Original
The TEI has a decentralised administration that is staffed by volunteers with significant professional responsibilities. This has a couple of consequences:
- We have no real-time, central overview of our operations
- We are generally inefficient in carrying out business processes that involve coordinating activities from different offices
- There is no central management for correspondence, projects, management research
- Highly overqualified people have to fit relatively low-level administrative tasks (such as updating figures and reports and coordinating with other offices) around their professional schedules.
The result is that we tend to be quite slow and at times sloppy in our operations: demands for information (for example a list of paid up members and financial information for contracting and distributing the members’s copies of the Guidelines) take an inordinate amount of time: at each stage of the workflow, request gets passed on to another busy person who must research the question and produce a report. Things can take months to accomplish that could take a day or two (or less) if the people involved were able to devote themselves immediately and fully to the problem.
We could certainly improve our efficiency by simply devoting more attention to carrying out the communication, record keeping, and report generation required in a continuous and timely fashion. But all the people involved have other duties and obligations that restrict and fragment the time they can devote to TEI business. And while we currently pay for administrative assistance in both Virginia and Nancy, we do not have any real system for maintaining centralised records and oversight.
The solution to this, I think, is to adopt a system similar to that used at Council for ensuring that administrative and editorial work on the Guidelines is carried out—hire somebody to handle the tasks that need attention but are likely to fall through the gaps if we rely on the volunteer efforts of overcommitted professionals to carry out. Initially (i.e. for a transitional year), this position would be in addition to the amounts paid to Virginia and Nancy. One of the goals of the position in its first year, however, would be to try and increase our efficiency (particularly thorough automation and maintaining real-time centralised records) to get us to the point where we can reduce our administrative costs below their current level starting in year two.
The number of hours and level of expertise required for this work is far less than that required by council. Instead of a team of professionals, all we need is somebody who is paid to make sure questions go to the right person and are followed up; who maintains a set of centralised records and makes sure that these are kept up to date; and who is able to carry out other secretarial duties. I suspect that this position would not require more than about 320 hours (an average of 6 hours a week for 50 weeks).
In actual fact, we would expect the number of hours required per week to vary through the year: more hours (perhaps 8 or more per week) would be required in the Fall and Spring (when we are preparing for the members meeting and then handling membership and subscription correspondence); in the summer, many fewer would be needed—perhaps only 3 or 4 a week.
If we were to hire a person in Alberta at between CAD $10~12 + 13% benefits, this would cost the board between approximately US$2890 and $4340 depending on the exchange rate (in Canadian dollars, the range is between CAD $3606 to CAD $4339; the Canadian dollar has ranged between approximately USD $1 and USD $0.80 over the last year; currently it is about $0.80). While this rate is probably a little under what we might expect to pay normally, we might find that the international nature of the organisation makes it attractive to people looking for work experience for their CVs.
If the position was in Lethbridge, the U of L would donate the personnel management costs as an in kind contribution. There is no need for this person to be in Lethbridge, however: if we could contract somebody more cheaply elsewhere, that would be just as useful. The point is that we have a centralised manager.
Assuming a Lethbridge location, here is a draft of the position particulars:
- Position
- Managing Assistant
- Duties:
- Maintaining and managing Board correspondence (formatting and mailing letters; ensuring timely responses; routing correspondence to the correct recipient);
- Real time maintenance and report generation of central data: membership and subscriber accounts; bank statements;
- Scheduling and record keeping;
- Research and maintenance tasks as required.
- Qualifications:
- Good secretarial and communication skills (essential)
- Good computer literacy (essential)
- Experience functioning in an international environment (preferred)
- Multi-lingual (English, French, German) (useful).
- Hours:
- Variable: an average of one day per week during the academic year.
- Pay:
- $10-12/hour + 13% Benefits.