10:00AM Mountain Standard Time

Members present: Allison Baker, Holger Vömel, Peter Sullivan, Eric Apel, Kelley Barsanti, Ryan Sobash, Carol Ruchti, Anna Malanushenko, Ben Johnson
Also present: Glen Romine from the Directorate’s Office

Discussion with Glen Romine

Strategic Plan

Strategic plan trying to get to a close. Collected feedback from all the sources. Largely people are content with the current state of the plan. Lots of opportunities to sharpen certain spaces. Patching things up and working to get to the final layout and design. Board of Trustees needs to provide approval before we can move forward. That review is late January to early February. Still trying to submit to NSF in early March.

American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting

AGU was last week. Everette had 17 different leadership meetings. A whirlwind of trying to talk to all these different folks. A lot of the pivots that we’re talking about in the strategic plan are similar to other organizations, to accelerate into certain spaces.

Political Environment

A lot of reaction to the change in the political environment. Concerns around DEI activities so you’ve seen the movement to change how we describe what we’re doing to be less polarizing. 

More impactful piece is the shift in the remote working environment. Best to let things get explained in the upcoming Town Hall. There will be another staff message updating on the Town Halls that will come out this morning. Some of the aggressive pacing will slow down. Seeking some patience on that because it caught a lot of us by surprise. The alternative concerns were far greater so the moves were pretty aggressive.

New Operations Director

We’ve recently brought in a new operations director. Had one seven or eight years ago. We didn’t have anyone for the last couple of years. Rachel Ray is the new assistant director for operations. It will allow us to be more responsive to issues that come through. For example we got a request from the ECSA that took us 9 months to respond to.

NSA-EC Update to Glen

Wrote year end letter and selected dates for meeting with the EC. We’ll send that your way today.

Question and Answer with Glen

Is the change in the work policy a reaction to something that was said by a politician or national figure?

The primary reason is building occupancy. If you look at our occupancy, it’s around 30% so it looks like a waste of taxpayer dollars. If you watch the news, there’s a thought to move the Space Force out of Colorado Springs. By pulling us back in, it makes us look like a center in Colorado instead of a center spread out over all of the states. This is an action to shore things up and protect the facilities. It’s been a concern since the pandemic when people send visitors and they walk the halls and there’s no one to talk to. But the concern for us is early career staff. It’s very expensive to live close to Boulder. Many people left to go to low or no tax states like Texas or Florida for a lower cost of living. There are operational roles such as budget analysts and software engineers where there isn’t a clear functional benefit to be in the office so there’s a risk that we lose key personnel with this move.

It sounds like we don’t have an idea of the number of people who are affected. Is that right?

That information seems to be difficult to obtain. We don’t have a central database of who moved away. It’s taking time to figure out where everyone is. We know many of them but not all of them. I heard from someone who put their house on the market an hour before the announcement came out. In the most recent operational satisfaction survey, the number one rated element was our remote work policy. The announcement still isn’t policy yet, so there’s still opportunity to build in more exceptions. Keep the questions and concerns coming.

How does the policy affect moving personnel between buildings and campuses?

Many of us can appreciate that the physical separation even in the city of Boulder is challenging. There hasn’t been a major shift of labs and programs in a while. It’s happened in the past. Alicia Swofford’s group (COO) did an assessment to figure out where we have open spaces. There’s roughly 300 open office spaces somewhere on our campus. The challenge is where are the spaces and what is the quality of the office? That’s what we need to figure out. Once people come back in, where are we going to put them? Technically there are offices in FL1 that haven’t been occupied for 20-30 years and are filled with old furniture. These facilities would need to be modernized.

Glen departs the meeting.

SAM Feedback and Discussion

Whole lot of skepticism about this being able to be implemented next October. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done with respect to reclassifying staff. Comparable institutions have had huge increases in payroll costs associated with such reclassifications. Some suspicion that the return to work policy is an effort to increase turnover to free up payroll to implement SAM. Lots of words and very little details. For example, what will happen with the ARG process. There’s a general sense that questions are not being answered.

Informal Monthly Meetings at the Lab Level

The CISL scientists have monthly meetings with a conference room reserved during lunch. There isn’t an agenda but it’s a way for scientists from different divisions to meet each other. In MMM Gretchen has a hang out once a week. Sometimes it’s 5 minutes long. Other times it’s 30 minutes long. MMM has a lunch gathering on Wednesday at noon. Those two things keep people in MMM pretty aware of what’s happening. Great way to discuss things that bring about general anxiety like ARG, SAM, etc.

UCAR Hybrid/Remote Policy

ECSA Steering committee met last week. This policy affects early career staff in a more extreme way than other members of staff. ECSA want to put together a letter with about 2 paragraphs that doesn’t get to the details of the policy, but the messaging of the policy. People seemed to be hurt. The rollout of the message was lacking context and lacked a consideration of psychological safety. If the NSA wants to participate in this, the current plan is to draft the ECSA as the steering committee and then share it with the broader membership of the ECSA. It’s good to outline that people are hurt by the messaging in general.

Haven’t heard much positive feedback from anyone. What are the mechanisms we could use? What strategy could we take to compile what we’re hearing from the scientific staff? Should we put it in a letter to outline concerns. We’ll see what happens at the Town Hall on Friday and see what happens with the feedback that is received. Would like more information on how the decision was made. 

This is a good example of the SAM follow up, and other policy rollouts. There’s not a chance to discuss it beforehand. Does it make sense to have Glen join the meeting later on so that we have a chance to discuss relevant topics before we meet with him? It might be more productive if we have a chance to discuss things first and then have Glen come on at 10:30. We’ve seen Glen make some small changes based off of the feedback that we’ve given him so it seems like our discussions are a worthwhile activity that actually has some positive benefit. 

General consensus that we should ask Glen if he can come at 10:30. Our notes do serve as a reminder of things we should be discussing at follow up meetings.

Any Concerns, Questions from Scientific Staff That We Want to Add to Our Notes?

We reviewed the bylaws and the activities that the NSA should be completing. Can we develop a plan to publish more articles? GATE/GARP and the developments leading up to those observing programs lead to the development of the dropsonde in 1974. There’s a lot of interesting lessons. Holger has been digging a lot into these and there are interesting lessons. Don Lenschow and Peggy Lemone would be interested in talking about these things and Holger has already interviewed them. Modest goal would be to try to plan 3 in one year and then we’ll probably get 2 out. Keep this on the agenda for each meeting so that we don’t forget about it.

Rotating Members Off

A third of the committee is supposed to rotate off every year. Should we put together a list of start dates? If we were more active in that then we’d get more interest in serving. There might be reluctance to get people to serve because it seems like a long-term commitment. If people knew their service time was finite that might make it easier to bring on new committee members. Including the term would be good to add. The term could be extended if someone was willing to serve again. The ECSA holds yearly elections, so there’s an awareness of the timing of open seats. The ECSA doesn’t have an end date but the announcement of elections serves as this annual reminder. Nominations can either be self-nominations or other people nominate.

Update on Scheduling Survey

The 3rd Wednesday of the month was the clear choice with the fewest conflicts so we’ll be keeping the meeting as currently scheduled.

January Meeting

The January meeting conflicts with the week of the American Meteorological Society 2025 Annual Meeting. General consensus to postpone meeting again until February.

Priorities for Next Year

  • Social events
  • 2 Scientists’ Journals
  • Create a roster get some rotation of representatives
  • Can talk about PSIF and Day of Discovery next year.
  • Help with planning of events since