Creating an Automated Duty Log for Residence Life Professionals in Qualtrics

For Housing or Residence Life professionals one of the most difficult things can be tracking your staff member’s duty calls. In higher education landscape, the recent changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act make accurate and unobtrusive tracking of staff member’s duty time even more critical. In this blog post,  I’d like to share with you how our institution has used Qualtrics to create, easy to use, mobile friendly, and carefree reporting on daily Hall Director Duty Reports. This approach is flexible enough that it could easily be used for Student Staff, Facilities, or Custodial callbacks as well. While this is created using Qualtrics and their reporting option the same approach could be useful with a Google Docs Form, Survey Monkey, etc.

1.       Login to Qualtrics at https://www.qualtrics.com/

2.       Create Project

3.       Name your project, for this one I used: 2016-2017 UNC Hall Director Duty Report

4.       Create the Questions You Want, here’s what I used

a.       Staff Member on Duty

b.       Date Issue was Reported (Please use this format, MM-DD)

c.       What time was this issue reported? (Please use this format, HH:MM AM/PM)

d.       Community/Communities Called About

e.       Issue Type, select all that apply

f.        Name of staff member calling

g.       Resident Full Name (Or first name and last initial if privacy is a concern)

h.       Area or Room Number

i.         Contact Telephone Number

j.         Summary of Incident/Issue

k.       How was this issue resolved?

• I found it helpful to embed links to other reporting tools (like Maxient/Jams, StarRez, etc. for applicable reports right in the question) like below.

l.         Is additional follow up needed, if so, who should follow-up?

• For this question, I have the option for a specific report to be sent out immediately, you can learn more about this below.

m.     For most questions I do not require an answer to give our staff members the most flexibility with their reporting but Qualtrics provides many logic, validation, and other question options

5.       Setup Email Triggers, these are used to send out a single report via email immediately upon reporting.

a.       You can access this by clicking Tools, then Triggers, then Email Triggers

b.       In the below example I have a trigger that emails a report out to our main office staff, you setup the logic based which option in the question is selected under the “If” Section. You can setup the TO and FROM email addresses and display names. Additionally, I have setup a custom subject to include the date and time of the report, see my example here: ${date://CurrentDate/DS} ${date://CurrentTime/MT} UNC: 2016-2017 UNC Hall Director Duty Report - Follow Up Request by Follow Up by Leadership Team

c.       The body of the email can have whatever is needed; the body of the email will also include the response text if the “Include Response Report” and “Show Full Question Text” are selected. You can also choose when to send it out under “When” if you do not desire an immediate sending.

6.       For your reporting every day you can use the Distributions tool, this allows a summary report to be sent out the next day (or whenever needed) via email. To do this Click Distributions, Click Reports, Printed Report (weird right?), then click Email Reports, and Schedule an Email.

a.       In this window, you can setup a “Panel” of all the people the report is sent to. You can do this by gathering a list of email addresses, First Names, and Last Names for your constituents in an excel table and copying and pasting it in (as long as your report goes to fewer than 500 people) To do this, under To, click on My Library, and New Panel. You can paste it all in, and name your panel as desired and edit it under the Contacts menu at any time if your staffing changes.

b.       Then you can schedule your email to go out as often as needed, you can see my campus’ setting below. One bit that we found useful was customizing the email subject to include the date of the report. Use something like this to do so: ${date://CurrentDate/DS} 2016-2017 UNC: Hall Director Duty Report

c.       Finally, you should distribute the link out to the folks who will fill out your report. You can get a link by clicking on distributions and clicking for an anonymous link.

7.       From here, daily at 9am, the Qualtrics system will send out an email digest of the prior day’s reports. A good practice is to report the call on the form when you are responding to the issue. The reporting form looks good on most mobile devices. If you’d like to add this to your iOS or Android device as an icon, so it looks like an app, follow these directions: iOS: http://bit.ly/1mjMVxN    Android: http://bit.ly/1omPNa3

Author Bio: A Technology enthusiast & MBA student. Assistant Director with University of Northern Colorado Housing & Residential Education. An alum of the University of Northern Colorado (Go Bears!) and Texas Tech University.

For more information on the use of Qualtrics for Duty Reports, contact Jediah via email or on Twitter @Linnix

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