Operations and Infrastructure

Dedicated employees and a service-oriented work culture are what make a large organization like a public university strong. How well a university functions and how well its employees do their job comes down to the quality of its processes, the strength of its working environment and the support and mentoring provided to its faculty and staff.

As part of the brainstorming process at the 2014 Planning Implementation Workshop, the participants considered ways to strengthen UNT's processes and to better support employees to build a stronger working environment. Many agreed that there were flawed and cumbersome processes, disjointed operations and a lack of transparency and trust in areas such as budget, HR, IT and data reporting. There also was strong consensus that there needed to be a better way to support, train, mentor and reward employees to keep them at UNT and to help them move up the career ladder as reward for their work and service at UNT. 

Participants specifically called upon President Smatresk to help them "disband the UNT runaround" and "break down silos" to create a culture of service excellence for employees but also for the university’s students, community partners and others.

At the end of the discussion, President Smatresk picked out the common threads from the discussion, specifically improving processes across campus and creating better support for employees.

"I see a real need for mentorship, supporting career progression and creating better ways to value our employees," he said. "We're here today to challenge the notion that we can't do it that way because that's the way it always has been done."

Workshop participants at 12 tables outlined their Top 5 priorities for improving operations and infrastructure. All of those priorities were pulled together for participants to vote on the top priorities they would like to see UNT tackle.

Here are the top priorities in order of the highest to lowest vote getters:

  • Improve processes to create more streamlined work flow and partnerships across campus
    • Improve finance processes and budgeting
    • Work with the UNT System Business Service Center on better management and transparency of BSC processes
    • Stabilize HR processes and make them less confusing
    • Develop consistent processes to reduce the time it takes for travel processes to be completed
    • Seek and implement common solutions that have worked at other universities
    • Empower individuals with necessary resources and hold those individuals accountable
    • Disband the “UNT runaround” and “break down silos”
  • Retain talent (faculty and staff)
    • Recognize and reward meritorious service and excellent performance
    • Offer competitive salaries
    • Provide better onboarding and professional development
    • Provide cross-training to improve efficiency
    • Support and offer training for skill development in administrative support staff to accomplish goals and objectives; better align resources with expectations
    • Mentor faculty and staff
  • Improve and better maintain facilities
    • Explore renovation costs for cost-savings and simplify complex procedures
    • Improve the quality of classroom space and labs and create more space
  • Establish a customer service-oriented culture and create a “can-do” attitude
    • Improve internal and external customer relations by emphasizing service excellence
    • Evaluate customer service in parking and accessibility areas
  • Improve IT infrastructure and governance to improve data analysis and data sharing
  • Improve alumni relations and more effectively leverage student to alumni life cycle
  • Establish a culture of trust through transparent communications
    • Improve budget planning, systems and priorities
    • Seek stakeholder input before making blanket decisions that will affect them
    • Create a better communications strategy and mechanism for Student Accounting to inform students about financial aid processes
  • Focus on meaningful ways to support diversity and inclusion and hire a VP for Diversity and Inclusion
  • Focus on retention resulting in more student success
  • Improve UNT business practices and emphasize expectations for improved UNT System business practices
    • Develop and follow metrics to measure effectiveness of operations and infrastructure
    • Fully fund priorities
  • Budget effectively to avoid workforce reductions that would impact students