A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Manage Initiatives

With a work plan in place, a company must now focus on ensuring the effective management of its efforts. A good manager communicates consistently with staff, partners, sites, and the community-at-large; maintains schedules; keeps within established budgets; recruits, organizes, and allocates resources efficiently; monitors ongoing processes; and evaluates results.

Guidelines for Managing Program Activities

Sound management supports employee and family involvement in education both within a company and the community. See Figure 2 for a checklist for managing program quality.

Management of internal activities concerns direct services to employees' school-age children and information and support to employees who have the responsibility for school-age children, particularly as it concerns early childhood education, dependent care, student programs and needs, and afterschool and summer programs. Management of external activities focuses on individual volunteer recruitment and participation by all employees (with or without school-age children) in education as well as institutional support for community programs that serve school-age children. Figure 3 highlights the employer initiatives, key management steps, and allocated resources of eight organizations.

Use Technology Tools for Support and Guidance

Technology becomes an important tool to support and guide general program management to:

• connect employees to schools, to their children, and to teaching and learning;

• increase access by all employees to resources to improve the balance of work life and family life; and

• improve the management and delivery of instruction including long-term training and support for teachers; curriculum development; demonstrating applications of technical knowledge and skills in order to administer schools more efficiently; and monitoring and evaluating program results.³¹

Figure 4 lists a sampling of employers, their programs, and technology applications that are being used to support employee and family involvement in education.

Address and Overcome Challenges to Success

Managers need to address and overcome both internal and external challenges to their efforts to support employee and family involvement in education. These challenges usually concern time constraints, limited resources, and difficulties in communication. Figure 5 provides samples of how some employers resolved such difficulties to successfully achieve goals and objectives.

Monitor Programs and Evaluate Documented Results

Ongoing monitoring and periodic formal evaluations are integral to sound program management to determine the achievement of short- and long-term objectives. The inclusion of monitoring and evaluation components from the commencement of an effort commits stakeholders to provide the needed attention, energy, and resources to support program improvement and ensure accountability.³²

Monitoring and evaluation: primary purpose. Evaluation's primary purpose is to determine both the scope and impact of efforts by answering the questions, "What happened and to whom?" and "How effective and/or useful were the program's activities"

Companies can make sound decisions regarding program refinement, maintenance, expansion, replication, and/or institutionalization when they can document:

• how resources were used

• the impact of efforts on:

  • promoting the company's image,partnership, or leadership

  • employee and family involvement in education

  • the bottom line

• the extent to which these efforts effected positive changes on:

  • the management and delivery of instruction

  • student achievement and behavior

  • the preparation and/or skills development of teachers

  • the administration of schools and schooling

  • the balancing of work and family life

Figure 6 provides a checklist to assist in conducting effective program monitoring and evaluation.

Current status of program monitoring and evaluation. Survey respondents in a recent Conference Board report held that evaluation and benchmarking helps them to "align overall programs with business goals, track a long-term goal or project, improve program quality and community awareness of the company, promote client/customer development, create a more competitive program, devolve more accountability to grantees by building in evaluation into a grant, 'change gears' in line with a new corporate vision and/or new community needs, and hold the focus on programs and priorities at fast-growing companies."³³

Respondents to The Conference Board's 1997 Survey of Education add another dimension to this discussion when reporting how business evaluates employee and family involvement in education efforts. Those companies with more consistently documented results from their efforts use both informal and formal measures to determine benefits to the company, employees, schools, students, and communities. Internally, measurement strategies were mostly anecdotal (87 percent of respondents). Lesser used strategies include employee attitude surveys (41 percent); internal studies (20 percent); and benchmarking (8 percent). Externally, measurement was also primarily anecdotal (68 percent), followed by employee attitude surveys (21 percent); internal studies (9 percent); benchmarking (7 percent), and use of a contracted evaluator (4 percent). It appears that the most frequently used evaluation tools to evaluate corporate community involvement in education include on-site visits and written reports, followed much less frequently by telephone interviews, focus groups, expert review, assessment teams, and observer feedback. Most of these evaluations are conducted annually (52 percent) or arranged "as needed" (43 percent). Results are usually communicated to management through internal reports and occasionally by verbal presentations.³⁴

Obstacles to evaluation and benchmarking. The Conference Board's report on measuring corporate community involvement noted that obstacles to both evaluation and benchmarking include insufficient time, inadequate staff, and insufficient budget. The primary responsibility for evaluation continues to be carried by internal corporate staff. Outside evaluators are called on infrequently and then, usually, to perform evaluations of multiyear, large grants/programs because of lack of in-house capacity. Nearly 40 percent of the respondents had no research budget at all; of those that earmarked a portion of their program budget to evaluation, 54 percent allocated only 1 percent.³⁵

Charts 3 and 4 reveal the extent to which companies that do evaluate their internal and external initiatives use particular criteria.

See Figure 7 for a sampling of employers' programs, corresponding evaluation efforts, and outcomes that show how these policies and practices are demonstrating a rate of return.

³² Regional Educational Laboratory Network, U.S. Department of Education, "Putting the Pieces Together: Comprehensive School-Linked Strategies for Children and Families," Washington, D.C., May 1996.

³³ Myra Alperson, Measuring Corporate Community Involvement, The Conference Board, Report 1169-96-RR, 1996, p. 13.

³⁴ Work Family Roundtable: Education Initiatives, pp. 10-11.

³⁵ Measuring Corporate Community Involvement, pp. 11-13.

[Develop and Implement a Work Plan]

[Determining Future Directions]