The EMCC “Ask Me” Team was created to help students with aspects of the enrollment cycle during the first week of classes.The first iteration of the Ask Me Model entailed long trainings for employees in order to master the concepts of different student affairs departments. The “Ask Me” Coordinating Team chose to take a different approach to welcoming students in order to quickly and efficiently give them “just in time answers”. First, the long training sessions were eliminated and volunteers were asked to become Ask Me Guides, not subject matter experts. Second, volunteers were deployed to high-traffic areas of the campus. Lastly and most importantly, walkie-talkies were purchased for volunteers to easily communicate with individuals from around campus that had greater expertise. By emphasizing the importance of teamwork and collaboration, employees no longer needed to thoroughly understand EMCC resources and services, they only needed to know how to refer students and exercise principles of service excellence to welcome our students back to campus. More information and survey data is attached.
| Attachment | Size |
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| assessment-results-plans-implementation.pdf | 407.32 KB |
| background-information.pdf | 110.83 KB |
| cats-contributors.pdf | 40.7 KB |
Comments
Great idea and love the teamwork and collaboration. I think this approach might evoke more volunteers!
Jake
I was very happy to see the presence on campus that week!
I am not sure how you closed the loop and how we know that this was more helpful and had an impact?
Thank you for sharing.
Olga
In reply to Jake I was very happy to see the presence on campus that by Olga Tsoudis
Olga,
Thank you for your feedback and concerns about closing the loop. We changed a few things with the Ask Me Redesign and we collected both quantitative and qualitative data. The pre-data collected was the concern with the declining membership of the Ask Me Team and we didn't have enough individuals to help students during the first week of classes with competing demands across campus. The post-data looked at how many more individuals we were able to recruit to help with the new redesigned program purpose. We also collected post-data from volunteers and campus that showed we had a greater presence on campus to support our students. The post-data has been attached to the CATS and I highlited some of what I captured in this comment in the background information document.
Overall, we observed the problem (not having enough volunteers to support students), implemented a new strategy (redesigned the program and reduced training requirements, purchased walkie talkies to promote collaborative efforts), and measured the effectiveness (campus and volunteer surveys to assess effectiveness of the changes).
Hi Jake,
This is great example of collaboration across our EMCC campus. I am glad our students were able to benefit from everyone's hardwork!
Catherine
Jake,
This is great. I thought the program went really well and appreciate that the feedback will be implemented for the next time.
Jackie