Norms and Expectations

In the past year, Division of Administration and Finance managers and staff have provided feedback and insight into our remote work practices.  We also embarked on a Future of Work initiative with Deloitte Consulting as part of the Beach 2030 Reimagine Staff Action Zone, in which we’ve learned about industry best practices in the areas of telecommuting, collaboration and communication tools, and sharing space.  As a division, we hope to use this information to evolve and continuously improve our alignment with managers and staff on expectations for remote work. To that end, we hope to reiterate and clarify expectations for employees of Division of Administration and Finance in the following areas:

Core Working Hours

Our division supports the university and its community, which is a 24/7 operation. While departments in our division may have varying core working hours, our goal is to be open and available for service to our students and customers when they need us. Supervisors work with their staff on how to optimize schedules to cover core hours.

General Telecommuting Guidance

  • All staff and managers must complete the telecommuting agreement prior to working remotely.
  • Telecommuting training is required for all DAF staff and managers who work remotely and must be completed within 60 days of signing a telecommuting agreement and when new training is introduced.
  • Telecommuting eligible employees will typically be asked to work from campus for the first 30-90 days or as operational needs require during their onboarding period.
  • In addition to operational needs, key times to expect to work on campus with required notice include but are not limited to:
    • Training that is listed as in-person
    • Seasonal work, such as open enrollment, student account support, facility summer project work
    • There may be exceptional circumstances that require all employees to work on campus full time due to a critical need

Collaboration and Communications

  • DAF is using TEAMS as its preferred platform for collaboration.  This includes using Teams for virtual meetings where possible, as a project hub, and as an adhoc video/phone chat.  We will eventually be implementing Teams Calling, which incorporates our desktop phones into the Teams Application to make it easier to incorporate communications with outside entities.
  • Presence is important for professionalism in DAF. Therefore,
    • Cameras for DAF employees are expected to be on during virtual campus meetings. Various CSULB virtual backgrounds are available for your use.
    • DAF meetings will have a physical meeting space wherever possible. If you are working from campus, plan to attend meetings in person unless otherwise specified by the organizer. 

We plan to continue to research, test, and host discussions on the future of work and remote work in our division. We will be gathering feedback on the effectiveness and efficiencies of the expectations above and I expect there will more iterations on our division ‘norms.’ Thank you for working together to best support our students and customers!