Recently I wrote a note to my division about the importance of professionalism and some ways they could do a more professional job. Perhaps these things will be of benefit to you or people you work with in your job.
Some Semester End Thoughts on Professionalism
This has been a really complicated semester in a lot of ways, but I’ve been experiencing a lot of actions and responses that really boil down to a lack of professionalism. I will start with the fact that we hold our students accountable. If they don’t come to class, they don’t complete their assignments or projects, they get a worse grade or even fail their course. If their behavior is outside the lines, in violation of the student code of conduct, they can be removed from class and suspended or even kicked out of college. As you all know, there is very little accountability for employees in this respect. Most of you are evaluated on a 2-year or 3-year cycle and even then, unless you get a needs improvement evaluation, there are things you do to fix it and boom you’re good again for multiple years. And unless you do something completely horrible, triggering an HR action, there is no off-cycle evaluation, basically it gets mentioned a year, or two years from now and everything just rolls on.
So, I’m not addressing the big things here, I’m addressing the day to day acts that show a lack of professionalism, some are quite small, but when consistently happening these things make our work less efficient or lower people’s opinion of who you are. I’m going to bring some that have been encountered this semester below, and my sincere hope is that you’ll take some time over the break to think on these things and how you want to perform and be perceived in your job. The simple fact is, you’re not going to be held accountable for these things in an evaluative, HR sense of the word, so in fact your level of professionalism and how you are perceived is something you have to care enough about personally to hold that standard. And if you’re looking to move to a higher position, or from part-time to full-time faculty, these are the things that hiring committees who know you, will bring up in their discussions around hiring you.
Expectations of a Professional Employee in Higher Education
1. Read and respond to your email
Yes, you get a lot of email, I average over 200 emails a day. Yes, there are a lot of nonessential emails that we get, but this is how we primarily communicate in our system. If you’re a part-time faculty member, your college account is where payroll information, student conduct, contracts, scheduling and evaluation emails will be going. You have to read these emails. I was greatly disappointed this semester in that of the 14 emails that I sent in October in the evaluation process to people being evaluated, as of December 1st, only 5 people had actually opened and responded to the emails. Ignoring evaluation process emails is a great way to get a negative evaluation, but it also complicates the process for everyone involved.
2. Learn how to use Outlook and Outlook Assistant and keep your calendar up to date
At least several times a week I get an email saying, when are you available to meet? If you’ve sent this message to me you know the reply was what it always is, my Outlook Calendar is up to date. Outlook is a wonderful tool, and Outlook Assistant makes setting up meetings much easier than a chain of emails back and forth or those damn Doodle Polls, particularly when we’re dealing with 3 people meeting at the college. Different ball game if you’re trying to schedule a meeting for 50 people and not all are required to attend. But Outlook Assistant is only effective if your calendar is up to date. It is incredibly frustrating trying to organize a meeting, finding an open spot, only to have someone say, oh, I don’t use Outlook, or I don’t put my class times on Outlook.
Outlook is the our college’s scheduling program, if you are a full-time employee, keep your calendar up to date. For your classes, if you’re full-time faculty this is a 30-minute set up once per semester that will prevent a lot of headaches. Absolute free pass to part-time faculty whose main life and job are likely at another organization and using a completely different calendaring system.
3. Meet your responsibilities
If you have been assigned, or volunteered to serve on a committee, go to the meetings. It is unprofessional and disrespectful to your colleagues and for you to not take this responsibility seriously. Again, I know, there’s no real penalty, but I would hope as an adult and a professional you would take your responsibility to your colleagues seriously. And thank you, to all of you who do show up weekly, or monthly to do your part and especially to you who do that and report out at our division meetings helping keep your colleagues informed.
4. Communication is key
There are three very important communication pathways that you need to maintain as a professional in our higher education. For anything that rises to a level of severity above the department level or that has broader implications you should be informing the dean. For issues within your department or program, particular issues with student wellness or success, you should be informing your department coordinator. Most importantly for faculty, you should be communicating with your students and colleagues. You should always be responding to student inquiries in a timely fashion. And if you are very particular about the way students contact you and they don’t follow instructions, you need to redirect them, not ignore them. Secondly, if you’re team teaching or in a cohorted program, it’s super important that you are communicating with each other about issues, problems and accommodations that involve students. If you teach on Tues and Thursday nights with someone who does Monday and Wednesday night, you need to make sure they are aware of student issues. And at times, this can be extremely important, noticing a student having a significant behavior change could be an indication of a larger issue in the student’s life and not letting the other teacher know may create an issue in class that could have been easily avoided. Please, communicate amongst each other any relevant and important student issues.
5. Read and Know Your Contract
I constantly get questions that are easily answered in the contract. It’s fine if you’ve read a section and are confused but when things are clearly laid out in the contract and you haven’t even attempted to look at your contract you shouldn’t be asking me or my assistant for the answer. I don’t expect you to be an expert on your contract but that you refer to it and generally know what’s in it.
This is particular important for evaluation. I constantly get questions about the evaluation timelines, forms regulations etc… and the simple fact is people, we have all had the same number of hours of training sessions on your contract, none. I know the things I know by going to and opening up the contract. And our evaluation sections are the most detailed sections of both the CSEA and AFT contracts.
6. Professionals make an effort and pay attention to detail
This one will revert specifically to faculty evaluation. Far too many full-time faculty, doing evaluations over the last two semesters, have dropped the ball in this process. There is a wealth of information on this process, which is by definition, a faculty led evaluation process. Taking the lead on a part-time faculty member’s evaluation should be a serious and significant thing, but all too often it’s treated as just one more box checking activity. There is a training every semester about the evaluation process, the meeting is videotaped and available to be viewed. You have all been through the process for four years, some of you have been department coordinators and have done this dozens of times. All of the information you need is in the contract. I’m happy to assist folks with the process who have made some sort of effort. When you turn in a packet to me missing several components of the evaluation, it’s clear you just don’t care enough to look at the list of the required elements and make sure they are all there.
I no longer accept the idea that the PDF, Adobe Sign process is an issue. There are training videos, ALL of the forms have been put into templates and are available to anyone. This process is covered in the evaluation training. And it’s 2024, you are able to learn how to use Adobe the same way I did, by Googling, how to use Adobe Sign. It is your responsibility as professionals, in a system that has been essentially paperless for four years, and requiring the PDF process in evaluation for three years, to bring yourself up to speed or get the help you need to get there.
7. Being Professional on Zoom
We’ve fully integrated the use of Zoom into our organization for the last four years, it’s no longer new. Sure, we all forget to unmute ourselves from time to time. But there are a few things that I see that are really unprofessional, small things but they really make you look bad.
Never being on camera. I’m not someone who thinks everyone should have their cameras on all of the time. There are lot of reasons not to. You might not be feeling well, working from home and look like a mess. You might be in a meeting where slides are being droned at you for an hour, no reason to be on camera. But unless that’s the case, when you’re speaking, you should probably be on camera. When you are never on camera, at any time, in any meeting, people just assume you’re not there, or that you just don’t care about the meeting.
Adjust your screen, please. Just this week I sat through two meetings where someone, through an entire meeting, was on camera but the camera screen only showed them from the nose up. I’ve also had meetings where people are on camera, wearing a hat and keep their head down the whole time so you only see the top of their hat. You don’t have to be on camera all of the time, but when you are, make sure people can see your whole face.
A note about doing Zoom meetings while driving. While in some limited circumstances this may be unavoidable it’s a really bad idea. If you are on a meeting and driving you are essentially a distracted driver putting yourself and others at risk. Also, you’re likely not participating fully if you’re having to concentrate on driving.
8. Follow through, consistency and attention to detail
This is probably the single most important trait of a professional. If I have to constantly send you reminders for deadlines or to respond to an email, it just feels like you don’t care. Sure, we all miss something from time to time, that’s understandable. But when I have to email you damn near every month to fill out your leave report, which you’ve done every month for years, it seems like you’re not really paying attention. Earlier this semester, I asked that when people call in sick, to please copy me and my assistant by email to let us know. I am still, constantly having to remind people to do that, because they email someone else and leave one or both of us off of the communication.
Far too many people scan things and respond. We’re all guilty of this from time to time, we all occasionally miss things. However, when people are having to consistently remind you that the answer to your question was in the previous email, an email that’s part of the thread you are responding to, it shows a lack of attention to detail. And while we are all occasionally late, don’t show up to meetings 15 or 20 minutes late consistently or not show at all when you have accepted a meeting invitation. If you are not going to show, let people know.
Your individual commitment to professionalism will not greatly impact my life. But whether you realize it or not, it will impact yours particularly in terms of your future opportunities, so I hope you’ll think about it and make an effort to be better for your own benefit and the benefit of our students.
Higher Ed Mentor 