Best Practice Facilitators: Believing in Change

Yale's Best Practices Facilitators—Debra Arcangelo-Vitale, Michele Potter, Lorraine Skibitcky, Brian Wingate—under the leadership of Jane Savage, director, Best Practices, and with the support of Laurie Manganiello, senior administrative assistant, and Mike Schoen, Best Practices advisor, see themselves as a family in the best sense of the word. Passionate about helping to unite union and management staff in departments throughout the University, these facilitators not only believe that there is a better way for union and management to work together, but they believe they owe the members of the Yale community the opportunity to see what they see: a day when the union-management relationship at Yale has evolved to a place where going on strike is not the primary way to resolve disagreements.

Best Practices works with Library staff. Left table (left to right): Jane Savage, Best Practices; John-Albert Moseley, Lewis Walpole Library; Margaret Seca, Sterling Memorial Library (SML), Access Services; Debra Arcangelo-Vitale, Best Practices; Elizabeth Johnson, SML, Document Delivery; Right table: Maureen Malone-Jones, SML, Document Delivery; Brian Wingate, Best Practices; Seated behind tables: Dolores Colon, Beinecke Library, Tech Services; Laurie Manganiello, Best Practices; Standing: Diane Turner, SML, Human Resources; Linda Veronneau, Organizational and Learning Center; Ernie Scrivani, SML, Human Resources; Bernadette Cioffi; SML, Human Resources; Patricia Simon, SML, Library Acquisitions; and Best Practices's Lorraine Skibitcky, Michele Potter, and Michael Schoen.

"You have to believe in the change, and we do," says Wingate, who spent 15 years in Custodial Services prior to becoming a facilitator in January 2008. "While each facilitator brings something different to the table, we are united in creating an outcome that can be supported. We are also blessed to have President Levin, the Officers, and union leadership on our team because they bring wealth to the change."

Adds Archangelo-Vitale, who joined the team in February 2008 from Athem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, "We are dedicated to the goal that improving performance and relationships builds trust, which in turn, enhances productivity. I like to think of us as change agents throughout the University."

Recent successes are bolstering the vision. Savage reports that Best Practices has received enough positive feedback from its sponsors and the Best Practices Initiative Steering Committee to move several important programs from the design phase to the implementation-planning phase. These projects include: Performance Feedback and Objective Setting, a union-management effort to design a performance management process and the necessary tools for the C&T workforce; Labor Relations Training, a collaborative effort with Managing at Yale to design labor relations training for Yale managers and for stewards in Locals 34 and 35; Interest-Based Problem-Solving pilot in the Library, a conflict resolution process with 60+ supervisors, managers, and C&Ts. Trained supervisors and employees will participate in constructive problem-solving and will have facilitation resources available when challenging points of view arise in the workplace.

"We are definitely gratified with the success we've had around the design phase of these projects," says Savage, "but we know that we have another heavy pull ahead to implement them successfully—certainly a challenge we are 100 percent committed to."

Commitment and collaboration are dual drivers of the work the Best Practices facilitators do. In addition to the three implementation-phase projects, the facilitators are busy launching a new website, developing a communications infrastructure, getting trained in essential skills for their roles, creating tools for use on projects, and supporting the active Joint Departmental Committees (JDCS) in Dining Services, The Center for British Arts, Yale Animal Resources Center, Yale University Health Services, and the Library.

New facilitation team members Potter and Skibitcky bring 50 years of combined Yale service to this work. Potter, who celebrates her 30th anniversary at Yale this year and worked previously at the Yale Medical Group, has been invested in employee satisfaction for decades and sees her role as "preventing fires rather than putting them out."

Skibitcky, most of whose 20 years at Yale have been spent at the Physician Associate Program and the Yale Health Plan, knows what it takes to help lift departments up and move them forward. "I'm so pleased to be able to experience what happens on the ground level of this important initiative at Yale, where the resources and the tools are so generously available."