COSAM News Articles 2019 April Message from Dean Giordano – April 2019

Message from Dean Giordano – April 2019

Published: 04/02/2019

Thank you to everyone who participated in the town hall meetings and the Group Explore and Star Power activities led by joyce gossom during the last few weeks. Originally, joyce provided a chance for employees to share their input during the Let’s Talk: A COSAM Exchange series in 2018. With the positive feedback from these discussions, I asked joyce to return to our college to help us continue to make improvements.

In March, joyce and her team provided professional development opportunities for faculty and staff members. During the Group Explore sessions, both faculty and staff collaborated on ways to improve the onboarding experience for new hires. The suggestions you provided will be used to make the experience for new employees more welcoming with helpful resources.

Supervisors were asked to actively participate in a Star Power session that gave the attendees a chance to role play to discuss and think about the roles of power in the workplace.

joyce is using the information from these sessions to help COSAM review your suggestions and make changes in our work environment. I look forward to her returning in 2019 to continue the Let’s Talk: A COSAM Exchange series. We are also planning some activities for faculty in their role as graduate student mentors, and these will likely take place in the days before the fall semester begins in August.

Another important result of joyce’s work is the creation of a new COSAM newsletter designed for all faculty, staff, and graduate students, with helpful human resources-related information. The first of these newsletters was sent out in late March. The information in this newsletter was developed from questions from the sessions with joyce. Future newsletters will cover topics suggested by feedback from folks in COSAM.

One of the new ideas we discussed at the town hall meetings was an initiative to recruit persons interested in being COSAM “champions,” whose role would be to help others in the college in addressing and resolving their problems, and in facilitating communication with departmental and college leadership. Moving forward, I encourage you to volunteer to be a COSAM Champion if you are interested. This new role will be available to provide help and support to everyone in our college. COSAM Champions are not limited to a specific department or office. If you sign up, you will be part of a network to help your peers resolve problems and find the resources they may not be aware of currently. You can use this online form to sign up to be a COSAM Champion.

You can now submit COSAM-related suggestions through a new webpage that is completely anonymous. Any staff, graduate students, faculty or administrator can share an idea or suggestion, and your information cannot be tracked. Share your suggestions online.

Thank you again for helping us work together to make COSAM a better place for everyone.