Since the release of the Task Force for the Future of Libraries report in late 2016, the MIT Libraries has been in a period of strategic planning and significant change. Our transition to the future is far-reaching and multi-dimensional. While we expect to be in a period of intense and significant transition for the next few years, we also acknowledge that ours is a field and a domain that will experience continual change for some time to come. We seek to create a culture that enables staff to actively create the kind of organization we want to become. To that end we want to establish new systems and structures that enable staff to exercise leadership and influence free from the constraints of organizational hierarchy, to share and act upon ideas, to be heard, and to participate in shared problem solving.
One approach is to provide a systematic way for staff to connect directly with the administration via a new, ongoing, Staff Advisory Council (SAC) that can provide a mechanism for surfacing and addressing staff concerns, and report out the actions taken as a result of their input. The Staff Advisory Council will model and facilitate transparent and constructive communication between staff and senior leadership in the Director’s Group and the Joint Leadership Team.
The Staff Advisory Council (SAC) will concern itself with understanding and advancing organizational health related to staff. The Staff Advisory Council will provide an ongoing vehicle for staff feedback, insights, and advocacy to leaders of the organization that broadens the means for voices to be heard beyond the structured hierarchy and enables greater staff empowerment and higher morale in the Libraries. This group will enable a direct partnership between staff and administration to address staff concerns by facilitating direct upward feedback from staff to senior leadership and enable shared problem solving to build organizational effectiveness.
Team members will take the lead to establish logistics; help identify membership and membership rotation; and identify processes for gathering comments, prioritizing issues, and determining topics to bring to leadership’s attention. The team is encouraged to devise and use a variety of tools to help explore questions of organizational health, diagnose what is happening in the organization, communicate what they have heard to staff, and synthesize and prioritize the information to share with leadership/administrative groups. Inclusivity, transparency and communication with appropriate discretion will be the primary characteristics of the team’s work.
From the SAC:
From administration:
Assumptions include:
10 staff members from a broad cross-section of the organization representing diverse workgroups, functional areas, and job classification categories. The membership will be open to all Libraries staff and led by two co-chairs. To ensure that membership is determined as democratically as possible, the following process is suggested:
Individual staff members can either self-nominate or nominate another person. All nominees will check with their supervisor to ensure that there is sufficient capacity to support participation. These nominations will generate an "at large" group. This "at large" group will meet and hold an election to identify the small group (10 people) who will be the active SAC, with time commitment and responsibilities. This ensures that active SAC members have the commitment, bandwidth and time to contribute, understand scope of responsibility, and have backing of staff to represent their interests. The "at large" pool may be tapped at a later date for more focused group input/insight/etc as needed by SAC.
The two co-chairs - one administrative staff member and one support staff member - will be elected by the group. SAC will hold a seat at Library Council and be represented at meetings by either of the two co-chairs. A trained facilitator from outside the organization will be engaged within the first six months of the team’s inception to support and develop members’ skills in group forming, facilitation, and mediation.
Department heads, members of the Director’s Group, and Human Resources staff will not be eligible for participation on the team. Membership of the group should not include a staff member and their supervisor during the same term.
The Director’s Group serves as the sponsor for the Staff Advisory Council.
Rollout of this group is an opportunity to rethink how we communicate this sort of info out to the Libraries.
Process steps for formation:
Communication to staff and call for volunteers:
Ongoing communication norms: