Transitioning Technical Services Staff to Working from Home

The sudden COVID-19 outbreak necessitated a quick transition to working from home for many institutions, including my own. With some public services, such as reference, instruction, and electronic document delivery, it's not hard to imagine how to do that work from another location. However, a lot of Technical Services work requires handling physical items. Below is brief outline of how I transitioned my Technical Services staff to working from home.

As the outbreak spread internationally, the University asked for all colleges and departments to update their Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP). Our Dean's office at the College of Law asked all supervisors to test having staff work from home to identify any technological and procedural roadblocks. In the case of my department, the staff member whose work was most suited to being done from home was the Acquisitions Specialist. I wanted that person to be the first test of working from home. Immediately, though, issues were identified. This staff person had neither hardware nor internet service at home with which she could perform her job.

On the other hand, the rest of the staff had good technological infrastructure at home but perform tasks that are less easy to transfer off-site as they handle physical materials. In their cases, I worked with them to identify projects they could work on from home. My other three direct reports came up with the following projects:

• Serials Specialist - Locating and correcting poorly formatted 852 fields and other garbled holdings information that was still outstanding from our system migration in 2018
• Cataloging Specialist - Original cataloging of theses and dissertations; focusing on re-cataloging and reclassification projects; cleaning up other data migration issues 
• Special Collections - Reorganizing photos of College events; research requests; working on publications and other professional development goals. 

The acquisitions staff person was loaned a laptop from the Public Services department. However, it needed various upgrades and administrative changes before it could function from the staff person's home. Additionally, the College purchased mobile wifi hotspots with unlimited data plans for staff to use. I was able to get one of those and set it up pretty easily. College IT staff upgraded the laptop and installed VPN software that allowed access to the University's financial systems. 

The directive to begin working from home came more quickly than anticipated. Everyone but the acquisitions staff person was able to begin working from home almost immediately, although they did make brief trips to the office to pick up items needed for their projects. The acquisitions staff person, who I had thought would be the first to begin working from home, ended up being the last one able to do so. Thankfully, it was only about a day later when all the technological issues were resolved. 

Since working from home, I check in with each of my direct reports via email at least once a day. I have asked them to send me daily summaries of their activities at the end of their work days. And I send out an all-staff message wrapping up at the end of my day. We have also transitioned our staff meeting to Zoom. At the request of our Dean, I have made these meetings weekly instead of monthly. I have also identified webinars and other activities the staff can view from home. 

Despite the sudden transition and the ever-changing situation, my Technical Services staff has adapted well to working at home. Once technological issues were addressed and projects identified, we quickly realized that Technical Services work is as adaptable to a work from home situation as other library services.