Taking an administrative office performance from process-focused to people-driven

Motivating team members and satisfying all concerned parties are among the most difficult challenges for a manager of a university administrative office to overcome. On top of that, an administrative office in a university is often neglected as it is not directly related to either academics or research. Often, these offices have repetitive, boring administrative tasks to complete. 

When I started managing the team, my main concern was how to motivate them and give meaning to their jobs. Drawing on my background in industrial engineering and researching customised products, I tried to put in place a people-driven approach. My research, after all, looks at changing the focus of production systems from process to customer or involved parties.

Identify what your team needs and what they do

At first, we needed to re-identify our mission and reframe what we do not as supporting international mobility and international partnerships development administratively at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC), but as helping students, staff and faculty live their best international experience to promote intercultural understanding, inclusivity, diversity and open-mindedness. In the end, our job is to help people be happy while facilitating and supporting international activities. 

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Next, we needed to identify those people: in our case, they included the international office team, the students, UTC faculty and staff, and partner universities. 

Then we had to find out what each person needed. We might think we know what people want, but often we are mistaken. We started with the international team, with individual meetings to identify what each person likes to do, what their talents are in general, how they want to evolve in their career, what gives them joy and what they hate in their job. 

Second, we worked with the students via surveys, focus groups and student projects to ask how they choose a destination, what information they need, how the international mobility administrative process can be improved, how our communication is perceived and what makes a good international experience. 

After that, we went to the faculty to find out what helps them create an international activity, what they need from administration support and how they perceive our work. 

Finally, we identified gaps between what we do and what is needed to make everybody happy. With lean management approaches, we identified improvement projects and action plans. Each project has a coordinator, who is part of the international team. 

How did consultation improve the team’s experience of their work

The director assistant, who is active in sustainable development, reshaped our communication, proposed sustainable gifts and actions for improving the office’s environmental impact and worked on new intercultural events at our university. 

The incoming mobility team – where one member loves decorating and interior design and the other human contact – reworked their process. They improved the information shared by working with international students and including their points of view. They added figures, more videos, more links to interesting websites and information about visiting France and living the best French experience, which was completely omitted before. They created an onboarding guide, suggested a welcome gift, included exchange students in the UTC new students’ integration week and organised a big event every semester (such as the Christmas and Chinese New Year parties).

The outgoing team stopped sending long emails and started working on videos. They also started using social media to communicate with the students. They worked with student focus groups to recreate dedicated pages for double degrees, scholarships and international destinations. These were highly appreciated not only by students, but also by faculty members and the head of academic programmes.

The office proposed brief, fast, easy-to-read descriptions and guidelines for the faculty on international academic projects. The guideline links what a faculty would want to do, which calls they should agree to and how to do it. Also, to satisfy the request for a brief overview of what is happening, three pages of international news are sent quarterly to showcase successful projects and all that is going on in international relations at our university, with a page dedicated to upcoming international project calls. 

More Erasmus+ or international academic projects were submitted by UTC faculty with a higher success rate.

All this led to happier, more satisfied people. Two years’ work resulted in:

1. More satisfied students, whether incoming or outgoing exchange students, giving recognition to the international team
2. More automation in the international administrative processes, freeing up time to do new things
3. A happier team, with people doing much more than performing repetitive administrative tasks; they see the results for the students and are touched by their feedback
4. Higher overall international office performance: more partners, increased mobility, more double degrees, more international projects and more international workshops.

Problems faced within the process

1. When we ask people what they need to be happy, we somehow commit to providing it, but sometimes it is not possible or takes a long time. How we explain that is important. Feedback is highly important for what has been done, what we decide not to pursue and why and finally how we learn from failures. 
2. Dealing with opposite opinions while keeping a happy, safe environment for sharing one’s thoughts, the process for choosing a proposed idea – and explaining the choice – appeared to be the most difficult challenges to overcome. We are still working on it. 
3. Finally, sometimes people do not know what makes them happy; hence, we need tools to help them express their needs, requirements and desires. Co-design workshops seem to be a promising idea, but we still need to work on this challenge. 

Joanna Daaboul is the director of international relations and an assistant professor at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France.

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