Virginia Tech’s strategic plan contains the following goal: “continue to promote an efficient administrative culture that promotes a commitment to quality and service.” It goes on to outline strategies to “promote innovative administrative processes…for enhancing quality, improving cost effectiveness, streamlining operations, and/or improving customer service.”
Are we trying to “corporatize” Virginia Tech by borrowing the language of business to highlight the need to improve administrative services and processes? Absolutely not! Our teaching, research, and service mission will always be the heartbeat of Virginia Tech. People choose to associate with our campus because of that mission, not because of our administrative support structure.
But let’s face some fundamental facts… Fact one is that Virginia Tech’s annual budget is over $1 billion. We are a large and complex organization. And that complexity can be challenging to customers of our campus services. Fact two is that our faculty, staff, students, and visitors have deservedly high expectations for administrative support services. As we work to meet and exceed those expectations, we enrich the Virginia Tech experience and help our community members succeed in achieving our mission.
Service excellence supports our institutional mission – what a simple idea! Our motto – “that I may serve” – captures the commitment required from each of us to make our institution a better scholarly community through our service to others. It demands that those of us in administrative support roles come to work each day with a caring attitude about service that motivates us to do better.
And we do care. To support campus efforts to achieve our strategic planning goal, we recently kicked off a new customer service certificate program. The response was overwhelming. Within a day, over three hundred people signed up for our Fall customer service classes. Since every class filled up, we are adding more classes and maintaining a waiting list because we still can’t keep pace with the demand.
Training alone won’t help us achieve service excellence. Passionate leadership, a focus on process improvement, employee engagement, and internalizing our motto every day in our service attitude will make us a model for other universities to emulate.
We have already done a great deal at Virginia Tech to improve our services, but we all need to recognize that the more we do the more our customers expect. Continuous service improvement requires constant and long term attention.
Those of us with an administrative service mission need to reach out to our community members – through focus groups, through satisfaction surveys, through recognizing patterns we see in our e-mail and phone traffic, through targeted initiatives – to understand what they expect from us. We need to use what we learn to improve our services.
We recognize in Human Resources that we must improve our programs and services. Look to this column for information about our efforts to improve recruitment and orientation and automate more of our service processes. Look to us for news about ways we will be supporting your efforts to improve your services and processes. As all of us work together to “promote an efficient administrative culture”, we have a tremendous opportunity to make Virginia Tech shine.
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About Hal Irvin
Hal Irvin has been Virginia Tech's associate vice president for human resources since March 2008.
Before coming to Virginia Tech, Hal worked for 14 years at Georgia Tech. In his last assignment, he served as executive director of organizational development – reporting to the executive vice president for administration and finance and was responsible for employee learning, change management, and internal consulting services. He played a central role in Georgia Tech’s successful efforts to improve administrative services and transform its service culture.