BYU-Idaho employs more than twice as many students for part-time positions than full-time employees. These student employees are an essential tool to accomplishing the mission of BYU-Idaho to develop students into disciple leaders of Jesus Christ. Over the past year, BYU-Idaho Human Resources has made some recent revisions to the Student Leadership Model (SLM) to help student employees and full-time managers accomplish their goals.
KyLee Ferrera, a member of the Student Employment Outreach team says the purpose of the Student Leadership Model is to improve the quality, experience, and efficiency of work performed on campus.
“Originally, the Student Leadership Model was created within Student Activities, and with permission we have adapted it to fit student employment across campus. This model is centered around the student experience, and elevating the work experience the students receive,” Ferrera said.
The need for a revision was rooted in the fact that the previous SLM anticipated the inclusion of volunteers, being that it was from Student Activities.
“There is a fine, but very important line between volunteer laws and employment laws. We needed this revision so there was no confusion with the responsibilities of volunteers compared to paid employees,” Ferrera said.
The revised SLM includes three steps to increase the effectiveness student employees can have within a department.
“The purpose of the SLM is to build the students but also some of the promises we give with it—such as decreasing turnover rates in student employment—alleviate some of the work that the full-time employees have by sharing some of their work load with student employees, and also give valuable work experiences to students,” Ferrera said.
The first step is critical work analysis. This helps managers determine what tasks are essential to their organization. From there, using critical work analysis, the manager determines which tasks to give to their students.
In step two of the SLM, there is a guide on how to create a student leadership structure for departments such as the BYU-Idaho Support Center (BSC), the library, Food Services, and Facilities Management. For the smaller teams that don’t require as much management structure, there are leadership structure suggestions for them as well.
The third step is conducting “one-on-one” meetings on a regular basis with student employees.
“One-on-ones allow full-time managers to really sit down with their students and have a productive meeting that will give the manager an opportunity to get to know the student more and learn what things they are wanting to develop as an employee. We hope for this to really help managers build a mentor relationship with their student employees,” Ferrera said.
If a full-time manager is interested in learning more about the Student Leadership Model, Human Resources will happily meet with you and give you the necessary resources.
“The Student Leadership Model does take a lot of manager’s time, but we feel that the long-term benefits of it will outweigh the time you have to take to implement it,” Ferrera said.
Human Resources can be contacted at KIM 226, 208-496-1700, or humanresources@byui.edu.