Organization and Employee Development
Organization and Employee Development works to advance the organizational effectiveness of MIT and its departments and to promote the professional development of those who work at the Institute. OED provides four major client-focused services: organization development consulting, career planning, professional development programs, and the management of the MIT Professional Learning Center.
Organization Development Services
The organization development consultants in OED provided internal consulting services for approximately 120 projects for MIT and its departments, laboratories, centers, and offices. These projects ranged from multi-year change efforts to one-time retreats. The role of the OD consultants is to collaborate with their clients to provide services in managing change, developing teams and leaders, and planning and facilitating meetings and retreats.
Examples of internal consulting projects during the past year follow:
- Center for Real Estate. Designing and facilitating faculty retreat about the center's Masters in Real Estate Development program
- Committee on Community. Consulting to the chancellor on the design and facilitation of this new effort, designing and delivering community liaison orientation sessions, contributing to the development of the web site
- Controller's Accounting Office Reporting Group. Planning and facilitating customer service project on service priorities, problem solving, and business practices for effective service
- Council on Family and Work. Consulting to the cochairs on the development and dissemination of recommendations regarding faculty and staff quality of life
- Environmental Health and Safety. Consulting with leadership to facilitate changes in the organization's structure and to redefine roles, assisting in the launching of the MIT Safety and Security Team
- Financial Systems Services. Collaborating with others working with the internal performance management team to create and implement a performance management process
- HR-Payroll Project (SAP). Coordinating and facilitating various business process redesign teams, recommending and helping to implement change management plans, contributing as part of the communications team
- Libraries-References Services of the Future. Consulting to the committee to create strategies for gathering faculty, staff, and student input, designing the plan for focus groups, including the number of groups, staffing, schedule, format, analysis and synthesis
- Medical Department. Helping to integrate the physicians into the department's performance review program
- Working Group on Support Staff Issues. Providing ongoing consultation with the coconveners, designing and facilitating day-long end-of-year meeting, providing training on effective meeting practices
Center for Career Planning at MIT
OED's Career Planning at MIT team experienced a very successful second year of operation. This multiservice career center continues to provide career-planning services to all of MIT's employees and their organizations, including Lincoln Laboratory. Its services support MIT's commitment to help employees assume responsibility for their own successful development, and link that development to the strategic direction of the organizations in which they work.
During this past year, Career Planning at MIT staff delivered services to over 800 employees through a number of programs. These services are listed below:
- Individual career coaching/consulting to members of the MIT support staff, administrative staff, sponsored research staff, and faculty
- Coordination of outplacement agencies for those employees in lay-off situations
- Brown bag series on job search skills, writing resumes and cover letters, resume critiques, and networking
- Career workshops and courses
- Customized career programs for specific departmental groups
- Partnerships with departments, labs, and centers to implement career development strategies
- Career assessment tools including Pinpoint, Myers-Briggs, Holland's Self-Directed Search, and Campbell Interest and Skill Inventory
- Extensive resource lending library
- Targeted promotion of tuition assistance benefits
This office also conducted a study of workforce trends to determine the needs and impacts of mid-life and retirement transition on MIT organizations and the individuals that support them. As a result of this study Career Planning at MIT partners with Retirement Benefits, the Center for Work, Family and Personal Life and the Retirees Association to develop programs and examine policies that relate specifically to the retention and development of a mature workforce. This topic will be one area of focus for the coming year.
Professional Development Programs
During the past year, OED continued to offer a variety of open enrollment professional development courses directly related to Institute priorities and goals. OED also focused on developing alternative delivery methods for professional development through the use of technology.
OED's professional development courses span the topics of leadership and management, communication, collaboration, financial management and reporting, individual development, and career planning. During the past year, OED offered 93 professional development courses in these areas. A total of 1,296 people participated in them. In addition to enrolling staff from across the Institute, OED continued to enroll course participants from employees of member institutions of the Boston Consortium, students, alumni, retirees, and spouses and partners.
OED made a concerted effort during the past year to design and develop alternative delivery methods for its professional development programs. Specifically, OED launched a redesigned web site that includes articles and tools in the following five areas:
- Communicating with Others
- Designing and Facilitating Meetings
- Leading and Managing
- Managing Change
- Working on Teams
OED's consultants wrote the articles and tools and customized them to the learning and development needs of the MIT community. The articles provide general background about a particular topic, and the tools include explanations for their intended use and can be downloaded from the desktop for immediate use. Future topics for this web site include career planning as well as performance management.
OED also increased the number of web-based training courses that it offers to the MIT community. These courses focus on topics related to management and leadership and are available to users directly on their computers.
OED continued to update and develop its professional development curriculum by such activities as those listed below.
Expanding its leadership offerings by designing a new course entitled "Everyday Leadership" that builds participants' capacity and skills to lead others, regardless of whether they hold formal positions of leadership.
Continuing to increase the courses in its MIT Senior Leader Seminar Series by offering a new course titled "Administrative Leadership in an Academic Setting." The course helps participants to understand the complexities involved in performing administrative responsibilities within an academic department.
Developing a new course related to the Myers Briggs Type Indicator titled "Myers Briggs Type and Careers." This course helps participants understand how their Myers-Briggs type preference plays a role in their career development.
Updating its course offerings related to performance management by redesigning the two courses "Performance Planning and Review: Your Role in Your Own Review" and "Performance Planning and Review: The Manager's Role."
A significant new program from OED is Leader to Leader (L2L). Eighteen individuals completed the pilot program in June of 2003 and shaped it for the next round, which began the following November. L2L has five goals:
- To insure the stewardship of MIT, its mission and values
- To support, develop and enhance world-class leadership for MIT
- To develop flexible, creative, strategic thinkers who anticipate and manage change successfully at MIT
- To nurture a culture of development for each participant and for others at MIT
- To create a cross-functional group of peers who serve as resources to each other beyond the program
To accomplish these goals, participants create their individual development plans, attend two full-day workshops about every six weeks for one year, receive executive coaching between these sessions, and apply their learning to real work. Those who teach in the program include faculty from the Sloan School of Management and MIT's senior leaders.
Learning Environment Services
The Learning Environment Team leads OED's fourth area of responsibility. This team manages the MIT Professional Learning Center (W89) and administers the MIT Professional Development Programs. The mission of the center is to provide a quiet, clean, and pleasant environment to support effective training based on trainer and/or customer needs. It has seven state-of-the-art computer-training rooms and two professional development/meeting rooms.
Since its inception in 1996, utilization and demand for services have steadily increased. This year's utilization was 66 percent for the professional development rooms and 54 percent for the technical-training rooms. FY2003 yielded a total increase of three percent in utilization over the previous year.
This year the Learning Environment Team worked in partnership with the groups listed below:
- Various MIT and non-MIT groups to set-up classrooms for 1,975 courses or sessions (324 of those courses or sessions were set-up and later canceled by the customer)
- Information Systems to offer wireless laptops and portable tables to support customers' growing demand for mixed platform classrooms
- Information Systems and Microsoft to develop and implement two new computing solutions for W89: Win/Athena and Windows 2000 Domain Server
- Several training groups and Information Systems to provide the latest MIT supported operating systems and applications needed for training
- Internal MIT and external groups to reduce operating costs by hosting weekend and evening events
- Groups in the Department of Facilities to improve the learning environment in W89 by upgrading many air conditioning systems.
More information about Organization and Employee Development can be found on the web at http://web.mit.edu/hr/oed/.