By Rob Hornberger, Ed.D., Consultant, AACRAO Consulting and Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management and Services, Emeritus, Missouri State University
Our enrollment services teams feel stretched thin, and there is growing pressure to add staff.
How can we determine whether our challenge is truly a staffing shortage or something else?
Signed,
Enrollment Leader
Dear Enrollment Leader,
This is one of the most common—and most important—questions institutions face. While staffing may be part of the answer, we often find the root issue lies in how the work is structured.
Map the work before adding people: Begin by documenting your core processes—application review, transfer evaluation, registration, degree audit, etc. Identify where work slows down, gets duplicated, or requires multiple handoffs. In many cases, inefficiencies—not staffing levels—are the primary constraint.
Align work with role level: It is common to see highly skilled staff spending significant time on transactional tasks that could be handled differently. Clarifying role expectations and redistributing work across entry, mid, and senior levels can immediately improve both capacity and morale.
Identify rework and “hidden workload”: A substantial portion of staff time is often spent correcting errors, responding to unclear communications, or navigating inconsistent processes. Reducing this rework can free up capacity more effectively than adding positions.
Assess structure before scale: Before expanding staffing, ask, “If we added two more people today, would they be working within an optimized system—or stepping into the same inefficiencies? Sustainable growth comes from fixing the system first, then scaling it.
Signed,
Rob Hornberger, AACRAO Consultant
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