Building Campus Partnerships

No doubt your store works with other departments from time to time as campus colleagues. But are you truly looking out for each other as partners?

In their CAMEX100 education session Transforming Department Relationships into Collegewide Partnerships, Mona Liza Colon and Frankie Ortiz described how they thought they had a friendly working relationship with other entities at Valencia College in Florida, where Colon is director of auxiliary services and campus store operations and Ortiz manages the store on the Lake Nona Campus.

When the pandemic hit, however, all seven campuses and four bookstores had to flip to online operations. The bookstores couldn’t use their physical sites. Instead, they had to set up a full-scale e-commerce systems in a large kitchen to get course materials and supplies out to students.

“We were working off stove tops and sinks,” Ortiz said. “Our website was not the best.”

It soon became clear store employees—the ones who were still working—couldn’t do it all alone. They needed help.

The security team had already assisted the move into the kitchen space. Now, Ortiz said, they reached out to other departments “and told them what our challenges were.” Soon they created a work pool drawn from the provost’s office, deans, human resources, and others.

“And not for just a week or two,” Colon emphasized. Many continued to put in some time with store operations for two years or more. “They started for a few days and wanted to come back, even after their own department started working again.”

But as most campus stores discovered during the pandemic, running an e-commerce fulfillment center for textbooks takes much more labor than traditional self-service or even counter service. They were picking and packing orders for shipment from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day, including holidays. About 40-45 people were needed to keep things moving.

One day the vice presidents and assistant vice presidents were having a meeting and suspended it in order to lend a hand. “They came down and helped us out. They were able to see what our challenges are, and they continued to come down,” Ortiz said.

Having campus colleagues working for the store helped them understand operations better, especially problem areas.

A curbside pickup location was set up in the parking lot, which alleviated some of the shipping preparation.

But eventually the long hours were difficult to maintain, “so we started talking about long-term,” Ortiz said. The college was starting to open up again but still needed to ensure students, staff, and faculty could keep safe distances from each other.

The solution was to install smart lockers where students could pick up orders (and eventually other items, such as graduation materials).

“The word we got from students was ‘We love ordering online,’” Colon said, so the store installed kiosks when it reopened to accommodate in-store orders.

Once again, the store reached out to other departments, to gain input and suggestions on the lockers. A committee was formed—mostly faculty, with just two store representatives.

“The locker process was long, more than a year,” Colon noted. When the committee wasn’t meeting, she made sure they were still in the loop on progress, “even if the update was there is no update.”

The committee work paid off when a total of 448 lockers were installed in seven locations on four campuses. The marketing department was given free rein to decorate the banks of lockers and select a name from a list of finalists (The Vault was ultimately chosen). Curbside service ceased once the lockers became available.

A little later Valencia decided to seek proposals for a third party to handle course materials online while the existing stores would focus on general merchandise and launching new services such as passport applications, notary services, and Apple Tech.

Once again, Colon and Ortiz made sure to collaborate with campus colleagues. A consultant was brought on board and had a meeting with faculty to explain what would happen and give them a chance to ask questions. A project manager was recruited from the IT department to ensure the technical side of things would go smoothly.

“We had a meeting with each department separately to get their opinion,” Colon said. “We finished in November and implemented in January. Quietest rush ever. We used to get buried by rush.”

Just as other departments got a firsthand look at the bookstore’s trials and tribulations during committee meetings and project work, so the bookstore discovered much more about the challenges elsewhere around campus.

“There were a lot of people at the table. All decisions were made together as a team,” Ortiz noted. “The biggest thing we learned was that we learned from each other.”

Ortiz’ and Colon’s best practices for building partnerships with campus departments:

• Use the word “partner” regularly and openly (rather than committee member, college employee, etc.)
• Collaborate with other departments on all decisions. This avoids trouble spots, keeps everyone informed, and heads off problems.
• Continue the relationship after the project or crisis is over. (Colon recommends keeping brief notes about individuals in order to remember their hobbies, likes/dislikes, children’s names, background, and other information that might spark conversation in the future.)
• Learn from each other.