Welcome Colleagues in An Inclusive Hybrid Environment

Welcome Colleagues in An Inclusive Hybrid Environment

Lightning Talk at the 2024 CALA Midwest Annual Conference

Tang, Angel

Chinese American Librarians Association

2025-05-24

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

video/mp4

eng

Video

Prior to 2020, the UW-Madison Libraries welcomed new colleagues at an in-person All-Staff meeting where supervisors introduced new members of their units. Since shifting to a hybrid workplace, the Libraries have experimented with different modes of introducing new staff. The challenge of navigating this hybrid meeting environment, paired with unprecedented growth in the organization and numerous new colleagues to announce at every meeting, sometimes resulted in awkward introductions where names were mispronounced. Since the all-staff meetings were hybrid, staff often were not present in the room to correct the pronunciations of their names. At the start of 2024, the Climate and Staff Engagement Team decided to work on improving these staff introductions, and took on the responsibility of gathering new staff information and pictures and announcing each person at the meeting. Through our efforts, we streamlined the new staff introductions and ensured everyone was represented in ways with which they were comfortable. After this initial run of the new staff introduction process, we have ideas on how we can improve it for next time. This new introduction process created a more inclusive environment in which all new staff were presented respectfully and made to feel welcome in their new roles.