Employee Experience Proposal: University Career Services

Project Overview

Student employees at BYU Careers & Experiential Learning (CEL), specifically the recruiting coordinators, are significantly less engaged and involved in their work than the students in similar positions at the Marriott Business school’s Business Career Center. I believe that this problem of engagement is due to a lack of:  personal responsibility in the job, any strong team culture, or programs that encourage growth. 

In order to help solve some of these problems, I have come up with a proposal to institute greater personal responsibility in the job through more student control and contact with clients, improving the team culture through better communication, and creating programs to encourage growth through personal involvement in the improvement of their workplace. Creating an employee engagement survey will help to measure the effects of these changes. 

Situation Overview

Currently, the recruiting coordinator team is a small team of 4-6 students who work throughout the day, with two full-time faculty supervisors. The main job responsibilities of students include vetting jobs that employers wish to post to BYU, working in-person with recruiters who come into the office, and approving any events or doing tasks that the supervisors assign to them.

Opportunity

The situation as outlined above creates a work environment where students do not take any personal responsibility for their jobs, and thus are not engaged in the workplace. Students are not involved in their jobs, and thus do not build relationships with their coworkers, supervisors, or clients. CEL does not currently collect any employee engagement data. According to a Gallup survey, employees who report high engagement are 30% more likely not to miss any work days because of poor health in any given month, and 42% more likely to evaluate their overall lives highly. 

Recommendations

To improve the student employee experience at BYU CEL , we propose the following three solutions:

1. Allow for student employees to work directly with clients. This will allow for student employees to build relationships with clients and feel more in control of their workload. Where currently the majority of client relationships are handled by the full-time supervisors, having the student employees gain more control over those relationships would help their jobs feel more meaningful and fulfilling.
2. Improve Team Communication. This will be done in two ways: creating a cohesive team-wide method of communication for work tasks, and creating a work-sponsored “social channel” for employees to create a community amongst themselves. Doing these two things will increase team unity and collaboration. 
3. Implement Annual Professional Development Plans (PDPs). This will entail students developing a plan at the beginning of the school year to find a way to improve the processes of their workplace or develop something of use to the career center. This plan will conclude with a one-on-one meeting with a supervisor. By making these plans mandatory, CEL will be encouraging innovation, as well as providing an opportunity for professional growth.

Success Metrics

The success of this proposal will be measured through an employee engagement survey. CEL does not use any survey to measure employee engagement, so the first survey would be taken before any piece of the proposal is implemented, and then will be given to student employees once a semester in order to see the most accurate picture of the impact of the plan throughout time.