Building Resilience with the 25% Plan

Morning Breakout Session I 10:00-11:00

Afternoon Breakout Session 1:30-2:30

 Part of being resilient is ensuring that we have the capacity to meet new work demands, but what happens when we have no spare cycles to give, and the demands continue to grow? Sometimes we need to find ways to adjust workloads to maintain resiliency. We cannot keep adding work; we have to subtract as well. But what work should we subtract?

This presentation will be applicable for leaders and managers, but all participants can learn from the content. The 25% Plan is a way of looking at the bottom quartile of team workload for work that has less value or doesn’t utilize our most important team skills, work that could be done another way, or work that is done inefficiently within or between teams. This process can be used at the level of teams, across divisions, or campus-wide to create the capacity that institutions will require to focus on new initiatives and prepare for a better future.

In addition to finding ways to improve resiliency and position the team for the future, this process can improve team culture. It can increase the level of empowerment in teams to discuss things they do that aren’t adding value and should be done another way. It can help teams feel heard and to instill a new way of thinking about work (internal management of services supplied by a department). The presentation will outline the methodology of the process and talk about key elements for success.

We will also plan some interactive elements to get participants to think of examples they might use in their own work.