ACM SIGUCCS 2025 Conference

In spring of 2023, the renovation of our IT department office at Hope College was completed. It was our first office renovation since the 80s. The renovation took almost 3 months to complete. During the renovation, most staff members either worked remotely at home or another location on campus. Our help desk support staff had two locations on campus for walk-in and drop-off help. We have a separate technician space for our A/V techs that was renovated separately so those staff persons were unaffected and our main help desk person worked from there. We emphasized the importance of keeping Google Calendar updated, extra diligent work ticket notes, being contactable via phone, and availability on messaging apps like Google Chat and Slack.

We converted our department from a maze of hallways and enclosed spaces to an open office with all desks in a communal area. There are 5 separate meeting rooms for phone calls, virtual/hybrid meetings, meeting with each other, and hosting external meetings. We have also tested the cultural impact of white noise machines around the office, as well as music in the customer service walk-in area. Most of our staff is able to work remotely 2 days per week, so the majority of our desks are hotel-like (meaning no permanent assigned desks; just a communal workspace with a USB-C monitor).

The meeting rooms have room reservation tablets on the door that are connected to our campus room reservation system. Each room can be reserved on the tablet itself or on our campus room reservation website. There is a 1-person private room, 2-person “project / work room”, two 5-person rooms, and an 8-person room. The three 5- and 8-person rooms have a large-screen TV. Our previous main entrance was not handicap accessible, so we completely changed on which side of the building our front entrance was located. This was also an opportunity to improve both the IT department office and dormitory by now having automatic door openers. Another improvement by moving the front entrance is greater visibility of our department from persons walking past outside.