 All right, I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. My name is Brian Alexander, I'm the Forum's host, creator and chief cat herder, and our two guests this week are coming to us to talk about an incredibly important topic. Remote working has been something that we've all experienced in great detail over the past almost two years now, thanks to COVID-19 pandemic. But in the United States, as the pandemic is starting to stagger its way towards winding down, towards bearing nearly a seasonal infection, we hope. The possibility of changing remote working is there. On the one hand, we have some who want us to just return to face-to-face work completely, have everybody back on campus. Most recently, Apple's Tim Cook just urged all Apple employees to return to their desks. On the other hand, we have the idea that remote work is beneficial for all kinds of things. We know that we can do it technologically. We know that maybe beneficial for a wide range of purposes. So now we have an open question and a strategic question for every institution now, is how do we do remote work? Do we do it at all? Now, in order to discuss this, I want to introduce two great guests who are both in the leadership position of their institution. And I want to begin with Karen Peterson, who's the Dean of Kansas State University's Global Campus, Global Campus, excuse me. Let me bring her up on stage. Hello, Karen. Hello, everyone. It's great to be here. Well, it's good to see you. Thank you for coming. How are you doing today? I'm doing fantastic. And I would just say that, yeah, there's some familiar faces. So it's great to see everyone. Oh, good. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. Karen, when I ask people to introduce themselves, our usual protocol is to look ahead and say, what are you going to be working on for the next year? You know, what are the big topics? What are the big projects? What are the big things that are going to be occupying your mind? Well, I'm just going to dive into today's topic because yesterday was our final day for 22,000 square foot space that we had occupied that Global Campus had been in for 20 plus years. And we've moved into 1,000 square feet at Kansas State University. So we are acclimating our ability to work remote and leading remote, growing our programs in a remote way. So I'm really excited about what is in store for us as well as the changes that we're seeing across the higher education landscape. Well, there's a lot, a lot there. And in your position, so your world campus, you work on Kansas State's goal of teaching as many people as possible online. I'm betting a lot of that expanded over the past year. Are you expecting more of that over the next year to come? So I think it's going to be a really interesting time as we look to the fall and into this next academic year. We certainly had to pivot and pivot quickly. We as administrators, faculty members and students as well as staff and others. So I think for me, it's really going to be interesting to see in the past, maybe we had 10 sections of a course and two were offered online and eight were in a classroom. And I'm not sure if that's where we're gonna be this fall. I think there's some of our learners that are gonna shift how they learn and the way they learn. And so I think as universities and colleges, we're gonna have to think about what does that mean for us and how do we balance what learners are wanting from us as institutions? I understand. Are you gonna be teaching any classes yourself? I am a full-time administrator. And so that is the role that I have. And so I work with faculty across eight different colleges. We have a large portfolio of online programs that we offer at Kansas State University. And I'm actually looking at doing more work in the non-credit space and looking at kind of seamless pathways for learners as they look at what they need to upskill, reskill or new skill. Wow. So that's gonna take a lot of work. I'm sure you're gonna have a lot of questions for folks. I'm trying to find your colleague. I'm trying to find him here. I don't see Kim Siegenthaler yet. So she may have had a problem coming in. I'll check my, I'll try and check to see if she can come in. But in the meantime, we have questions for you. Friends, I have a couple of quick questions to put to our guests or guests. But as we go, I would love to hear more from all of you. This platform, this event is all about your questions, your thoughts, your ideas. Monica, please just quickly refresh this page if you're having any issues with sound and I'll just type it into the chat. My one quick question to you is just to get things rolling. What are the biggest reasons for a campus to maintain some form of remote working this fall? So let's say one of the biggest reasons for my being to this point and what we have seen over the last 18 months is we have seen just this incredible opportunity for our faculty, staff, students to think about work-life balance. And for a lot of individuals that work-life balance is something that they yearn for, that they're looking to potentially continue as we kind of move out of our pandemic mode. And so I think for me that work-life balance is critical. The other thing I would say is that I would say a lot of administrators might have been surprised about just the productivity level of all of us being remote and sort of what we were able to accomplish. And a lot of articles that you read about remote work or telecommuting talk about that. They talk about just that ability to be focused and to get done what we need to get done. And I think those are the things that for me made a huge difference when I made the pitch to our provost about stepping out of a 22,000 square foot building, maintaining some presence on campus. But it was really about, I could talk about what we had accomplished during the year and just what difference it made for those that worked in global campus. So the work-life balance, is that in the sense that people have more time to themselves because they're not commuting and also because they can blend their work at home, take a call while doing the laundry, that kind of thing. Yeah, and I think sometimes too, it's just sometimes when you work in an office and it's an eight to five situation and sometimes the best time for you to do things is not from eight to five. And so again, how flexible can we be as employers as we think about what really works for this individual? And clearly we have learners that we need to serve and we have faculty as instructional designers that we need to work with. And so we have to be available when others want to work with us. That's part of working together and collaborating. But again, that flexibility is what I see as so critical as we look to the future. Well, that makes a lot of sense. That makes a great deal of sense. Friends, I'm gonna ask one more question myself, but again, this is about you. I would love to hear your thoughts, your comments and your questions. And already we had Vanessa Vale just added an extra point which is really important, not just work-life balance and flexibility, but also environmental impact. So you're not riding a bus or driving a car instead. At most you're paying for a bit of electricity. Good point, Vanessa, very good point. Yeah, and Brian, I was just gonna say, I'm really glad that Vanessa brought that up because looking at Kansas State University, if you know the state of Kansas, we split kind of in the middle of the state. So North, South, East, West, kind of put a little line there right in the middle of the state. We might be a little off from that, but I had a campus that would drive 30 miles, 60 miles, about really being able to think about the impacts of our remote work and how that can positively impact on the environment. It's a critical point, so thank you for sharing that. Okay, we just, your first 20 seconds got a little bit garbled just then. You were talking about commuting across the state, right? Yeah, so at Kansas State University, we sit in more of a rural part of Kansas. And so just that ability, we are a major employer in the region. And so we had, I have personnel that would drive 30 to 60 miles one way to come into the office every day. And so I really appreciate Vanessa's point about the environmental impacts and how working remote can have many different impacts. Very good, absolutely. All right, and then thank you. And again, the group of us is always better. I think than any one of us. So this is a great time. So either, if you'd like to join us on stage, you can see that Karen and I are both very friendly, even though we have more hair, both of us than I think anybody, but please just click the raised hand button if you'd like to be your face to face and just hit the Q and A box if you'd like to type in a question or a comment. And before I can finish that thought, we already have a question that just came up from the esteemed Thomas J. Tobin, a good friend and a great organizer from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who thus wants to add his own story. I've been full-time remote in a 99% in-person team for five-plus years. My partner is now in a full-time remote trial as well. How would you respond to campus leaders who demand presence because of hallway serendipity? Just for everybody, if you don't know the term, just the chance to bump into Tom on the way to the bathroom or as we're between meetings and say, hey, what do you think about this or that kind of thing? It's a classic call for in-person, a good point. What do you think, Karen? Yeah, I think that is one of the questions. And part of this is really understanding how to do this and how to do it well. And I think that for me, as an administrator, I personally, like you, Tom, I personally have worked remote for about 12 years of the last 20 of my career. And I've found that there is a responsibility to make those connections. And how do we do that? Because sometimes it's the conversation before the meeting that really is the spark that lights this opportunity up or you find that individual that you can work on this project together. So it really, from my vantage point, I think it's about identifying how can you create those kinds of opportunities, those kinds of situations in a remote environment? This is a top one because I think for individuals that have worked in an office for their entire career, see that as the way to work, this requires some moderation and some thinking that's a little bit different. But I think, well, that's one of the things when you read about remote work. Lots of us are sort of asking the question, and maybe your calendar was like mine, pre-pandemic, where it was meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, every day was like that. And so I think some of us have sort of said, not all those meetings were necessary. We can do our work differently. We can accomplish what we need to in different ways. So Thomas, I'm with you. I think it's figure out what the administrators that your institution are worried about, and then how do you solve that? How do you provide that serendipity, that hallway serendipity? What are strategies and ways to do that? And I think you can look at convincing case. Just done, first of all, thank you, Karen, for a fantastic, thoughtful answer. Again, if you're new to the forum, this is how the Q&A box routine works. You type in a question in Q&A box, we share it, and our guest thoughtfully responds to it. I do want to share something that Tom and I are working on, which is a conference on online learning and teaching. I just put a link to it in the chat, the DTL conference. So you should know about that. Also, just a quick observation from Charles Finley, who says, why should students and staff go to a central location Monday, Wednesday, Friday for 50 minutes? Tradition, so that definitely counts for a lot. But we have more questions and more comments, and I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance. This is one coming to us from Massachusetts, Gerald Petruzzella. I'd like to hear it, Karen, talk a bit about how Kansas State's IT staff are supporting the increase in remote work, things like bringing your own device policies, remote support, troubleshooting, et cetera. Good question, Gerald. Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So I'm talking between about 15, 20 minutes. Brian, just double checking to make sure you can hear me. I can hear you just fine. All right, I was getting a little feedback, so I wanted to double check. You're good. So I'm talking with a team of about 55, and we're going to be totally remote. And so we are going to have the Small Thousand Square Foot Office. We are going to have what we're calling Hotelling Space. So staff can schedule a desk. If they're coming to campus for various meetings, to engage with various stakeholders because we work across the university, the personnel and global campus, they'll have a home base. They'll have a place to come, internet connectivity. We all have laptops in our unit, so we'll have docking stations and we're ready. So that's how we're going to handle sort of that in-person. But my point I was going to make is that just at our last meeting, our staff meeting, we had our IT personnel join us because there are some increased security considerations when you think about remote staff and remote staff who are permanently remote. Oftentimes at the university, when I would go to campus, updates would push to my laptop, unbeknownst to me, by just plugging into the university's network. And so how does that happen when I'm now remote, that I need to ensure that those updates continue and that my computer has the latest patches and the latest, you know, we know folks are out there trying to hack every day. And so how do we do that? So for me, it was about really ensuring that everyone in global campus, all of the personnel that were going remote were up to date on what to do, how to do it, have the resources understood it. And so having that kind of presentation and actually our IT professionals were excited because at my institution, global campus is the tip of the spear. We are the first unit to be given the green light to go remote. But I know that there are other individuals and other units within the university that have an interest in this. And so part of what IT said was really, hey, we're gonna develop our training because I have a feeling we're gonna be doing it for more personnel within the university. The same thing was true for us with our human capital services personnel. New policy around remote work needed to brief on that, make sure all personnel in global campus understood the policy understood, what happens if I bang my knee on my desk and I'm at home? How does workman's com work when you are working remotely? And so all of these things were critical for us to think about and to have our human capital services colleagues really partner with us on ensuring a smooth transition and a successful long-term venture in terms of remote work. Well, first of all, that's a great question and this is a rich, rich answer. Karen, this is probably when we all discovered you were starting your consulting business on this thing because that is a lot of thought, a lot of experience. And I wanna make sure that we get to hear from you. But I also wanna make sure that we get to hear from Kim Siegenfeller who managed to come in and we should bring her up on stage. Hello, Kim. Good afternoon. Sorry to be late to the party, but glad I was able to get here. Oh, it's only a party when you're here. I'm so glad you made it. I'm so glad you made it. Friends, if you don't know Kim, she's the Associate Provost for Online Strategies at Georgia State. And just to give you a chance to introduce yourself. That was a great noise. But we'd like to ask people to introduce themselves by describing what they're doing over the next year. Now, what are the big projects and the big ideas that are top of mind for you? So a couple of things are our adult learner strategy. So we're making a big push for an institution-wide approach to attracting adult learners that includes stackable credentials, additional on-off ramps, undergraduate certificates, expanded credit for prior learning. So kind of a very comprehensive structure around how we attract and support adult learners. We're also expanding or really firming up our infrastructure around our online education enterprise that launched in fall of 2019, right before COVID. And so have been working on making that a reality in the midst of COVID. So in some ways that's really accelerated our progress and in other ways it's created some interesting points of confusion and conflict. Wow, what a great timing to have that fall of 2019. Well, this sounds great and like you have a lot of work cut out for you. Good luck, Kim, good luck. Thanks. Friends, again, we have two brilliant guests that you can raise questions with and I wanna make sure that everyone gets some pants to ask. So if you're just joining us, remember that on the bottom of the screen there's the raised hand button to join us on stage. And of course the Q and A button with a question mark. An example of that question comes from Rob McLeod. We just put this up on stage here. There seem to be different perspectives across the staff and students solutions that work for one group or less ideal for others. I hope we respect these differences when we explore solutions. Thank you, Professor McLeod. That's not just a question, that's a comment as well but I'm wondering, Kim or Karen if you'd like to respond to that. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that we've certainly identified here is that there are some roles or some jobs that are more easily done fully remotely and others that you're kind of challenged to deliver remotely and others that there's that balance between sort of that hybrid approach. And I think one of the things that is informing our thinking is not only is it possible to do this work remotely but is that in the best interest of the university for that work to be done remotely? So it may be very possible to provide instructional design support fully virtually but is that really what our faculty want is that really what contributes in the best way to the mission of the university? So it's not even so much a yes, no, this works remotely and this doesn't but so many other factors get rolled into it. I'm curious just for a second as a moderator just to ask this question and this is for you, Rob, as well as for everybody are any of your institutions surveying or polling their populations, faculty or staff or students to ask about their preferences for remote working? Kim, are you guys doing that at all? No, we're really not. I mean, I would say there are probably some informal surveys. We certainly did some of that work within our own office to identify which of our employees wanted to remain remote who wanted to come back to campus and then balancing that with what the institution's remote work policy was. So in some cases the policy is, well, to a great extent our policy was informed by the university system of Georgia and then trying to create the flexibility across the campus to accommodate the range of positions and departmental needs and employee preferences. So all of those things again, there's no, you know, they're always multiple factors and layers of factors. Sure, sure. Yeah, I was just going to chime in, Brian and Mike Kim, we did the same thing within our staffs. Well, I knew that 87% of the staff in global campus had an interest in staying remote, but I also knew I had 13% that really had an interest in coming back to an office. And so I think that is critically, your question is really a good one, Brian, to think about, you know, where are those in the landscape and what is their thinking today? I will say the interesting point about the university is that we were the only unit that was given the green light to go remote. The university was planning this fall to have more dialogue about other units or other sort of opportunities for remote work. That timeline has been greatly hastened and I believe additional guidance will be coming out next week. So I can't speak to sort of the impetus for that, but I have to believe from what I've learned is that there just were a lot of questions. Why can't I do this? What does this mean across the university? So I think those institutions that are, they're tackling those kind of challenging questions because there's no right or wrong answer when you're looking at this. And as Kim just said, it's very dynamic. Well, thank you. Thank you both. We have more questions coming in. I wanna make sure everyone gets a chance to respond. But following up on that, the questioner, Professor McLeod, you just wanted to share this. They're required by their state, Utah, to evaluate all university positions for their potential to remote jobs. And I don't know if that applies to private universities but definitely to public ones. In the chat, Janet just added, my institution is working on guidelines by which employers, excuse me, by which employees can work out with a supervisor a remote and or blended schedule for themselves. Now, an interesting response to this comes from Rob Gibson at an important state who asks, do you think either you think the universities will experience staff turnover if they do not offer remote options? Great question, Bob. Yeah, so I know that that's happening. I've talked to colleagues at many institutions that are seeing in some cases almost a mass exodus where the institution has seemed to have a very rigid requirement to full time, everybody returns to campus full time. And in other cases where they don't feel like it's flexible enough. I mean, one of the things that I've heard about happening is that during COVID employees relocated. So they moved out of the area, they moved out of the state and in some cases they moved out of the country. And now there's this return to work, which you would think they would have known that there was going to be that at some point. But now they live someplace else and they're not willing to move back. And if the institution is not offering enough flexibility around remote work, then you kind of have no option. But from the institution's perspective, depending on whether it's public or private or what state it's located in, there can be legal issues, tax healthcare issues associated with out of state employees. So it's not just in all cases, the university being really hard nose, but they're trying to comply with the rules and regulations that they have to operate under. I think some, just a quick note, I think some people in this forum today are actually doing remote work interstate like that as well. And I was just gonna add to where Kim was saying, I think the other side for me is in the future, will we be able to attract a different group of staff to join us? Not everyone wants to move to the middle of Kansas. And so will this provide us with the opportunity to source talent that may have been difficult for us to bring to Kansas. And so that's the other side for me, kind of the flip of the coin. Good point. This question struck a nerve. We have all kinds of responses in the chat. I just wanna mention a couple of them. Benjamin Whitmore says, we've lost a handful of staff who wouldn't return to campus. Those who left weren't given flexibility or any remote options. So I'm wondering, Kristen Palmer says, I found we have better qualified candidates applying for jobs where we have posted as a remote job. So this, I wonder if we're not moving into a high flex job situation this fall, basically. We also have a couple of, I think it'd be technical questions. And so I wanna bring these back. This is one from Eric Fournier at the Washington University in St. Louis. This is a brilliant, brilliant fellow and always glad to hear from him. Since going remote, I've had a lot more meetings. It seems like folks have to justify their at-home busyness by meeting all the time. I had a lot more me time when I went to the campus each day. Are you guys experiencing this as well, or is this something that we should know about and take care of? What are you thinking? Karen, I'll let you take that one first. That's very generous of you, Ken. That's just me. I think in some ways, I have not experienced that. So I would say quite the opposite for me personally, but it doesn't mean that I haven't been busy. But I think in some ways, is that part of kind of the institutional culture? Is that part of sort of the workplace environment? I don't have a sense of that, but I think again, probably if we pulled everyone on this Shindig event today, we would probably see variability in terms of what COVID has meant for them. And I appreciate that for some of us, it's more meetings for some of us might be less. I think we're just in an interesting time. Could just be a transition phase. Eric, I'd love to hear if that changed over the past year. We have another technical question that comes from a friend of the program and a great, great guest and also a great activist, Michael Johnson. And he asks, how does your organization address making content fully accessible for individuals with print disabilities? That's a good general question, but I'm thinking about how that might impact people who work remotely. And Karen, you're talking about, for example, the security problems of being off-site. I'm wondering, I'll flash this on the screen again. I'm wondering how you see that accessibility issue for remote work. Yeah, I mean, we encourage course design with universal design characteristics, really trying to make all of our content accessible to all kinds of learners that as anybody who works in this space knows is always a challenge. And one of the challenges around that is that sometimes faculty don't understand why that's important. And so you're having to educate the faculty and sometimes sort of drag them, kicking and screaming in a direction they don't think they need to go. Definitely, definitely. Anybody have a... Please go ahead, Karen. No, I was just gonna say, I think just the focus on inclusion and just ensuring as faculty members and as administrators, as personnel in higher education and beyond, whether you're working with staff, whether you're working with students, just that sense of inclusion and ensuring that the technologies that we're using provide for and allow for everyone to participate equally. And so that's the thing that is important whether whether you're looking at this from a student to faculty member perspective or a staff member to supervisor perspective, we just have to be very attentive to everyone's needs and ensure that we provide an inclusive environment. Thank you both. Thank you both. That's really, really... Michael, again, thank you for the great question. We also have still more questions coming in and I wanna make sure that we all get a chance to address them. And if you wanna turn on your video to ask a video question, you can see Karen and Kim, not only do their names both start with K, but they're also both very kind. So they'd be happy to talk to you. Sonya Stroll, oh, great guest, long time participant here. Sonya asks, do you have any suggestions for helping faculty delineate work and non-work time when working remote, especially when they're already mistakenly worried that teaching online is a 24-7 endeavor? Good question. That's a great question. And the short answer is no. I mean, even when we think about faculty anyway, some are working 24-7 even when they're teaching face-to-face. And we have tried to facilitate or offer up some suggestions around that work-life balance and what it means to be accessible online or responsive online. But again, during COVID, all of those lines got blurred. And where you had faculty who were trying to develop and teach an online class for the very first time in the most stressful experience of their lives, it was almost impossible to help them or for them to separate that work and life balance. I mean, when you're teaching your class from your bedroom, where do you draw those lines and how do you create that kind of space for yourself? That's a very candid answer. I really appreciate that, Kim. In the chat box, watching the cloud answers, there is a combination for faculty. They come from the benefits of this amazing profession. I do wanna share if I could, I'll put a link here in the chat. Over the past year, we've done a couple of sessions on work-life balance for faculty and staff. I'm not gonna be able to link to them in each individual session, but if you just look in the archive and just page down in the past, like 20 or so, you'll see there are at least two sessions just in that topic. We have more questions. You guys are great. Sonia, you're the most welcome. Here comes a very, very practical question that comes from Charles Finley, who always asks great questions. Institutions have invested billions of dollars in real estate. What happens if they offer more flexible remote learning staffing options? Great question. This isn't just higher ed. This is for everybody. Yeah, I think that is a really important question. The Georgia State is located in downtown Atlanta, and we have academic space, or we own 26-story buildings that are academic buildings, and we rent the space on the first couple of floors a lot of times to local businesses. Well, it's a ghost town. It's been a ghost town for a year, and this is sort of the financial district of the city. And if we're not present in those spaces, we own 26 buildings in downtown Atlanta. So when you talk about real estate, that's a key question, and you talk about the businesses that are also located in downtown Atlanta. I mean, for the vibrancy of the city, it's really important that Georgia State is present. It's important that those other businesses return to occupy a large portion of that space, or it just has an incredibly negative impact on the city overall. Wow. Sorry, I'm shocked. Downtown Atlanta being a ghost town, that blows me away. Sorry, I've been there. That's amazing. Please, Karen, go ahead. No, I was just gonna chime in. I think if you contrast that with a man held in Kansas, and you sort of say, okay, this university, like Emporia State University, in that part of the state, it is a hub for the community. It's a hub for the region. It's a vibrancy. It brings arts. It brings a lot of just culture to a community. And so again, I think that town-gown relationship, which we oftentimes talk about in a college town, is so critical because it is part of what fuels a lot of that local economy or the dynamic nature of that area. So much like Atlanta, you put it in your context, you put it in your context and think about what does that look like if there's a major change in terms of where faculty, staff, find themselves. What does that mean? That's a very, very good point. And you wonder how many towns in the town-gown relationship are gonna be pressuring gowns to have less remote work and to have fewer remote work options. Charles, this is a great question you asked. And not only did Kim and Karen have good answers, but there's also people chiming in with a few other examples for themselves. So let me just share these quickly. David Ron at Coyahoga says, my institution, a great school, pandemic has caused a decade of leadership to develop a remote work policy that has not previously existed. It's gonna be announced next month and put into pilot mode in September. David, I hope, if you wanna share a recording of this session, it'll be up tonight. I hope it's of use as you guys form the policy right now. We had Eric Forney says that at Washington U, each center department had to respond to this prompt. How can your school unit have a meaningful in-person presence this fall that contributes to our rich campus culture and student experience? So that sounds like a strong encouragement. And then we had, where did this go? Eric Forney says, friends in banking say they're never going back to the big downtown office tower. And Brian Bowd answers, the bigger questions, what if they don't? An analog to the previous question, Sears and JC Penney invested billions of retail space. What happens when they didn't make a commitment to going online? That's very, very interesting. Good thoughts, everyone. I love seeing the group mind at work. But now we have another technical question, a very practical question. And this is from Tom Tobin. I wanna bring this one up at the stage for you to see. Meeting fatigue. My team has purposely adopted 10 minute Piper-focused meetings and phone-based longer meetings. What are the tactics of carrying Kim shifted to because of remote? Survival, to a great extent. I mean, the question earlier about have your, the number of meetings increased. So I've only been in this role at Georgia State during COVID. So I can't tell you whether it would have been different in terms of meetings otherwise. But yeah, there are probably more days a week than not that I spend six or more hours a day in virtual meetings, you know, and some of them are back to back to back to back and even overlapping. And so it is that it can be extremely fatiguing. And one of my strategies has actually been to adjust, you know, how it shows the screen. So I don't have to look at myself because I found that extremely fatiguing, you know, just to keep having to see myself on camera. But in some cases, we have actually chosen to talk over the phone rather than having the video chat because just needing a break from that screen time. But, and I'll tell you as we're beginning to return to in-person meetings, there is a giddiness among my colleagues when we actually gather together in the same room and nobody has to say, you're muted or I can't hear you. Oh, Karen dropped out. And to actually be able just to interact in what we consider to be sort of that more natural, normal manner. I'm expecting that the next face-to-face meeting, I'm gonna bring a cardboard box with me and just put it on my head just so people recognize. But those are two really good solutions. Karen, did you want to add any more? Yeah, I would just say that, you know, one of the things I had a colleague once that said to me, you know, you were in a meeting, there were lots of us in the meeting and he said, how many thousands of dollars do you think is sitting right here during this meeting? And so that stuck with me. And so I really, I have pushed our, you know, I've pushed in my institution to sort of, are we meeting because we need to meet? Are we meeting because we like to meet? Are we meeting because we have work we need to accomplish? And so I think sometimes that's part of it. I was part of the, you know, the going remote kind of emergency management group. And there was a point this spring when we could have stopped meeting because, you know, we were through the pandemic, we were all over the hill in terms of what we really needed to talk about and the strategy and how to move and how to shift. But the group, you know, had bonded and so they kept meeting every Wednesday. And so I think part of it too is just recognizing and when do you kind of call the question that our work is done? And so those are, I just, I'm just cognizant of why are we meeting and what's the outcome? That's, there's a sense of doing this intentionally and deliberately, that thousands of dollars is a really good prompt. Kim, Vanessa agrees with you. She turns off her camera from time to time, which is a really good point. I find that can be pretty, pretty useful. But friends, we have seven minutes left. I want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to ask a query of our two experts. And one of them comes from John Zinn, not too far from me, University of Richmond. Hey, John, don't ask, might this all be a boom for smaller communities with lower cost of living? There's also the possibility of increased quality of life by getting out of the city. So in a sense, you know, Kansas over Atlanta is the question here. And I think that is for, certainly for some cities that has been what's fueled a decision for people to relocate that, you know, they're thinking, oh, I don't have to live in Atlanta. I can move, I can move to the beach. I can move to Kansas or, you know, whatever, maybe it puts them closer to family. Maybe it takes them out of a higher cost of living, improved quality of life. All of those things certainly have influenced people's decisions about that. And then the question is, okay, but now do you have to come back? And if you do have to come back, what does that begin to look like? And I would go back to something that was mentioned a little bit earlier in terms of our ability to recruit deeper pool of highly qualified candidates. I mean, even before we had the revised remote work policy, I was able to get permission to hire some people as full-time permanent remote workers. And that certainly made a difference in the pool of applicants. But it took us an additional level of approval to make that happen. I think there's that opportunity if your institution can see that benefit. Thank you. I'm glad to hear that from, coming from Atlanta, major city experience. Eric, for me, I have a good meeting. He's got a Zoom meeting at the top of the hour, so I understand completely. We have a kind of related question which turns this inside out. It's a very thoughtful question from Ben Whitmore. Ben, you're coming from Spokane and I hope you haven't melted to death in the heat. Oh my gosh. Ben asks, as more instruction moves remote, what strategies or frameworks can we use for institutions to re-envision their physical spaces? Karen, you were talking about hoteling, for example. Did you wanna say more about this? Yeah, I think for us it was really, we moved from a larger space into a smaller and it was about still providing what was important. When we did the survey of our staff about going permanently remote and how interested they were, that was critical that I understood that from everyone. And one of the things that was resonated through a lot of that survey work was a physical presence is important. And so we knew that we needed to maintain some kind of a presence on the campus. That was critically important. And so I think for me, in some of our institutions, if we're growing, we may be constrained by space. If we're in the middle of a city, we may not need to think about that 27th building or whatever the case might be. And so I think there is gonna be this rethinking of space. And what really prompted this quest for me was the fact that our lease on the space that we were leasing was coming up June 30th yesterday. We moved out of our space. And that's what prompted it was I knew that lease was coming up. And I thought, wait, do we sign this lease again or do we do something different? And I think that question is being asked, I think as we look across institutions, it's, we have deferred maintenance questions. We have space that's highly usable. We have space that needs to be maybe remodeled or renovated. And so how do we invest as we look to the future? I think it's gonna really take a different lens across institutions. Yeah, and our situation was very different in that we had hired over 30 new staff during COVID. And we were already maxed out in our physical space. And so I was driving this conversation at my campus because I either needed to have a remote work plan or I had to get more space for a lot more people to sit. And so as we've developed our remote work plan then we are renovating our space not for a hoteling so much because we'll still be at 80% occupancy five days a week, so we needed a schedule around when people are going to be on campus and they need a designated place to sit so that you don't have everybody try to come in on Wednesday and nobody comes in on Friday and you don't have any place for everybody to sit on Wednesday. So looking at how we're utilizing the space, making sure that where we have space we've created a setup that allows for people to customize the work station, so adjustable desks, monitors, those kinds of things so that people do have the opportunity to work in a space that feels comfortable to them but they know that they're only sharing that space with one or two other people over the course of the week. And so it's not a fruit basket turnover every time they come to work. Fruit basket turnover, that's a good phrase. Thank you, thank you. Our last question just came in and then we're gonna need to wrap things up. This comes from Bob London at the Alpha Phi Megan National Service fraternity. He says, how will student affairs be reimagined in light of so much more remote instruction? I would add remote work to our instruction. That's a tricky question. So I would just say that again, as institutions are working to what they're gonna do in the fall, this question is being raised. What about academic advisors? Do they need to be on campus to support students? What about advisors that support online students? What about advisors that support online and in-person students? So this question about what has been historically an in-person service and what about tutoring? What about the library resources? What about proctoring services? And all of these questions I think are on the table. And I would agree. And we're really taking a both-hand approach that we're not giving up any of the tools or the strides we made in providing fully online student support services. But we also recognize that many, many students do want to meet face-to-face with an advisor or with someone else in student support. So again, it's, we have to be present, but we have to be present in more ways than perhaps we did pre-COVID or during COVID. Sounds like that's next again. What a great question. Thank you very much for that question. And Karen, Kim, not only thank you for your answer to that question, but thank you for this past hour. You've been terrific guests. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, your expertise, your candid reflections. It's been an absolute pleasure. What's the best way you can keep up with the two of you in your work? You can always email me at ksigandthaller at gsu.edu. Happy to chat with any of you at any time. Great, great. How about you, Karen? Yeah, you can find me at karenpetersonatksu.edu. And I'll just drop my email in and or you can just check us out at Kansas State University Global Campus. Fantastic. Thank you both. Thank you both. It's been a real pleasure. But don't go away, friends. We have just a couple of quick notes. One is from Gabriel Sainz, who says that there is the possibility of social virtual worksplaces, such as open lobbies, where colleagues can log in and work independently, which is very interesting. Looking ahead for the next few weeks, just wanna remind you that we have a whole bunch of sessions queued up, including on improving education equity for black students, mentoring, professional development, trauma-informed teaching, the history of personalized learning, and augmented virtual reality. And beyond that, if you wanna keep talking about this, if you wonder about Gabriel's lobbies, if you're wondering about Zoom fatigue, if you're wondering about staff turnover, and so on, just use the hashtag FTTE on Twitter. We'll be happy to continue the conversation. If you'd like to go into our archives to take a look at previous sessions that touched on some of these subjects, including faculty work-life balance, the staff work-life balance, just go to timeurl.com slash FTF archive. In the meantime, thank you all for terrific questions and thoughts today. It's been a real pleasure. We really enjoyed being together in this community. Thank you for everything. Good luck planning for this fall, and above all, stay safe. We'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.