"The Institute was experiential and offered excellent opportunities
for our team to connect our values to everyday operations.
As a result, we especially strive to add a little 'magic' in an effort
to offer exceptional service throughout our organization."
—David. C. Joyce, President, Union College (KY)

As a result of their visit to the Disney Institute at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando (FL) last summer, several CIC member presidents said the lessons they learned from the workshops they attended with a team from their campus have led to substantive, long-term changes.
    Twenty-one CIC member colleges and universities sent teams led by presidents to the Disney Institute in July and August to learn about the values and practices that have made Disney's resorts the leading vacation destiny in the world and to determine how similar practices could improve operations on their own campuses.
    "When we returned from the Institute, we brainstormed with campus staff to come up with a set of service standards to create an environment of welcome, hospitality, and inclusivity," said JoAnne Boyle, president of Seton Hill College (PA). The standards they agreed to are: openness (the freedom to question, debate, wonder, and speculate); service (performing one's job at the highest capacity so students have the best educational experience); community (the campus welcomes, celebrates, and affirms the uniqueness of everybody and reaches out to the broader community); amazing place to learn and work (characterized by academic excellence, passion for perfection, beauty of the campus, spirituality, and endless effort, among others); and respect (the foundation of the college's beliefs, exemplified by treating people well, caring about the campus environment, compassion, and attending to detail). The standards are known by the acronym of OSCAR.
    "We tied these standards to performance appraisals, introduced them to the campus during orientation, and at the end of the year we will hold a recognition event with meaningful rewards that will, of course, be called OSCAR Night. In the fall, we'll start the process all over again." Boyle said her team and the campus gained a "value-added notion of service" and she intends to send more teams to the Disney Institute to continue the momentum and allow others to get "a hands-on sense of what the best service looks like."
    Union College (KY) President David Joyce and his team of 15 campus staff members "definitely got their money's worth and learned a lot" from their two and one-half days at the Disney Institute. "Once we returned to campus, we met on a regular basis to look at our mission, vision, and core values. We created a customer service group to focus on important issues such as who our customers are (internal customers are staff, faculty, and administration; external are students, alumni, and community), and how to provide exceptional services related to the core values of the campus."
    Joyce said his team also developed an acronym to help drive the change process—PRIDE, which stands for Personal Responsibility for Initiating and Delivering the Experience. "We now take personal responsibility for everything that happens on campus and take pains to ensure that the core values are ingrained in everything we do," he explained. "The Institute was experiential and offered excellent opportunities for our team to connect our values to everyday operations. As a result, we especially strive to add a little 'magic' in an effort to offer exceptional service throughout our organization."
    F.J. Talley, president of Olivet College (MI), accompanied his team to the Disney Institute "to try to fix things on our campus." As a result of their experience, the team developed a new check-in process focused on efficient service for students entering Olivet in the fall term. "We conducted the check-in in one location, posted more signs for new students, stationed greeters wearing name tags around the campus, provided free soft drinks, created areas for parents to rest, gave parents coupons for discounts in the community, and made orientation an event with music, vendors, and full-court press."
    The outcome was a huge success, Talley said. "We had shorter lines, faster service, happier staff—and returning students were amazed!" The Disney experience is leading to long-term changes on campus as well. "Now we will ask more questions to determine the students' perspective on issues; focus on the physical setting; look at course delivery for students—it's infectious stuff. Small changes made everyone happier and helped us all to do a better job," Talley said.
    CIC is collaborating with the Disney Institute again this summer to offer a program on service quality tailored specifically for institutional leadership teams. (For details, visit the CIC website at www.cic.edu/conferences.)

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Last updated: May 30, 2001
Copyright © 2001 The Council of Independent Colleges