ResEdChat Ep 27: Delton Gordon and Luke Hams on Re-Imagining RA and Student Staff Positions

Paul Brown (00:10):
Welcome back to Roompact’s, Res Ed chat podcast where we highlight cool people doing cool things, and we talk about cool topics related to college student housing and residence life. And today I have two guests here that I’m really excited to have on the podcast because they’re doing something pretty innovative and pretty cutting edge. There’s not a lot of campuses doing this right now, but experimenting with how do we rethink that RA role. So I’ve got Luke and Delton here. If you folks want to introduce yourself, maybe we’ll start off with, let’s start off with Luke. How you doing Luke?

Luke Hams (00:42):
I’m good. Thanks you for that quick introduction. So my name is Luke Hams. I’m the director of residence education at Arkansas Tech University. I hail from Wisconsin, so I did my undergrad at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse and then went over to Oklahoma State University for my grad work and worked there for a year or two professionally, and then I ended up here in Arkansas Tech University.

Paul Brown (01:14):
Awesome. Great. How about you Delton?

Delton Gordon (01:18):
My name is Delton Gordon and I serve as the associate Dean for Residence Life at Arkansas Tech University and born and raised in Oklahoma, did my undergrad at Oklahoma State and grad work at Emporia State and here at Arkansas Tech for about five years now leading our department.

Paul Brown (01:41):
Great, great. Well thanks for having you. I kind of cued us up a little bit here about our topic today. But one of the things that we’ve been running here at Roompact is a series on what’s the future of the RA role, what’s the future of the RA position, what does that look like? And another thing that I’ve noticed is at every conference I go to, any session that even remotely touches this topic is a jam-packed full room. So it’s something people are really talking about and why I wanted you have on the podcast today is you’re actually doing something about it. So you actually have gone through, am I right it’s been about a year that you’ve been Yes. Really in earnest experimenting with something

Delton Gordon (02:19):
From conversation to putting it in action it’s just a little over a year, about 13 months.

Paul Brown (02:25):
Great. Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit, how did that come to be? What were the conversations that led to you kind of rethinking and restructuring the RA role?

Delton Gordon (02:36):
So it started, I had read the leadership exchange from the NASPA publication that they put out, and there was an article, I think George Washington University had implemented something like this right after the pandemic and it kind of piqued my interest. We say it a lot in student affairs about how our students, population we serve changes every year and that we’ve got to be creative to meet their needs. And we’ve kept the RA position very much the same as it has been for when I was a student staff member 20 some odd years ago. And so it made me think that it could be a different way to do this, a way to make it more valuable to the student who we’re hiring and more valuable to us as a department. And that’s what set us on that journey.

Paul Brown (03:40):
And it’s hard to do. You’re one of the few schools I think that I’ve even heard of that have actually started to kind of make those changes. How did you go about thinking through those changes, what those were going to be like? What was that process leading into actually taking that jump?

Luke Hams (03:58):
Yeah, I can talk a little bit about that. I think first Delton came to us and really tried to have a good brainstorming session of, “Hey, what are we currently doing and how can we make it a little bit better?” And so that was a pretty interesting time to really think through that. I think overall, we kind of just evaluated what our staff needed to do and what current staff members are currently doing that. And so seeing where maybe some positions were overloaded. I think some of the conversation that we were talking about before this was, “Hey, the RA is kind of the Swiss Army knife of residence life,” and things like that. And so I think trying to reevaluate and see what areas that we can maybe split up some of those roles and kind of went from there. Then we kind of went to the next level, our other professional staff members and then our grad students and got their feedback of what’s going to happen?

What are we going to do? I think that was a good learning process of trying to process all the differences and from different vantage points. Because we can sit here and say, Hey, from our point of view, let’s do these changes. But if as we get closer to the student staff member part of it, we’re learning more and more about what does it look like to be a supervisor in that role? And then getting the student staff’s point of view, “Hey, this is what our thoughts are, what are your thoughts?” And went through it that way. So that’s kind of how we guess processed those changes. But yeah.

Delton Gordon (05:36):
Yeah. We really looked at the tasks that we needed accomplished and where best they fit within our department and really started to look at hiring students for those specific tasks. So looking at their talents and their interests and trying to meet those together.

Paul Brown (05:56):
Did you get any, especially at this early stage, was there resistance? Was there openness? I’m sure there were people all across the spectrum, but where were some of those kinds of attitudes as you brought this forward?

Delton Gordon (06:12):
I would say there was quite a bit of resistance. I think typically, whether it’s Res Life or student affairs in general, “Hey, there’s this big idea that could change a lot of things.” “Oh, let’s study it for a little bit. Let’s talk about it. Let’s make a plan and really figure out how best to implement it.” And I think I pushed a little bit harder because one, there were some budgetary constraints. We were trying to figure out how to keep our rates the same and still give our students a good experience, still continue on the same things that we had always done to serve our residents.
And we have positions now that are available to the introvert that they would never consider applying for in the past. And we have jobs where the extrovert extroverts don’t have to do a whole lot of paperwork there. There’s a good mesh of the types of jobs. And so it just became one of those where everything come together at once and it was like, this is what has to happen. It’s not really my preferred leadership style, but it was one where everything happened at the right point and it was like, this is what we need to make it happen. And so we jumped off. We just jumped.

Paul Brown (07:35):
Yeah.

Luke Hams (07:36):
Yeah. I think the biggest pushback we had were honestly from some of our professionals, professional staff. I think everyone’s in that kind of mindset of what I grew up in, whether it was you were an RA or you lived on campus and you interacted with RA staff. And so I think probably the easiest group for us to convince was the student staff, honestly, they were pretty excited. And obviously there’s little things here and there about the specific roles, but I think trying to really get our professional staff on board so that it kind of trickled down the positivity of, “Okay, we’ve really thought through everything,” and then moving on, because if we don’t get the belief in at the top, then it’s going to trickle down into some negativity and things like that.

Paul Brown (08:24):
Yeah. Well, and the hall director resident director role is a whole nother position that people say that we should examine as well. And I haven’t been in that role for a long time, but I also know that it’s pretty busy. And so I would often rely on mental models of, okay, we know how these things work, and I can just go right back into that kind of mode of going through autopilot. And if all of a sudden all of that changes, that’s probably going to make me pretty nervous. I would think of, “Oh, now I have to think, how am I going to supervise these differently? How is this going to all fit together?” And it kind of throws my position a little bit into chaos in some kinds of ways or really forcing me to move on the fly that I can’t go back to when I’m really busy, go back to those default methods of operating with that. So I think that actually makes a lot of sense to me. The frontline professional staff might be the ones that might say, “Wait a minute, going on.?”

Delton Gordon (09:26):
You touched on so that triggered something. This is similar to the conversations we’ve had about moving to a residential curriculum model versus a programmatic model. And so a lot of those things, the unintended consequences are everybody’s role changed. It wasn’t just the student staff position that changed.
But what I think is important for our residents of residential education team is one to know our residents know who they are, what’s going on to be able to reach out before there’s an emergency to get a pulse on them. So that’s the important piece is we’ve really focused our RA job, that role in getting to know their residents. They do the security rounds like typical, but the other piece is really put a door deck up and know who your people are, get to know them, talk to them, interactions, lots of one-on-one stuff. And then the RD is supporting those student staff members by also knowing what resources to get those students, how to infuse the homesickness and those types of things into our other areas. And so it really is very similar to that whole approach to changing the program model to a curriculum model. And it’s just slightly different, but it makes a huge difference.

Paul Brown (11:05):
Yeah. To me, the kind of curricular movement along with this idea of we need to rethink some roles are linked. They’re very much the same thing. One of the things like when I’ll go and do a curriculum workshop on campus is I’ll talk about you need to let go of things that no longer work. One of the things that I think having been in residence life a while, we generally know we have a hazy notion, here’s what we want to do. We want to build community. We want students to be successful and be well, live well, stay at the institution. We can all talk about what those goals are, but if we’re really specific about what they are and then are forced to make some choices where we can’t do everything, what is the most important things that we need to focus on and how do we let go of things that we’ve just always done that don’t really support that goal in a major way?

It really forces you to think through these positions, which fits with are our staff overburdened with too much work to begin with? Okay then we need to be smarter about it. And so curricula, that kind of curricular mindset as well as just looking at what’s best for our staff to me are pretty much intertwined, it kind of forces you to do both at the same time.

But I get that. So what changes did you make? What did that look like? So that RA role no longer maybe looks different or called something different. What were some of those changes that you made?

Luke Hams (12:36):
Well, so in our current structure, we had our department broke into three areas. And so we had our resident education, so that’s the area that I oversaw. And then housing services. So that includes our marketing and some of our occupancy type staff. And then our facilities basically area of our department. And so when we were breaking down, it kind of made sense for us to look through that lens when we started creating these changes. And so we previously had positions in these areas. So we had the traditional RA, we had our community assistant, which was basically our LLC liaison staff member. We had our housing ambassador who basically was officed out of our front office and took phone calls and did tours, marketing interns. Basically they did marketing, they did some of the social media, flyers, things like that. And then we had our operations assistants and they kind of did some low level maintenance on call and basically responding to residents following up and that sort of stuff.

So we took that model and broke it down. I think sometimes we like to make things equal. So we basically spread all those positions in the four positions in each of those areas. So a total of 12 staff positions. So a lot of the Res Ed positions, I’ll just hit on those first. We have the traditional RA. I think Delton and I had been at past institutions where we had changed that RA name, and it was really hard for parents and students to really click with that. And so we were going back and forth about should we change the name? Should we rebrand? And I think it’s sometimes just easier to keep the name, but change the functionality. I think they still serve in that role. So the RA role is basically, we kind of stripped that role down a little bit. And I think Delton Hinton added a minute ago, made it more of a community building, making those relationships and then being a resource on that floor.

They also did most of the on-call components in terms of the traditional RA doing rounds and things like that that stayed with them. So not as much of during the day needing to be in an office or anything like that responsibility, but more of the after on calls and then being there, building that community. The next one was the community assistance. And this one didn’t change all too much. They still worked with our living learning communities. And then we introduced a new format. Basically it’s kind of like a newsletter that students can sign up on if they’re interested in hiking or interested in food. So basically around the area, they would get tailored emails every other week talking about the events or opportunities that would happen on campus and in the community. So that was really cool. So that’s kind of our community assistants.

And then we have a residential experience assistant. So we took a lot of the roles of bulletin board and maybe of when you think of a residential curriculum, you really think about doing bulletin boards and educational things and all that. And we kind of pulled that out of the RA role and put it as its own role. And so they’re in charge of doing all the bulletin boards around campus, all the lesson plans that we have for those, they basically take it and do it. We have planned events, educational and social that they put on throughout the week. So one building may have two floor events and another one have a hall building event, but basically schedule those out throughout. So a lot of distance. Our residential experience assistant really takes our curriculum and really takes ownership of it and does a lot, everyone is a part of it, but I think it helped us narrow that down to a few student staff members that could really take that and go with it.

And then our last one was a peer health advocate. So all of our staff obviously go through a training to have a mental health component to their positions, but we wanted to really stress that. And so our peer health advocates are, they work with our health and wellness center to do programming. They have listening hours, so it kind of helps supplement some of the counselors where some students may need to go there just to talk to a peer. And that’s kind of where that position falls in. So that’s kind of the residential side of it. So that’s just four positions. So it’s kind of a lot of positions as you can see. But yeah, so then I guess the other two areas, housing services, we have the two positions we used to have, which is the housing ambassador and marketing intern and broke those down to a housing ambassador.

We continue to have that role. We have a guest service assistant, so they kind of help on a deeper level in terms of our occupancy and working with roommate issues and making sure the things are placed on the backend side of things, which is great. And then we have a marketing intern, which kind of stayed the same. And then we had a marketing project manager who basically manages the marketing intern. So that one’s pretty self-explanatory. And then our facilities operations staff, we used to have operation assistants, and we still do, but we kind of transitioned that elevated role. So we have building managers now. And so they take a lot of the facilities type things off of our entry level professionals, or in our case, they’re graduate students, our resident directors. And they kind of handle a lot of the day in day off facilities aspect of our buildings. And so it kind of falls off the RAs or the traditional RA role. So I think that’s a really cool, they follow up with work orders, they follow up with staff, they do minor work orders, and that’s been really awesome.

Delton Gordon (18:36):
Also serve on call in the evening.

Luke Hams (18:37):
Yeah, on call.

Delton Gordon (18:39):
After hours maintenance. So a lot of the being able to shut off the water or unclog a toilet or something like that.

Luke Hams (18:47):
Yeah. And so our operation assistant, so we kept a similar name and they really help out with our transition. So basically when someone checks out of a room, that position goes in, assesses the room, what work orders need to be placed. And then whenever someone wants to move into that room, they’re the ones that goes, checks the key, makes sure the room is ready to go. So we don’t have students moving into spaces that aren’t ready to be lived in. And then we have two other ones. We have our student maintenance assistants who are mostly our lower level facilities, basically people who go out and fix the issues. If there’s a bed frame that needs to be lowered or someone has a clogged drain or something like that, they have tools to fix that quickly. Where our facility management team on campus, it take them a couple days to go and assess that situation.
And then our last one is our transition assistants. And so this was kind of a cool idea. I think when we pitched this idea, it’s similar to an orientation leader. So they come in a few weeks before school starts. They do all of their work within that first few weeks, and then they don’t need to work for Res Life the rest of the year, but they still get their benefits of being on Res Life staff. So I think that was a pretty fun unique one. And Delton might be able to talk a little bit more about that. But yeah, that was a cool one.

Delton Gordon (20:15):
Well, that’s one of those things when you think about, oh, we need all these RAs because how are we going to get the campus ready? So we’re going to have to do training, we’re going to have to do all these extra things. So we need AD RAs because we got to go through every room. We got to get every door deck hung up, we got to get… So that’s where we were very similar to the article in the leadership exchange. We were like, “How do we accomplish that because we have less, they’re going to be in training. There’s only one RA per floor.” And in some cases we had two or even three based on the size of the floor.

And that concept, they had mentioned that they had a transition assistant. We’re like, “Let’s roll with that.” And they came in three weeks early and we got through every room, checked every key to the point where they were weeding, they were doing grounds work, they were helping offices move across campus. They were getting the library set up. We had our goal was to hire 90, we hired 60, and we really probably only needed about 20.
Because all of the other things really started to fall into place. And so we realized we don’t need 80 people to go through the room because all the other positions kind of all fell into place. And so it ended up to be something where we made the most cuts for this upcoming year after we saw what we did.

Paul Brown (21:53):
Well, and that’s really interesting because it’s kind of like, you need some need surge capacity during those heavy times. It doesn’t mean you need all these people for that entire year. It’s just in defined times. And looking at it as kind of more or less a part-time opportunity opens up something new for campus employment and opportunities that staff wouldn’t get otherwise. So the answer is not, “Oh, if we add 10 RAs, now I’ve got them for the whole year and they can help out with that.” But where are our busiest pain points? How can we be smart about hiring to those? Because that that’s obviously a different situation once you get into the year because the needs are different, things like that.

Delton Gordon (22:37):
And the other thing is the RA position, the building manager position and the project manager position are all stipend because many of them, they may have a week where they have 25 or 30 hours and they may have a week where they have 10 or 15 hours. So we have averaged that out. All the other staff that we mentioned. So the other nine positions are all hourly. The other thing too is the RA and the building manager are the only ones who have an assigned space. Everybody else gets to choose where they want to live, who they want to live with, and in what price point they want to pay.
And that has made a huge difference too, because we had so many people who would be a great RA. We go to place them and they’re like, “No, I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to live in that building.” And so it has really helped. It’s really with that part too. I will say this, I’m not sure if this is really the right time, but we’ve hired more students than we had in the traditional model. Because most of them are working hourly we’re actually spending less, and every single one of our students receive a 25% discount no matter where they live. And so we’re actually spending less money than we spent. We have more students that we’re being able to serve, more students will being able to help afford college, and we’re being able to get more stuff done. It’s been the best of both worlds.

Paul Brown (24:17):
And it also seems like too, from the way you’ve described it to me, it sounds like you’re giving more significant leadership opportunities to those students because their role is more narrow and more defined. I feel like that would probably mean they take more ownership in it. This is what I do, and so I’m going to step into this role more deeply than when an RA is pulled in 50 different directions. It almost feels like they maybe can’t be a leader in all of them. Was that something you experienced with this change?

Delton Gordon (24:48):
Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Well, I was going to say for we have a lot of nursing students and psychology students who are doing the PHA work working with our Health and Wellness Center because of the work that they want to do. So that’s a great opportunity for them to say, oh, I’ve helped operate a biofeedback lab. So these are types of things that fit a little easier on their resume for what they want to do in their career. The ones in our maintenance are like, “Oh, we’re learning how to do this. This is going to come in handy. I can now fix the things in my room, or these are good skills for me to have in life.”

And again, those extroverts who really like to go out and do things, they have an opportunity and there’s not just a whole lot of paperwork. The other great thing too is every single residence hall floor has a program every month, and every building has a program once a month. So for us, that’s 45 programs a month that happened. And how did we accomplish that? Well, it’s only four or five different programs presented 45 different times. So each building gets a mixture of those four or five programs.

And so purchasing supplies, we buy stuff and then if we need it, we don’t have to buy stuff if we don’t use it for the next time, or we find out days and times. So we might have a program on a Tuesday at 3:00, and we might have one on Thursday at 9:00 at night. We’ll have floors mixing together because, “Oh, I wanted to go to that because I hired my friend, but I wasn’t able to go to this one. So I was able to go to a different time.” So curricularly, we’re doing the lesson plan, we’re putting this together and we’re presenting it multiple times, but on a convenient schedule for our staff and for the students. So one other thing, and again, it is anecdotal at this point. I don’t know any way to quantify it yet, but our return to campus rate is much higher.

We had 252, which is 252 more go through our renewal process than we had last year, and that’s a little over half our spaces we’re filled with returners, and that’s typically closer to the 40%. So there are some things that have happened. Many of our students just like the discount and working 10 to 12 hours a week. And that’s the other piece that we found too, is that if they need a day off, they can take a day off. Or if they need to work multiple jobs, they don’t have to worry about, I’m on call this weekend, I can’t work this job. I can’t go home and work this other job that I’ve worked at. We now have this ability for most of our staff that they have that flexibility for those who are involved in multiple student organizations. And we know every campus has those. We now have a position that fits for that group. So it’s been a nice marriage of what we need, what the students need, and the additional services that we’re able to offer.

Paul Brown (28:41):
That’s awesome. It sounds great. I’m ready. I’m sold. If I had a residence hall or I had a residence life program, I’d do it. Clearly there’s also probably some challenges or course corrects that you might make next year. Things that you tried and you’re like, “Ah, if we tweaked this, it’ll be a little bit better.” What were some of those kinds of challenges, growing pains or things that you want to change for the future?

Luke Hams (29:04):
Yeah, I think I kind of hinted this at this earlier, but I think we may have overextended some of our positions. I think in terms of making them the responsibility that they had wasn’t enough, I guess is probably the best way to put it. I think we realized to try and get four positions in each one of our areas, I think made some of the roles pretty limited in their scope. And so for next year, I think we’ve refocused some of those roles. I think in terms of our housing services, we had four different positions and now we’re going down to three positions. So one was the operations assistance, and they were the ones that would go to the room and check if someone were to check out the room, check the room, if someone’s moving into the room, making sure the room’s ready.

And I think that position’s getting absorbed into our building manager role because we realized I think this role may be a little bit too limited in their scope of responsibility. And so in terms of resin for Res Ed, we’ve kind of kept the same positions. We have reduced some of the hours that we are providing just because we weren’t using them this year, and we had all kind of assessed that. But in terms of those roles, I think we’re keeping them very similar. For our housing services positions we realized that our housing ambassador and our guest services assistant role were really close, and they had very similar responsibilities. So now next year, those two positions will be combined into one. And so trying to get a good fit of the role, and that might change from year to year end. I think it’s okay to kind of assess what the needs are for that upcoming year, but I think we kind of pulled back a little bit from some of the splitting that we originally did.

Delton Gordon (31:09):
Yeah, I think that’s probably it, there was a lot of overlap or confusion about what the difference was in some of those positions. Quite frankly, we saw about 75% usage of our budget for each month. So that really made us like, “Here’s what we budgeted, but here’s what we’re using.” And we budgeted in extra time for training because hourly staff now we have to pay them for that. The other bonus is our staff meetings don’t last nearly as long because students get paid for their staff meeting. And it’s like, if you don’t need to have one, just let’s not have one. And this is very task oriented.

Yeah. So just evaluating that piece, and it’s allowed us to be able to hire a few of those to stay and work during breaks. Many of our students worked until we closed for winter break. Many of them come back early and work and get a few hours before school starts. And so really our office coverage, we have a student in our office during spring break, so it’s not just a covering lunch. We wouldn’t be able to run our office to the level we do without the student staff members that we have, but we’ll get to a work order in 15 minutes because we have the staff to do so. And that’s great customer service.

Paul Brown (32:51):
Yeah, lots of great options there. Lots of great benefits coming out of it. If folks wanted to go down this path, so if I’m someone working on another campus and I hear what you’re talking about and I said, “Great, I’m sold.” What advice would you give them or any guidance or pointers of things that you learned along the way of saying, “Here’s how we would suggest you go about thinking about this or doing this.” What advice would you give them?

Luke Hams (33:21):
I can start. I think the biggest thing in any of, especially a big shift like this, I think being transparent with everyone. And so I think obviously you got to work through and get the pieces here and there from going from professional and our resident directors, our grad students, and then obviously getting the feedback from the student staff. I think starting over the good and then adding some of the key stakeholders as you continue to really develop the plan kind. I mean, similar to what we did, I think Delton did a very good job of being transparent about, “Hey, this is the timeframe we have to do this in. Can we do it? What is this going to look like? How do we need to communicate to our campus partners? How do we need to communicate to our own staff?”

And so I think the more transparent, the better. And sometimes it’s okay to get some harsh feedback because I think that maybe that’s what’s going to make it work and make it better in the end goal. But yeah, just making sure that you’re taking the time to do that and don’t rush. Don’t rush through it and then meet with the RA staff and say, “Hey, your jobs are all changing.” And they’d be like, “What’s going on? So yeah.

Paul Brown (34:32):
Yeah. That wouldn’t go over well, I don’t think.

Luke Hams (34:34):
No, no, no.

Delton Gordon (34:37):
We did several interest sessions with our current student staff to talk about those changes. We made a couple of those available virtual meetings so that we could kind of roll through, record them and send them out so that we could answer a lot of those questions. I think it is really sitting down with your team, what are the things that you need to accomplish? What are things that either at your institution students are capable of doing? If we had some different majors, there may be a few other things we might entertain because of the opportunity for an internship. But we just kind of looked at those tasks of what each… Especially the RA, because we had 88 RAs and now we have 45, and we achieved a lot of equity in that process because of building of four was on call for that building. And now all of the areas are same number of staff, and they all are on the same amount of time for on-call.

So that helps, but just really divide out what needs to be accomplished, how you’re going to be accomplishing it, and how can you have students help you accomplish it. And honestly, I think my vice president told me when I started here, I’m not going to able to grow my department professionally. There’s only so many professionals that we’ll be able to hire, only so many positions available, but you’ll never be frowned upon by hiring students. So if you can figure out a way to hire students, that’s going to be easy to submit. And so those are the types of things. I would understand your budget, understand your job descriptions and the tasks that you need to have accomplished and jump, don’t sit and committee it to death. Just go ahead and jump.

Paul Brown (36:43):
Yep, yep. All the connections for me with curriculum, since I do so much with that, that’s also a problem with curriculum is that people talk about it, talk about it. We need to refine our goals so often that it’s like, well, if you’re constantly revising your goals, you’re never going to get to doing at some point you have to kind of launch at 40%, which is a common refrain you’ll hear at the institute on the curricular approach, experiment, iterate, do it. That’s not something I think we do enough in this field of, or we’re a little scared to sometimes. So I applaud you for kind of taking that jump because really you are one of the few institutions kind of starting this, and I think we’re going to see it more and more in the next few years. So thank you for joining us today. I will make sure to put that article you mentioned from the Leadership Exchange, from NASPA’s Leadership Exchange in the show notes, as well as any other information that can kind of help out. But thank you all for being on the podcast.

Luke Hams (37:45):
Thank you.

Delton Gordon (37:45):
Thanks guys.

Paul Brown (37:47):
All right. And that’s it for our episode. We’ll see you next week.