knowing that we had a team dedicated to making sure that there was some equitable version of our culture virtually, I think, really, really helped us out. Ultimately, our employees, like everyone else, want flexibility. And flexibility, especially in the heart of the pandemic, is what we were able to provide. So I think we did a pretty good job from that standpoint.
03:30
Kelly: So building that culture was definitely a challenge with a distributed workforce. Were there other challenges that that remote pivot introduced or just exacerbated?
03:41
LaFountain: Yeah, I think, you know, we are, we are unique in many, many ways. But we are also just like everybody else in a variety of ways. Like, you know, with any quick change there are challenges, and like other organizations, we've continued to face challenges with recruitment and retention and managing the volume of communications. But ultimately, you know, our North Star is meeting the needs of our learners, who are experiencing all of the same obstacles that we are experiencing. So from an empathy perspective, we're in a great position. And the good news for us is, we're used to moving quickly. We innovate in higher education, and so we were able to very quickly innovate from an employee experience perspective, to create and implement a full, robust distributed workforce program, which we call Synergy. And this has opened us up to recruiting from over 15 states that we previously were not recruiting, which has ultimately really allowed us to more deeply connect with our learners, because we have learners everywhere. So now we are, you know, our goal is to have employees everywhere so that our learners see themselves in our staff. The big, big challenges that I think were exacerbated by going remote so quickly were really about change fatigue and change management, which I don't think is a surprise to anybody — you know, folks were experiencing all kinds of changes in their personal lives, and then changes in their work lives. And so we really just have focused, my team particular, on creating places and spaces virtually for folks just to connect, just to have that human-centered connection to hopefully ease some of that change fatigue.