By Stephen M. Gavazzi, Ph.D.

The Latest News, Views, and Announcements

What’s New at CHRR

This past week, CHRR launched a survey as part of a new collaborative effort with United Way of Central Ohio. Several years ago, the United Way conducted a survey of partner organizations aimed at capturing information about the demographic makeup of partner boards of directors, with a keen eye directed toward mapping and encouraging diversity among board members. CHRR was tapped to replicate this survey effort with slight modifications to enhance the scientific value of the survey results and set the stage for future longitudinal data collection efforts.

CHRR team members are grateful to Lisa Courtice, President and CEO of United Way of Central Ohio, for this opportunity to display our survey expertise while serving the needs of an important community partner. Special thanks also are extended to Ryan Schmiesing, Ohio State’s vice provost for outreach and engagement and a member of United Way’s Board of Trustees, for bringing this effort to our attention and providing encouragement along the way.

CHRR's Leadership Team

As noted in several previous newsletters, the CHRR Leadership Team has been hard at work on a Pattern of Administration (POA) document. Over the past month, team members have been discussing how and where elements of our performance-based culture fit into the POA. Readers will remember that CHRR’s performance-based culture is holistic in nature, which means that the success of the entire center is seen as being determined by the ongoing interactions and contributions of all employees. Further, we seek to implement our performance-based culture within a growth mindset, which means that all employees’ talents and abilities are seen as valuable and are thought to be capable of being further developed and improved over time.

So, how does our performance-based culture help us frame up our POA, which at the end of the day is a document that states exactly how we are supposed to conduct business? Leadership Team members are moving toward a series of statements that reflect how we believe ongoing and timely feedback is promoted through the relationships among CHRR supervisors and their direct reports. Most specifically, these statements contain an emphasis on three important components of the supervisor-direct report relationship:

1. performance evaluation;
2. an emphasis on continuous feedback; and
3. allocation of effort.

For the purpose of this month’s newsletter, I wish to focus most directly on the continuous feedback component of the supervisor-direct report relationship. In brief, an emphasis on continuous feedback highlights the expectation that CHRR Leadership Team members with supervisory responsibilities will conduct quarterly check-in (QCI) meetings with their direct reports. Please note that, at least for the time being, other CHRR employees with supervisory responsibilities are encouraged but not mandated to conduct QCIs. Whereas performance evaluation is seen as summative – part of a formal process that evaluates employees against university performance benchmarks – the QCI meetings are viewed as formative, which translates into a more informal process that focuses on employee growth and development.

My focus on this continuous feedback process is timely in that the next round of QCI meetings is upon us. I have already scheduled QCI meetings with my direct reports for the second week in December, and I have asked everyone to meet with their direct reports in advance of those meetings. We also have settled on a topic for these meetings, which focuses attention on Work-Life balance.
 

CHRR Team Member Celebrations

“No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” -Halford E. Luccock

This month we are observing the work anniversaries of six valued employees:

• Elizabeth Cooksey, 9 years of service to CHRR (and 32 years at OSU!).
• Lucy Herrera, 31 years of service to CHRR.
• Joe Joyce, 10 years of service to CHRR.
• Joe Miller, 18 years of service to CHRR.
• Brian Stamper, 9 years of service to CHRR.
• Justin Smith, 14 years of service to CHRR.

That’s a total of 91 years of service to our center (and an average of over 15 years). Thank you for your commitment to the CHRR mission!

Things You Might Want to Know

OSU Office of Secure Research and ASC Tech Visit CHRR

Jim Guiliani, Director of the Office of Secure Research (part of Ohio State’s Enterprise for Research, Innovation, and Knowledge), brought his team to visit and tour CHRR last month. Nick Ramser, Joe Joyce, and John Stevens also helped me to welcome ASC Tech’s Michael Kaylor and David Sweasey.
 

Celebrating a Center Partner’s Promotion to Professor

The College of Arts and Sciences recently promoted John Low to the rank of full professor. As part of the celebration of Dr. Low’s accomplishments, yours truly was on hand at the Ohio State faculty club on November 12, 2024 to co-present an Inaugural Lecture entitled “Land-Grant Universities, Native Nations, and Tribal Territories: When Will Ohio State Adopt an Official Land Acknowledgement?"

Dr. Low is a professor of contemporary studies and is the director of the Newark Earthworks Center (NEC). The NEC has been a previous partner with CHRR on the Land-Grant Partners Project, and will be a primary collaborator on an upcoming survey that aims to gauge public awareness and understanding of Ohio’s eight earthworks sites known collectively as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks (which recently received the UNESCO World Heritage designation).

Congratulations to John for all his achievements!
 

ASC Space Planning Efforts

The College of Arts and Sciences has been conducting focus group sessions to gather feedback on certain subjects as part of the college’s master planning project. The goal of this planning project is to create a facility roadmap for the college, with special emphasis on addressing programmatic needs, deferred maintenance needs and space utilization. Yours truly participated in one of those focus group sessions last month at the invitation of Paula Melchert, a Senior Project Manager in Ohio State’s Planning Architecture and Real Estate (PARE) department. I came away with some excitement about the ensuing dialogue. Among other topics, focus group participants expressed great interest in CHRR’s potential to serve as an incubator for fledgling centers and institutes that had more data-intensive needs.