Until recently, most distance education programs were staffed by on-campus professionals that whom colleges and universities supported with work space and equipment. Now, many online-program instructional designers, consultants, and instructors are themselves remote. Come and learn how to attract, manage, and support a remote workforce for your distance learning programs.
If you’re able to create a 100% remote staff unit for your distance-education support team, congratulations. You’re in a very small minority of units at colleges and universities. Most of us are wrangling with how best to manage, support, and strengthen the work of teams composed of staff members who were hired into place-bound roles, alongside colleagues whose work agreements are more flexible or are fully remote from the beginning.
The most immediate needs for distance-learning administrators have to do with time, accountability, team cohesion, and work coverage. In the long term, we can contribute to the success of our remote staff units by paying attention to the needs of remote employees around five key areas: policy, human resources, information technology, administration, and collaboration.
This interactive “boss training” session is designed for both new and experienced distance-learning program administrators who are feeling the pinch of the “great resignation” as staff jobs move from place-bound to work-anywhere modalities. Participants in this session will learn a three-phase management technique for remote staff members, and practice or reflect on each phase during the session:
- Phase 1: Attracting Remote-Work Talent. We’ll collaboratively write a job ad.
- Phase 2: Managing Remote Staff Members. Role-play how to weave remote staff into on-campus life.
- Phase 3: Long-Term Support for Remote Staff. Create a core-promises list to bring back to your campus.
Since the late 1990s, internet-based distance-education programs have attracted students and instructors who could be geographically distributed: they could learn and teach from anywhere. However, the model for the staff who support distance-education programs was overwhelmingly the traditional place-based office with co-located physical and human resources. The idea of the campus as the physical location where services are literally housed was slow to shift to a distributed-workforce model until the COVID-19 pandemic forced an emergency shift to remote instruction and remote support services, starting in early 2020.
While there have been a few colleges and universities whose distance-education staff were intentionally flexible, hybrid, or agnostic regarding the physical location of work, far more of our programs remain stuck within larger institutional contexts, policies, and expectations that the work of the campus must take place on the campus.
This session outlines the history of distributed work in higher education, shares models for shifting from co-located to hybrid and fully remote units, offers tips for how to manage such arrangements, lists ways to attract and keep remote distance-education staff members, and suggests policy and infrastructure needs that support successful remote-staff units.
As remote work become more common among higher education units, we in distance learning can lead the conversation because of how we are positioned in the life of our campuses. The Rutgers University Future of Work Task Force asked all employees at the university to help define what work looks like in the future at Rutgers: “Our goal is to create a caring, inclusive, and respectful work environment, where employees are engaged, productive, valued, and rewarded for their contributions” (2022).
Much of what they learned from their town halls, surveys, and listening tours reflected practices that were already common in their distance-learning teams. Chief among the concerns of remote staff members was wanting to be seen and valued as contributors to the work of the institution: “You can give your team all the flexibility, independence, and remote possibilities—but if you aren’t fully seeing and valuing them, you’re doing it wrong” (Ahlquist, 2022).
As administrators, we should be as proactive as possible to create a welcoming and supportive environment for all of our employees. Beyond just attracting talent from outside our ordinarily geographically limited talent pools, taking steps to be ready to nurture the talents of our existing staff with remote-work options is a business-continuation practice that will pay us back many-fold in increased employee retention and satisfaction.