Alabama Community College System

Alabama Community College System (ACCS) knew the importance of investing in their staff’s professional development. But with thousands of employees across 24 campuses, they needed to speak to a diverse range of departments and staff needs.

When ACCS approached Paskill about setting up a training, we helped them find a common concern across their campuses: improving their level of customer service to students.

We had just the workshop to meet those needs.

Customer service, redefined

The goal of our Student-First Culture Workshop is to redefine what customer service looks like on a college campus. This means going beyond conflict resolution to create a seamless transition for students from department to department and across divisions.

The best way to achieve this kind of customer service? Break down silos between departments and campuses to remove friction from the student enrollment process.

Cross-college collaboration

We help break down these silos over the course of two modules. In the first module, participants are grouped with colleagues from other departments or divisions—or, in the case of ACCS, across campuses. Then, they’re given the task of collaborating to identify and create solutions for institutional challenges. Working with colleagues from different teams can help participants find common ground while also gaining diverse viewpoints.

The second module groups participants back with their departments to discuss how change can be implemented at the individual and departmental level. Improvements don’t always start at the top; we want to empower every staff and faculty member to play a role in providing great customer service to students.

Maximum flexibility for maximum impact

The Workshop for a Student-First Culture is highly collaborative, combining presentations with hands-on activities. In many cases, our workshops have 15-25 participants at a time. ACCS, however, had a unique request. Could we deliver a program for 400 employees across all their campuses? And, most importantly, could this be done efficiently with the same level of value that’s found in our usual structure?

Our answer was: of course.

Our workshops are set up to be flexible so we can meet the scheduling needs of an institution or college system. Modules can be completed in one day, over the course of two back-to-back days, or even two days weeks apart.

In this case, each module was delivered in four, half-day sessions, with about 100 participants at each session. Quick math: That’s eight sessions with 32 total hours of in-person training. This allowed us to make sure every participant received the full benefits of the workshop, including the collaboration time. 

Scaling success

The project was a huge success for both ACCS and Paskill. The Alabama Community College System received the training they needed for 400 employees at a price point that worked for them. We demonstrated this workshop can be effectively provided to college systems as well as individual colleges. There are immediate plans to repeat this model for other prospective higher education systems. It’s an exciting new way to deliver our proven training at scale.