The University of Michigan,
Voices of the Staff

In addition to my regular role as a senior systems administrator at LSA, in June 2012 I became a member of the Voices of the Staff program. Voices is a volunteer-based initiative that was launched in February 2005 to give staff, at all University of Michigan campuses and Michigan Medicine, a stronger voice for developing and sharing ideas about the campus community topics that matter most to staff. Topics are chosen from the responses at a Town Hall meeting held approximately every three years. About 120–150 people form the Voices network teams, with a rolling 2-year appointment (about half roll out every year in June). Up to one member per team is allowed to serve a third year.

Each Voices network team selects two people to form the Core Team that has a direct dialog with the University's executive officers and shares ideas regularly with the President, the Vice President for Human Resources, and other executive leadership.

The Voices program is administered by the Program Management Team (PMT), who serve for varying lengths of time. Many PMT members work for University Human Resources. PMT is responsible for planning and running the Annual Meeting for the program and the triennial-ish Town Hall meetings.

My tenure with Voices is unusual in several ways. Not only did my first 2-year commitment take seven years, and not only did I return to the program after a year away, but I also have held almost every possible role (individual contributor, facilitator, advisor, Core Team representative, and PMT member):

• 2012–2014, individual contributor, technology team (at the time, called "Best Practices and Technology (BPT)"). My efforts involved moving the Voices teams from the old course management system (CTools) to the new-to-us Google Drive, and teaching the teams how to use it. I presented on the topic, including how one nontechnical team member took what we produced back to her team at the hospital and reworked a process to be more automated and more consistent, saving money and improving patient care.
  
  
• 2013–2014, Core Team representative for BPT.
  
  
• 2014–2018, facilitator, technology team (renamed to "Leveraging Technology").
  
  
• 2018–2019, advisor, technology team.
  
  
• 2020–2023, founding individual contributor, Alumni Engagement Network Team (AENT), a new team to better engage the several hundred Voices program alumni; my efforts included surveying the program alumni to see what they were interested in helping with and how often, and the development of a historical member database to track that information in addition to who was on which team with what role at what time.
  
  
• 2022–2023, Core Team representative for AENT.
  
  
• 2023–2024, facilitator, AENT.
  
  
• 2023 and ongoing, lead facilitator, all Voices facilitators; member, PMT; PMT liaison to AENT.

In Voices' terminology, an individual contributor or member is a member of one of the network teams who works to define and accomplish that team's goals. A facilitator helps a team run their meetings and decide what to do, but does not participate as an individual contributor; it's more of an administrative role. An advisor works to eliminate project roadblocks and provide current and historical information that may be relevant to the team's projects. A PMT liaison is a liaison between the network team and the PMT, mainly to keep communications streamlined.

(The only roles I haven't held with the Voices program are "Advisor Coordinator" (new in 2023) and "Executive Director." No, thank you.)

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