Communication and working with others

Moving from a team of one to a team of two

I’ve realised that over the last 10 years, a pattern has developed in my working practices. I have taken on a new role (new to me and new to the organisation) and my purpose has been to build a role and justify my existence. Then, after a couple of years the organisation has made my role permanent and advertised for a second member of the team. Moving from a team of one to a team of two can be challenging.  I have had the luxury of moulding the role in my image. I have invested a lot of time in building relationships with colleagues and I have built workflows around those relationships. Recruiting a new member of the team brings the following questions:

  • Will I get on with them? (We’re going to be spending a lot of time together)
  • Will they agree with the processes and procedures I have put in place?
  • Will they disagree on the nature of the role?
  • How will we partition the workload?
  • Who gets the best desk! 🙂

Also, when working as a team of one, it’s easy to get a little sloppy. For example, colleagues would email me direct any questions they had (why do anything else when there’s just me?). Also, my (online) filing only had to make sense to me. So, in ECA, when we recruited another learning technologist, one of the first steps was to address how users would put in a support call. We started to use the centrally provisioned TopDesk ticketing software and created our own queue. Now, when a call came in, if one us was on leave / busy with other work, the other could take ownership of the ticket. It took a while to embed this practice – people are creatures of habit – and I didn’t feel good replying to emails asking them to pop the request into TopHat. However, after a few months, behaviours did begin to change and this was a positive outcome.

Where shall we put the Learning Technologist?

At the University of Edinburgh, a school based Learning Technologist is often placed in the IT team. But is this the best fit? Relationships with the teaching office are just as important (if not more so). Similarly, relationships with academics. Do academics see Learning Technologists in a different light to other ‘support’ staff? I do believe having a similar academic background can help with building these relationships. When I was Learning Technologist for ECA, I was very comfortable facilitating learning design workshops as my Undergraduate degree was in this discipline. Sharing a common language can be very helpful. I don’t think it was until I moved to Informatics that I quite appreciated how important this can be.

Communication Methods

When I moved to the School of Informatics, I knew that within a year or so, it was likely there would be the money to recruit another learning technologist (or similar). I was therefore keen to build the service, from the start, with that in mind. I created my own queue in both our School based ticketing system, as well as the wider University’s one. I was keen to brand the service as a ‘service’ and use the language of a ‘team’ from the start. I continued to offer face-to-face drop-in clinics, coffee time etc as a way of building informal relationships with colleagues. In parallel to this, I approached with great enthusiasm building a website for the service. This has allowed me to simplify the volume of information available on the wider University webpages. And the blogging aspect to the site encourages me to write frequently which, in turn, helps me develop my voice and, if I’m being honest with myself, it’s pretty important to me that my service reflects something of myself. I continue to question myself as to whether this makes me a narcissist. I have yet to build a social media presence for the service and I am disappointed with myself that I haven’t yet achieved this.

Evidence

ECA Learning Technology website (written in collaboration with Eli-Appleby-Donald)

Informatics Learning Technology Service blog (all work my own)