Abstract

Ever feel overwhelmed by the shifting priorities impacting you and your research management teams? Ever struggle with how to gauge whether you have enough individuals to efficiently manage the constant flow of proposals, awards, agreements, reporting and everything in between? Ever wonder how to align staff with the work to which they are best suited and achieve some semblance of routine, sanity and (dare we say!) happiness among your teams? And all within a resource-constrained environment!?

In this session, three US-based RMA office leaders will share their experience, observations and actionable recommendations for sustainably staffing an RMA office, aligning individual worker dynamics, expertise and preferences to create a balanced RMA ecosphere. While these methods have been developed in an American grants managements setting, they are universally translatable approaches to managing RMA staffing. Learning outcomes include how to:

- Map out workflows and identify the full landscape of transactional needs;
- Measure proposal and award complexity, including how to find the smaller yet high-touch work that acts as “workload vampires” on you and your staff;
- Gather and use supporting data to bolster such measurements and assess workforce capabilities;
- Engage staff in the process for a greater sense of autonomy and participation, so changes impacting balance and sustainability of workflows happen “with them” and not “to them”; and
- Create sustainable ways to maintain balanced workloads, even amidst the constant storm of new requirements, duties and processes.

The presenters will jointly share experience from three different levels of an organization, as well as approaches that take into account various sized teams – from very large to small – each posing different challenges to be discussed. Join us to tackle this essential-to-get-right challenge as we explore novel ways to “refresh” older strategies of workload assessment!