IT Meetup: Staffing, Structure, and Building the Right IT Team

So hello everyone, and welcome to our spring IT meetup.

Very glad to have you.

Today we have a fun discussion.

We're going to be talking about staffing, structure, and building the right IT team.

So this should be a fantastic topic.

We've got Jimmy here with us as our guest facilitator.

But before I turn things over to him, Jenna's going to give us a quick intro.

So Jenna, hey, welcome.

Hi, everyone.

Nice to meet you all.

It's actually my first Atlas meetup, so I'm a newbie.

I'm coming from Meter, and we're an enterprise networking company that we work with schools to basically co-manage their network.

So we offer the hardware, the software, the install, design, support.

And again, with schools it's obviously nice because then you don't have to worry about your network as much.

But I'm just here to say hi.

We also have an upcoming webinar with Atlas that I hope you might join us at.

And I'm here to listen and learn, so thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely.

We appreciate Meter's sponsorship.

We'll drop a link to that webinar below if you're interested in that.

But, welcome everyone.

Today is an informal session.

This is not a webinar.

There is no formal presentation.

So if you are in a place where you can come on video and off of mute when we get the discussion going, we welcome you to do that.

But we have a guest facilitator.

So Jimmy, welcome.

Thank you so much for being here.

Would you introduce yourself and then since we're such a small group, maybe even have everybody quickly go around the horn and say who they are, where they work? Sure, absolutely.

I'm Jimmy Codzillo.

I'm the Chief Information Officer at Miami Country Day School in Miami, Florida.

We are a PK three to 12 school.

I've been at Miami Country Day School for 15 years now.

It's crazy.

And I'm excited to be here and talk a little bit about the state of IT staffing in our schools.

So if anyone wants to come off mute and do a little intro, that'd be awesome.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Jonathan Chastang.

This is also my first Atlas meetup.

I am the Academic Technologist at the Westminster School.

I am new to independent schools, and so I am excited to join in a community of folks who are in the space and also working in technology.

Great.

Thank you, Jonathan.

I'm Mike Seipman.

I'm the Director of Technology at Kent School.

So I think we're about an hour away from Jonathan, in Connecticut.

I myself have been at Kent for 16 years.

Similar feeling to Jimmy.

I don't know where the time has gone.

But enjoy the work we do in the independent schools.

All right.

Thank you.

Stacey, Bob, Vinny, anyone? Hi, my name is Bob Sager.

I'm the President and Founder of EduTech Academic Solutions.

We provide support services and staff on-site at independent schools for the past 23 years.

I've served in roles ranging from technology director at multiple schools to director of finance and several other administrative roles.

We have, I guess it's about 16 IT directors currently at independent schools throughout the Philadelphia region, throughout the whole area.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Next.

My name's Stacey Pope.

I work at Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and I'm part of the tech team.

I'm data services.

I'm really the point person for Veracross, Canvas, Reach, our major systems, and connecting everything.

We actually are very close to starting with Meter.

And we have one person that is retiring, so this topic just rang out to me, just to see how jobs are distributed within a tech department and as we all probably wear a lot of hats, so.

Yes.

Vinny? I think I'm last.

I'm Vinny Vrotny, the Director of Innovation and Technology at the Kincaid School, which is a pre-K through 12, down in Houston, Texas.

This is not my first Atlas webinar.

So...

Nice to see you again.

All right.

Thanks everyone.

So let's hop in and talk about new roles, changing titles.

Let's start off and say, has anyone recently expanded their team, or are you contemplating new positions, new roles? I've been noticing just looking at job boards, and I've always told everyone on my team, "Look, you should look at what's around there, what's out there.

Know what other schools are doing." We don't always get the opportunity for a meetup like this.

So, I've been seeing CIO positions, CTO, director positions.

Has anyone started to have conversations like that at their schools? What's the temperature? New AI titles.

Yeah, actually, we justAnd launched a chief AI innovation officer.

So it's a CAIIO position.

And they sit next to me sort of in very tight collaboration at the school, along with the academic leadership.

And so, yeah, we've actually seen that, as well as a lot of people are just getting AI sort of thrown on as that sidecar, that other duties as necessary.

But I feel that that maybe isn't doing our schools justice for the type of attention that we should be paying to AI, and especially the data, the risk around students using it, what age is it appropriate? There's so many implications that having that as sort of a sidecar, either you're going to pay a lot of attention to that or you're going to not pay as much attention, and maybe things will happen that we don't necessarily want to happen.

I'm interested to know how many schools manage all of their technology in-house, and how many people are using MSPs to augment their internal staff? Quick, just brief.

Yeah.

MSP.

MSP.

Which is one of the reasons why I was...

Again, it's one of those things we've been debating of how long do you stay with an MSP? It's worked out well for us.

We're a big enough school where we could bring back on a network admin and most likely a cis admin, but we're a little bit more rural of a place.

Salaries for those would probably be higher and just trying to figure out.

It's nice to also have some separation of duties, a little different control there.

So some of the things we're working through internally.

I'm curious what you say when you mean augment.

Do you mean outsource or do you mean- Yeah, outsource.

So, generally we would see an internal school direct employee as maybe the director of IT, and then they would liaison with the MSP to provide those detailed network security, your cybersecurity, your network configuration.

I know we brought that in-house at Miami Country Day School, but we still outsource certain projects to trusted partners.

And so I was trying to get a temperature of how many schools are still using outsource versus just made that decision to pull people in or have just always have operated with your whole IT team is just your group there on campus.

I'll give you an opposite to that.

Our staffing are the IT staff for schools.

So we're completely on-premise.

Our staff attend or work at the schools full-time, just like an employee.

But they're not a part of the payroll at the school.

And so we do it the opposite way.

We're not an MSP, we're an education services group, so we do it a little bit differently than most.

So when I mentioned before, we have technology directors, we have technology integrators, we have a number of different people.

They serve in those roles.

And oftentimes it's a result of a school that's had a person inside and also had half their support doing MSPs coming in from the outside.

And we just simply replace all of that internally with one of our, or two of our staff members, depending upon what the needs are.

And then augmenting, like you mentioned, in some cases, where we'll put somebody in to become a help desk technician, where they're working with four other members of the team inside the school that are part of the IT staff for the school.

So it's a little bit different model, different approach.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, for me, there's definitely advantages to us bringing that team on board.

We were their only customer.

So it wasn't like we were dealing with a big firm that had sort of a depth and a ton of resources to back up when someone wants to go on vacation.

Right? And that's one of the benefits that you have when you're dealing with an outside partner on your managed services for technology, is that they have redundancy and they've got the skill set, and like Michael mentioned, concerns around, well, how are we going to be able to compete with some of the corporate or the commercial opportunities that these people that are highly skilled and trained have? All right.

Vinnie's got a couple of comments in here.

Let's see.

The Chief Innovation and Transformation Officer, I like that title, to articulate the role I played with our AI and our campus.

Okay.

Yeah, most of our directors, most of our senior executives or senior administrators at the school, we also are mostly heads or division directors.

We haveThree, four chief-level positions at our school.

So I think it's pretty common to see, at least from what I've seen and looking at the compensation report that came out last week, I did see a number of chiefs mixed in there.

"Due to campus expansion, recently able to add two to your head count." That's exciting.

"Spent the last year revising the eight other job descriptions.

Ten years old." Oh, my gosh.

That is a perpetual challenge, right? Keeping up on our job descriptions and keeping up on our skill sets.

I've said on several occasions, look, if you're not investing as much in your professional development for your technology team that you're willing to invest in your faculty, you're doing a disservice to your entire institution.

And it's sometimes hard to get those PD resources put aside to staff positions, but it's something that I'm a firm believer in.

And I'm wondering, do you all, when you're looking at your technology team, are your schools committing to that? Are they open to every year sending people to either the Atlas conference or FETC or whatever platform, whatever SIS that you happen to be on, or a Microsoft conference? Or do you get the pushback of, "Well, you went two years ago.

Do you really need to go to that technology conference again?" Realizing how quickly technology changes, and if we're not learning every year, that means the school's going to lag behind.

How are you all sort of tackling that? We've been pretty successful in budgeting out for, I have a smaller team, but trying to have them go to one conference a year, whether it's locally.

A few of us might go to Atlas or to InstructureCon, or one member going to ISTE.

But I view it similar to what the business office does here as well.

A couple of them go to NVOA.

They go to a couple different conferences.

So, we've had pretty good support with that, fortunately.

Fantastic.

I'm fortunate enough to have a robust professional development budget for our team.

Wow.

That's amazing.

But, that's something you need to advocate for as part of your budgeting cycle and budgeting process.

If you- Yeah ...

if you feel that strongly about that, there should be a line item for that to cover those costs.

100%.

Let's talk a little bit about department structure.

So, at Miami Country Day School, I can tell you the way we structure it, and we're actually in the midst of sort of splitting.

So after 10 years of a consolidated ITS, Information Technology Services division, we're kind of splitting.

We want to try something else out.

And so we're taking the operational technology, and we're going to sit next to the academic technology.

And we're going to give that a try for a little bit.

And so for the past 10 years, we have been operating with library services, which included media services and education technology.

So all those, EdPuzzle and Seesaw, and all those other ClassLink-connected applications that we have.

The registrar's office.

We're a Blackbaud institution, so our Blackbaud LMS, SIS, athletics, all that was managed through that team.

They also managed our Razor's Edge and Financial Edge, that one team.

They did centralized data reporting out of there as well.

Our innovation center, and then our infrastructure and operations, which is really kind of like a traditional IT team, right? They are the, "Yeah, we know this switch," and, "Oh, that access point went out.

We can go swap it with a backup." Or, "Oh, this SMART Board in this classroom has humidity damage, and looks like there's water inside the TV." Whatever.

So that's the way we've been set up, and so we are splitting that.

And so that we've got that infrastructure team that also manages all of our technology asset and inventory.

They are one team, and then those three other teams have split off into academic technology, under a new senior director role.

So how do you all sort of structure your technology teams at your institutions? I'm curious how many people you have on your team.

It's 16 now altogether- Okay ...

across those four departments.

And they all work under technology? Yes.

So they had all been under technology.

Technology falls...

So the ITS division is part of the operations side.

Mm-hmm.

But that team being part of operations, it was really designed that way so that it would serve the entire institution, since operations serves the entire institution.

Right? We had looked at innovation center going under STEM.

Okay.

That's great for STEM, but maybe not so great for humanities, who-- Our humanities, they go and they use the innovation center.

They're 3D modeling.

They're using the laser cutters.

Same thing with our world languages.

And we just felt that if innovation center sat under STEM, it would really just be totally STEM, right? And we wanted this cross-curricular approach, and we said, "Okay.

You're going to go under operations, and we'll figure this out." There's an advantage to moving that back, for sure, under academics, under an academic side, because we're actually in the process of having that team transition into full-fledged educators.

Trained educators, I should say.

Right? We're all educators.

I don't want to misspeak or be misquoted on that.

But we're all educators, but actually go to school to learn to become educators with classroom management skills, and learn some of that that you don't learn when you are just a technologist.

Right? I have never taught a day of my life.

I did student teaching.

That's what I originally wanted to do in college.

But other than that, I haven't professionally had exposure to pedagogy.

Right? It's something that we deal with, but it's not necessarily like, "Oh, hi.

Welcome to your new career in K12, and you've got all this great background in technology, and here's what you need to learn to be successful in technology in education." Right? So I think it's really going to take the team to a new level, making those shifts and consciously recruiting individuals that have that education background.

Jimmy, something that we do here at Atlas that I think is really interesting and that schools could, at least in small part, take this idea and use it, is that a lot of times over the summer, we will get together and we will have a retreat.

And what we will do is we will take our current strategic plan, and we will map out.

We'll get chart paper, and we pull it all around the room, and put up all of the big projects and initiatives that we have to tackle in the upcoming year.

And then we will assign a primary point person and a secondary point person.

And it does not matter what your title is or what your other things are, and we basically shake it up.

And it's been so fascinating because there's a lot of research about not just getting the right people, but getting the right people in the right seat on the bus.

Really matching them up with their skill sets of where they want to grow, what they can already bring, and what their passions are.

And it's fascinating because even in my own work, I was actually very misaligned when I first joined the Atlas team, versus all of those things that were my interest and my background.

And so through this iterative process, we've been able to get people kind of closely into working on those things.

It's able to have them work on stretch projects as well, when we can accommodate it.

And then we sit down and reevaluate.

Okay, now what are our titles that actually match up what our responsibilities are? I know that this doesn't work at huge, massive scale, but especially within your own department, I wonder if there are elements of this that you might consider.

I love that idea.

In the car, I listen to podcasts or books, audiobooks, and I was listening to "Creating Magic" by Lee Cockerell.

Anyone who joined early, we were talking about Disney earlier.

He used to work at Disney.

And he's gone on to talk about customer service.

And let's face it, IT, we are customer service.

If we're not mastering customer service to our community, we're doing them a disservice.

But he was talking about giving your team members the opportunity to be in a leadership role even when they don't have a leadership title.

Right? And so I think what you just described gives us that perfect opportunity to say, "Look, you may be the help desk coordinator." Right? "You may be the help desk coordinator, but on this project, you're going to run point.

Because you've got the skill set on this.

This is reimagining our help desk operations.

Okay.

Well, I want you to lead that.

You're the one who lives it every single day." And I think that is a very empowering experience for our team members.

And so I am totally going to steal this idea of doing this during the summer and aligning it back to the strategic plan or priorities of the institution.

We already do that as part of our technology plan and our annual goals is, okay, everything needs to feed back into thatthat strategic plan for the institution, but I like sort of reimagining every summer.

Might I suggest a different timeframe? Sure.

Which would be in somewhere between that Thanksgiving and spring break, which is our technology winter or our technology summer, because everything's up and going, and then it gives you the impetus to go into your busy summer season knowing and aligning to what it is that you're trying to accomplish for the opening of the school year.

That's what we do.

That actually makes so much more sense.

We became a one-to-one school a couple years ago, and ever since everyone's like, "Oh." Faculty on the last day of their-- because they're on a 10-month contract.

"Oh, have a great summer.

Enjoy the short days." I'm like, "Oh, yeah.

No.

That doesn't happen." We're kicking it in high gear.

We've got to recover devices.

We've got to prep them for distribution.

We've got the new inventory coming in.

The old assets need to be wiped and prepped for return.

Yeah, that's a good idea of between Thanksgiving and spring break.

I am just scribbling that down here on my iPad.

Sorry.

One of the things, Jimmy, with regard to your-- Oh.

Just real quick, Jimmy, with regard to the separation that you're talking about, one of the things that I've seen when we've done that in the past is it's critical that those two up lines have a dotted line between the two leaders of those departments so that the communication isn't lost.

Otherwise, you're working in silos, and planning and challenges all start to become hidden until they become overwhelming.

So, it's important when you separate like that, that you maintain that level of communication, and it's planned, not just off the cuff.

It's, "Okay, we are going to connect on a regular basis to make sure we're all on the same page." That is absolutely vital, and that has been something that's kept me up at night.

I'm like, "Okay.

I don't want death by meetings, but I also want to make sure that we don't start siloing ourselves as we're trying to better serve our community, by exploring this option." So that is a very good point.

Michael, I think you're about to say something.

Yeah.

We just had a shift.

Our academic technology moved on to a different school, and so we're going through a little bit of a shift in our world where it's kind of a vision and belief that because that position was absent before them for so long, that we really need to rethink and reenergize academic technology.

And there's the belief now that they want to move that to more faculty facing to try and get more buy-in from the faculty and break down that barrier of it's not a tech staff position trying to explain to teachers how to more effectively use technology.

So, it's interesting.

We're kind of going through this experiment with a new job description being posted and seeing getting something a little bit more faculty facing that'll report to the academic dean.

But it's also a bit scary because they're not keeping up on the latest trends and this and that.

And so, it'll be curious to see how it works.

Then we're trying to figure out where do we backfill? We're losing a body.

Do we replace it with more help desk support? I'm curious for those.

We outsource our network, but I still find the need to have a CIS admin type role on site.

We have campus safety systems.

That's just exploded.

We have alert us camp safety, all these different platforms, Zoom, everything to manage.

So, you still find the need to have someone that's really managing that.

So, I'm just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on that.

If I might- Yeah ...

since I'm new to this.

I'm the academic technologist for Westminster, and I was hired in October, and my title is actually Academic Technologist and System Support Specialist.

And similar to, it sounds like what you're trying to do or where you're wanting to go is, I very much work closely with the faculty, and actually, my background is in education.

That's what my first degree was in.

But then I made a shift with my master's degree to learning analytics and actually worked at an educational technology startup for a bit.

So, I have that technology experience as well.

And I think being an academic technologist, having gone through this interview cycle, talking to other academic technologists and educational technology instructional coaches.

The titles are varied.

There's a lot of different names for this kind of role.

I think it's absolutely critical that you do have the both piece, where they are working closely with the technology team.

I'm in the tech office today with the tech team.

That's where I'm housed.

But I go to department head meetings.

I meet with the academic dean, the director of studies, the associate director of faculty, and I'm in all those spaces as well.

So, it's very much a both and role, and I think that's really important.

One, for what you were saying is for buy-in to make sure that faculty understand how these products work and what they can be used for, and how to leverage that to their fullest potential.

But then also to have the technical knowhow and that system support piece, where if something does break or go wrong and you do just need an extra body to support, you have that as well Yeah.

It's been so crazy to me that you basically just have to take a person that's here and just move them over here, and suddenly it's magically going to change.

So I'm really curious to see if that is going to be enough to fix some of the barriers that we're having.

But, so we'll see.

But I agree with everything that you said.

It's key to attend those meetings and push into classrooms and listen and see where you can be helpful.

I wanted to circle back real quickly to sort of where do your IT departments sit? Right? So like I shared, we primarily are in operations, but we're splitting, and we're going to have some under the academics directly.

We started that migration this year, or that sort of split this year.

How are they arranged in your schools? For our school, I'm at a independent school in Chicago.

Our infrastructure is under operations, and then the academic technology coach, and actually the person who supports our academic system, they are more in with the pedagogical side of the operation.

We're under the operations side.

What's that? Operations? We're under the operations side as well.

So.

But I report to our business manager, who reports to the CFO.

Got you.

Sorry.

That's my dog.

I'm working remote today.

Who do y'all, well, you just answered, Michael.

But who do y'all report to? So I report up to the CFOO, the chief finance and operating officer, who then reports to the head of school.

So I'm sort of two removed.

Who are you all reporting to? What are we seeing? For my technology directors, it's probably 80%, just like yourself, CFO, business officer, business manager, and then about 20% report directly to the head of school, depending upon the school.

Yeah, and I think there's, I think a certain advantage where we see the technology leadership reporting into the head of school or president.

I think it keeps the-- So what we've done is I have regular meetings with head of school, just like a one-on-one with the head of school, in addition to my regular one-on-ones with my supervisor.

But, having that line of communication, just like the line of communication back and forth between our academic and our operational technology, is essential.

I think that communication with the head of school, because what I have found since we started having these regular meetings, myself and the head of school.

The head of school hears so much about technology that for whatever reason, I never hear about.

Like I don't get help desk tickets on these issues.

I don't see patterns in emails that are indicative that, oh, it looks like we've got some Wi-Fi issues over in this building that we just rewired, right? It's through that close interaction with the head of school that for whatever reason, people will surface to her, like, "Hey, our parents are concerned about student access to XYZ on any given day on the school devices." "Oh, that's interesting.

That hasn't come to me." Do you all find that you're getting that information? I guess if you're not getting it, you probably don't know.

But are your community members actively bringing issues and concerns to you so that you can address it as the head of technology within your organization? Or are you still finding out through meetings with other leadership at the institution? I think the thought that sometimes people don't enter help desk tickets is pretty common.

Definitely, it happens at our organization where people don't enter a formal help desk ticket, and then if our network administrator's walking around, he might hear from people in the hallway.

So I think that is pretty common, and it's a difficult problem to solve because people are in a rush when they realize that they have a problem, and they don't have time to enter in a help desk ticketI think doing regular rounds helps a lot so people see you and remember to put, enter in some information and it breaks checking technology because there's some things that people are not entering tickets about, but are a cause of some underlying frustration.

Similar or tied to this, I was wondering how many of you as directors of technology are part of the school's admin team.

So meeting with the admin team, your weekly meetings, to ensure that you're hearing about all the things that are going on so that you could provide input.

Because sometimes we'll hear, well, you don't need to hear about what's going on in admissions or in development or in all these things.

But in reality, we're going to hear things that they don't realize we need to know about that are important, academics as well.

So I was just interested in seeing how many of you are part of that because that's where a lot of this information we find comes out during those kind of meetings.

We split that.

So the director of technology, who I report to, attends the advisory council meetings, and then I, the academic technologist, attend the strategic planning implementation team meetings.

Both of those have administrators in them.

And then we also have a tech committee with our associate head of school and our CFO, and that's the technology team, and then those two people.

Yeah.

We attend the admin team meetings, although sometimes it's trying to-- I'd say we're part of the admin team meeting, but there's still a smaller group of senior administrators that are actually making the decision, which is where it still becomes challenging.

And as many of you are, we're still trying to break down that barrier of we are a strategic player and, if you have us employee attendance during a lockdown drill was a problem, dean of faculty want to work with them to help provide a solution on that because there's lots of different ways that we can be helpful there.

And so it's just continuing to get those recognizing that the IT operation is changing.

We're not just break-fix.

We're that strategic ally and partner for you.

Yeah.

I think, so I did ALI back during COVID.

I was the COVID class.

And so as soon as I could, once we were back to normal operation, and I had just moved into the CIO role at that time at the school from another director position within technology, and one of the things that I took away from that was going and seeing the work, right? And we hear about this in plenty of literature.

Go and see the work.

And what Irana mentioned, did I say your name right? I hope so.

Of going and having your regular rounds.

The first time I did that, I think I caught a couple of people off guard.

And I had said, "Look, I'm just going to be walking around.

I'm not observing how you're using technology in your classroom.

I'll just be popping in, checking in on how things are going." And, especially as we were coming back from COVID, and people were getting used to the technology in the classrooms again.

But I know that was really instrumental for me to start hearing directly from teachers, because like you said, teachers are so busy, right? They are go, go.

And then when they're not going, they are going to a meeting.

Or they are planning, or they're grading.

And so for them, opening a support ticket isn't necessarily top of mind.

But having a conversation in the hallway between tracks or at lunch is often sort of that communal ear to the ground way to learn about, oh, let me get my team to look into that for you.

Sorry you're having that issue.

And you know what? It's okay you don't have a ticket.

I'll always ask, "You got a ticket open so I can follow up with the team on that?" "No." "Okay, don't worry.

I'll open a ticket for you." I'm not a stickler about, oh, you need to open a ticket, otherwise we're not going to address it.

Goes back to my whole customer service mentality here.

Yes, I'd love for you to open a ticket.

I will say we allow email to ticket, which my community loves, but us as the helpdesk ticket administrators hate because it's just an email that doesn't fill out any of our required fields that we need in the ticketing system to get good tracking.

So it means a bit more administrative overhead on that.

But if you're managing your ticketing system well, you can start to see those trends.Again, as long as even when I say it's okay not to open a ticket, I need to remember to go back to my desk and open the ticket.

Because I do try to pool and say, "Okay, how many network issues did we have this week? Did they all come from the same building? All right.

Let's get our specialist over into that area to see what's going on." I swear we always have construction projects going on, or renovation projects going on and someone decides, "Oh, I'm going to clip these network cables and then patch them and try to not tell anyone." And of course, you get your little blip in your network like, "Oh, network went down in that area.

Oh, but it came back up 10 minutes later.

Oh, okay, we're not going to worry about it." But then all of a sudden, "Oh, now we've got Wi-Fi issues over there." That's because the telecom team clipped your network cables and just decided not to tell anyone about it.

This sounds more like a session for a therapy.

It's like you've gone through this, Jimmy.

Jimmy, I'll commiserate with you.

You've dealt with people.

Yes.

No, I had my operations director, he was like, "Well, I didn't know what they did, so I just clipped them." But I'm like, "Okay.

Deep breaths." Well, we started doing ports.

We started locking certain network ports to certain VLANs, and our teachers didn't realize that the little port with the printer on it needed to be the printer, and not anything else that they felt like they should be plugging into the network, and start hot swapping.

And then they would kill the ports, because they'd plug a device in that shouldn't be on that VLAN and kill the port.

So we learned pretty quickly when we saw a uptick after we implemented what we thought was we're labeling everything, we sent an email.

And I know that totally just took us totally off topic of staffing down to help desk management.

But, yeah, sorry about that.

Yeah.

What else? What else is on our mind? How do we keep our team members who have great skills? This has been my concern.

So since we brought everyone in-house, and I'm only one deep for a lot of things, unfortunately.

I hate to say that.

I'm only one deep in my network specialists, my senior network specialist, because I had to do something to try to keep him on the team.

Instead of going off and working...

I'm in Miami.

There are tons of businesses and corporations and major players in the market that my team members could go and work for and make double, if not triple what they make in our private schools, in our independent schools.

What are some of the things that you do to make staying at the institution worthwhile? We may not be able to compete on outright pay, and we know that that's a driving factor for plenty of people, and it's a contributing factor to people's satisfaction.

If you're stressed out about money, you are going to take that into work.

If you're stressed out at home about your money, that will affect how you perform.

What are you doing? What are some techniques that you use to keep your employees engaged and happy and not looking to constantly leave, and try to find greener pastures? I know, I think Michael had mentioned this and I think Finny had mentioned this, about making a concerted effort for PD.

Showing our team members that we're willing to invest in you and your development, your skill set.

I've always had a very frank conversation with all of my team members.

I do not expect you to work here till the day you retire.

I expect your time here with me to make you a better professional and better prepared for your next chapter.

I don't want to be your final chapter of your career.

Can I echo that? I'm sorry, I thought you were done.

No, yeah.

Go ahead.

I was just going to tell you, if you haven't listened to the recent podcast episode with Jonathan King, it's phenomenal.

And he talks about how many tech directors have you created.

And so he's not trying to keep everybody here in the little bubble.

He is trying to set them up on their leadership journey.

So it's looking and seeing where are movement and opportunities within your own school? How can you create rooms for growth, paths for growth and professional development? And I'll try to find that and drop it.

There's another one, Megan did a really great Access Points article for us, and she was talking about doing stay interviews.

So a lot of times we wait until people are leaving, until we ask them like-What's going on with you? Like, what could we have done? And so instead of waiting until they're out the door to ask what went wrong, take the opportunity to annually or whenever you're doing reviews or whenever it feels right for you guys to talk to them about their professional growth goals.

And maybe there are some levers where maybe that person doesn't need to come in five days a week.

Could you give them one day of work from home as a perk to help retain them? Or are there other interesting things like that where we might can proactively keep our really awesome people? We've seen a lot of the hybrid requests as being part of a retention method.

We also have a great number of staff members that are not ready to retire, but they want to reduce their workload, so they'll work four days a week instead of five.

And that's been beneficial to keep really experienced people without having to be able to keep them, without having to replace them with someone else, and just make up that extra day somewhere else by somebody else within the routine if necessary.

The other thing that we do a lot is with our younger team members that have maybe been working two, three, five years, intentionally partner them with other members of our staff for periods of time on projects.

So, like you were talking about, Jimmy, with your networking person, have them actually working with that networking person, stripping cables, doing things, working and understanding the firewall, working and understanding tables within the VLANs so that they get that exposure that they haven't worked on before if they're the help desk person.

Gives them a chance to see what's out there and learn a little bit.

And many times that creates a connection with them that they feel, I don't want to say obligated, but they feel more in tune with being there for a longer period of time because they see opportunity potentially.

I've started asking people for-- earlier I had said we try to get all of our goals to align towards the strategic plan for the institution.

But I've asked everyone to give me just a personal goal, like a personal growth goal.

It can be directly related to what you do.

It could be related to where you want to grow.

It could be learn another language.

But give me a personal goal that you're willing to discuss with me and that I can work with you on.

Right? Because none of our team members should feel like those goals are just like that is all you're going to be measured against, and you have to hit everything, and you have to do it alone, right? And so I've found that asking people like do you want to learn, like one of my academic schedulers, they are in data intensive positions, but they're not reporting specialists, right? So they're not required to know Power BI or Power Automate.

But through this process, we discovered one of our academic schedulers really wanted to learn Power BI.

And I'm like, "Oh, wow.

Okay.

So you really want to get deep and dirty into the data." And so it's a win for all of us, right? Like what you were just mentioning, Bob, it gives you the opportunity to expose another team member to that side of your technology stack because our tech stacks are so big.

We have so many different things, right? Like high cap alert protocol for anyone who deals with emergency notification systems.

But there's one or two of us who know what that is on campus, right? But if someone said, like, "Oh, I want to learn about..." We use Rise Vision for our digital signage around campus.

"I want to learn how to design for that and to manage that platform." Well, part of that would be exposure to these other tools that we use.

And so it's giving us that depth.

Even though I'm not adding headcount, I'm adding a skill set to the individual, and they can take that because CAP is common, common alerting protocol, in anywhere they go, right? If they work in another place where they might have emergency situations and notifications, that can go with them.

And yes, so our head of school off of Ashley's comment, actually every year she has a wellness goal.

So she has a personal wellness goal every single year.

And so that too can be, I know one year for me it was run a half marathon.

That was one of my goals one year.

I did it.

I thought I was going to have a heart attack in the middle of it, but I finished it.

And thankfully I did not.

But it also helps us make a personal connection with our team members, right? And when people feel connected to their supervisors and their team members, it helps them feel connected back to the organization as well.

A lot of sort of unexpected benefits came out of this, like let's add personal goals.

I love that.

And I think that that's such a great note to end on, is to really be cognizant of people bringing their whole selves.

How can you support them and how can you foster their growth and empower your team? Jimmy, thank you so much for being here with us as our facilitator today.

You did an awesome job.

We appreciate Meters again for being the sponsor for this series.

And thank all of you for coming and for sharing.

It's been really fun to be with you today..