ResEdChat Ep 48: Rethinking Residence Life Staff Structures

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s Res Ed Chat, where we provide a platform to talk to really interesting people about interesting topics related to housing and residence life today. And I’m particularly pleased to have Stewart with us here today because we’re going to delve into a hot topic that’s been around housing and residence life for a while, but really within the last I’d say year or two, how do we look at our staffing patterns within our residence halls? What are the duties? Do we need to blow up these positions? Do we need to reconfigure them? What does that look like? And my guest today actually has direct experience in doing that, so I can’t think of anyone better to talk on this topic than my guest today.
So Stewart, you want to start us off? Tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, how you came to be a little bit knowledgeable about this topic.

Stewart Robinette:
Absolutely. Before I start, I just wanted to congratulate Roompact again on 10 years. That’s an amazing milestone and everything. Congrats.

Paul Brown:
Thank you.

Stewart Robinette:
But yeah, my name’s Stewart Robinette, I use he/him pronouns, and I do have direct knowledge because I was fortunate enough at GW to have a Vice President that got behind really rethinking the way we could do staffing, both with the RAs at George Washington University in DC and also with our professional staff. And though a lot of the headlines and the questions that I’ve gotten in the past is really revolved around, “Oh, what’d you do with the RAs and the student staff?”, what gets lost a lot of times is that it wasn’t done in a silo. And I know we’ll talk a little bit more about this probably about the genesis of the decision, but it was so much more than what we were trying to do with RAs there.
And it was an amazing journey while I was there because I basically was given the ability, once we made the case, to take an RA model and completely re-envision the way that we could use student staffing for the betterment of residents, but also to make sure that we were engaging with the type of learning and the type of experiences that I think all of us in the profession really want student staff to have. The other thing too is I got to not only see that for a year, I got to see kind of our follow-up in the tweaks and changes that we made to it before I decided to take a different course in my career from there.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah, and you’re not at GW currently, is that right?

Stewart Robinette:
Yeah, that’s correct. So yeah, it was amazing to be able to kind of do what I felt was this pinnacle moment for me with my partner Seth Weinshel at GW to do this change. Got to really see it to a place where I’m like, “Okay, I feel good about where it is and where I’m leaving it.” And I took a step back to say, “Okay, what do I want to do with the rest of my career now?” And I decided that what I learning, the talent development part of it, the organizational design.
And I got to tell you, it was interesting because I was always thought of myself as a pragmatist. I like tweaking things on the edge, in the corner. And then I did this and I was like, “Oh man, I love this. I love being this creative where you almost take something and just throw it up in the air and say, okay, how can we really re-envision it?” So I actually decided to step away from student affairs, and it was the hardest thing ever. But it was also a really important decision for me because I’m looking right now to take what I learned in higher ed and apply it to another industry. If it works out great. If not, I know that I always have the home that I had in student affairs and I’ll be able to come back and continue to make impacts there. But right now, that’s my journey that I’m on.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, that’s fantastic. I mean as someone who went higher ed, I like to say I went higher education adjacent before it was cool, meaning there’s a lot of people really seriously considering that now, but didn’t at the time that I joined Roompact seven years ago, that just really resonates with me. Because I feel like I was in a similar place of I loved student affairs, I loved working in it. I would go back to it, but I also looked at what are all the other things that I enjoy? What does that mean for my lifestyle? What does that mean for what I’m able to do and freedom? And can I serve student affairs in a different way? Can I serve the values and principles I want a different way? And making a change actually allowed me to still do those things that I love, but just from a different angle. So yeah, I’m excited for you in seeing where this journey takes you. That’s fantastic.

Stewart Robinette:
Well, and I think part of the reason I made this decision too is when we were looking at the way we were doing staffing for our student staff and also our professional staff, we were really careful to look outside of higher education. And I think there’s this automatic impulse to always look within and look in the research that we have and really focus there. And I don’t want to take anything away from that because that really informs the practice. However, there are some really exciting things happening in different industries that are directly applicable to, like you said, the values that we are trying to espouse and that we are able to deliver to our students every day, the type of workplaces that we’re trying to create, and the learning that we’re creating for everyone in our community.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. And as we start to delve into this topic now, I think that’s what I’m finding when people talk about this. So I’ve given some presentations with some colleagues on this at [inaudible 00:05:50] and we have talked about it, and I think it’s sometimes so hard for people inside the system to think, what could it be like outside the system differently, bringing in different things. And so there is a hunger for, “Give me a different model, show me a different way of thinking. How can I wrap my brain around that?” And that’s why I’m excited that you’re here today because you went through that process. Maybe for the listeners, could you give us just a little bit of a history lesson into at least what happened with GW, like what led to that space where you’re like, “Let’s re-look at this,” and what was on your mind or you and your colleagues’ minds when you said, “This is something that we need to do or should be doing.”?

Stewart Robinette:
Yeah, that’s great. And I mean part of the genesis of this story I think was actually happening before COVID in the way that we were thinking about things. And I do have to give a plug to my partner that was there at GW, still there, Seth Weinshel, because he and I would have one-offs, and these one-offs would be more about, “Okay, how do we fix this problem?” And then part of my training, I have my JD, and so one thing that I’m always trying to think about is two or three steps ahead, if we fix this problem, what are the consequences that we’re not thinking about, and what are the unintended consequences? And so we have this issue, we have designed a package for our RAs where whenever we award them room and board, for those that most need that type of financial assistance, it hits our financial aid package. Well, how do we fix that? Well, if we fix that, then this is going to impact two steps down the line these other students, it’s going to hurt our numbers here.
So we were thinking outside the box, but we were thinking in these small narrow ways of problems and issues. And then COVID hit and the leadership at GW was like, “Hey, we have to rethink the way that we’re doing things, not only to get through COVID, but this is a perfect time to really reset the way that you think about your operations.” And this was across the university. And so Seth and I had dusted off one of our … We had taken notes one time when we were just talking where we had 30 minutes, where we were just throwing everything out there and we said, “Is there a different way to do the way that we’re doing staffing?”
Now, mind you, GW had made the decision that we were not going to put our student staff, across university, this isn’t just housing and residence life and student affairs, in any type of direct contact before they could be doing work where they would be directly interacting with others. So I mean the RA position fundamentally shifted there. Plus we had also decided that we were closing our residence halls, so we emptied our residence halls in March like many institutions. We also made the decision in fall of the next year that we weren’t going to bring any students back. We didn’t make that decision though until a week before we were bringing the RAs back, which was lovely communication.

Paul Brown:
Sure.

Stewart Robinette:
Another really difficult part of it, and another one of those issues before we took a step back and we’re like, “All right, every year we bring back the RAs like 14 days early and every year something comes up last moment before we have to send out this type of communication. It’s difficult for them to plan. We’ve got people flying in. How do we prevent that?” And so we took another like, “Okay, there’s something that we got to be doing differently here.”
So when we were actually looking at everything, and this is the one thing that we really came back to our foundation, it was always like, “Well, if we do this, it could do this, dah, dah, dah.” But what we realized is we were like what are the issues that we’ve discovered that are the big salient ones? And this is where we went to not only research that was out there from [inaudible 00:09:55] and NASPA and ACPA, but we also went back through our exit surveys of five years of RAs, which was great. We had had anywhere from around 100 to 130-some RAs during my five years there at that point. We had done exit interviews every time an RA left the position. And so there was some really good data and themes that were falling out of there.
One of the most important things that we’ve learned is that more and more RAs were responding to incidents, which we kind of coined as critical incidents, in which vicarious trauma or secondary trauma was happening, right? Now, of course that stuff’s going to happen. We know that. However, we know from the data how much mental health needs have been rising. We also know that students, and this is a great thing, and parents too and guardians, are great about reaching out to get their students help. However, we have built up the RAs as it’s like, “You are the frontline, you’re the best of the best student leadership that we have. You are the person that’s going to make sure these students are successful. You are so important.” And that’s great for a confidence builder, that also kind of implies how important they’re on the floor. However, if you take a step back, and this is what we did, we were really setting them up to take on more responsibility than they should.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. And that is consistently, even I mentioned we presented on [inaudible 00:11:26], we did some student voices, that consistently came up in those student voices exactly what you said. That is also what shows up in our other podcast episode with the folks at CU Boulder in their multi-institutional study. That consistently is one of the things that comes up.

Stewart Robinette:
Yeah. So once we saw that, our number one thing went back to one of our ethical promises that we make being in the profession, do no harm. And we can look back, I was an RA okay, I was back in the 1830s. No, in the …

Paul Brown:
Were you a good RA? I was not a good RA.

Stewart Robinette:
I thought … Listen, not only was I an RA, I became a head resident my senior year.

Paul Brown:
Oh, well, okay, well there we go. You were a much better RA than I was.

Stewart Robinette:
But I just remember hearing those stories and hearing how those students would carry. I responded to a student that was thinking about taking their life, or I had a student knock on my door and I didn’t know that they had just been a survivor of sexual violence, and I tried to work with them for the rest of the year. Those types of stories were just breaking my heart because now we’re taking what a student that maybe is a year older that we’ve maybe given what two weeks of training, a couple hours of that training directly to what they’re going to be doing responding to that, nevermind for the student that’s actually at need that’s going to be potentially telling that story now to the student. They’re going to have to retell that story to a professional staff member. It wasn’t making sense to us there so we said, “Okay, how can we reverse some of the harm that’s happening there and take that out of it?”
And then the other stuff kind of fell from there. We were like, “Okay, well, we shouldn’t have RAs in that position.” And then we said, “Okay, let’s quit calling them RAs. We’ve got our student staff, we’ve got our professional staff, and they’ve got different experiences.” A really important inflection point for us is when we also said, “Well, what does some of the theory tell us?” And we’re like, “Well, we talk a lot about strengths from gallops and we talk to students about, ‘Hey, do your strengths know your strengths, have it towards your passion.'” We’re like, “Well, we’ve created this system where it’s like ‘RAs, you do everything on this level,’ and then it goes up to the professional staff. “You do everything on this level.” And that’s where we’re like, “Okay, we’re not doing right by the professional staff at that point.”
Assistant directors, if it’s too hard for the professional staff, you’re going to respond to it, or when it becomes too big. And it just was like you have all these other sectors that are continuing to think about how do you focus in the responsibility and the mission to what that person is doing and make sure that it really is their passion, their strength. We talk about the students, we talk about when they’re finding their careers and when they’re exploring, yet we’re not doing that in the roles that we had at GW right now.

Paul Brown:
Well, and something that you’re just hitting on for me in terms of you talking about taking a step back, figuring what you want in your career, you’re actually doing that right now it seems like of, “Hey, I did this role.” And yeah, I’m sure you were very good at it, but there were probably certainly areas that you would say you were better at and that were more passionate for you. And you said, “Well, what if I focus on my strengths?” I mean that was my experience in taking this role.

Stewart Robinette:
You’re exactly right. That’s part of my own decision making that [inaudible 00:14:48] in the back of my head. But then I realized later on where I was like, you know what? If I’m going to put this in as a system for myself after 20 years, I have a good idea about one, what I love and what I’m passionate about, and two, the ways I can add the most value to an organization or our team. You’re exactly right, that’s the route that I’m going right now.

Paul Brown:
I mean that’s a whole other podcast episode.

Stewart Robinette:
You’ve got to keep me on task here.

Paul Brown:
Well, you’ve got to keep on task.

Stewart Robinette:
I shared before I’m from the Appalachian Mountains. I’ll tell a story about anything.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. So you really started rethinking the whole kind of system and wanted to rebuild it from the ground up is what it seems like to me.

Stewart Robinette:
Yeah. We storyboarded out where our mission was and what we were trying to do in the residence halls. We thought about not how we had done in the past, but who is best positioned to have the expertise and also the situational awareness, and I’ll talk about that in a second, to be able to do it.
So let me give you a really quick example. We would have a student that would get locked out. Now, we had moved to where we had gotten rid of keys, we were using all card swipes in all of our doors, but still the student forgets their card. Because the way the system was set up. RAs couldn’t just be like, “Okay, I’m going to let you into your room,” because we didn’t want master cards hanging out. We didn’t want it being someplace where it could be checked out or forgotten. And also the way that we had our agreement, we weren’t able to write that into where RAs could also call up and have that done. So what an RA would do then is that they would have to call and get ahold of either Key Depot, which was a different entity outside of even student affairs, or if that didn’t work, that had to go professional staff. That’s just the way the bureaucracy was that we had at that time.
We said, well, by that point, I just want to get into my room. And the expectation is in a hotel if I get locked out of my room, I go downstairs or I call, they verify who I am. They either give me another key right there on the spot in the building or they let me in. And so we said, “Well, who could do that?” Well, the professional staff could do that. So then it was like, “All right, well, our student staff shouldn’t be doing it then because we’re actually just creating an extra step mainly for the students and student staff to have to triage something rather than just being able to solve the issue at hand as quickly as possible.” And we know that if you solve the issue as quickly as possible, not only do you have satisfaction go up, but also keeps you from that negative threshold effect of where if you make the best decision in the world or you have the best outcome in the world, but if it’s too late, it’s bad. It’s not good. So we were trying to solve for that in a number of issues too.
So we started going through it and then we started saying, “Okay, well what tasks do we need to be done in the resin salts? Well, who’s the best person to do that?” And going through strengths and everything else, we said, “Okay, if we’re able to take positions and narrowly tailor them to specific responsibilities, rather than having all this conglomeration of every hat that you have to wear and the role, it’s going to be better for the residents living there, it’s going to be better for the staff members that are serving the residents. It’s going to be a more efficient process, which helps with whether we want to call it work-life integration or balance. It’s also going to help with delivering the service at the point of where the issue is occurring.” And now you throw in the strengths-based stuff and you’re like, “Okay, well this aligns with theoretical concepts.”
So long story short now, or long story longer depending on how you want to put it, we took the student staffing model, RAs and also our desk assistants, we had a separate staffing for that, and we said, “Okay, let’s actually make more positions.” So where it’s more narrowly tailored, gets to their passions. You love programming, you love doing events. Well, we’ve got a role for you. For my pre-law students out there that are like, “I want to mediate because that’s going to help me in law school,” and I’m like, “Well, not really, but okay, if you want to, great.” We create a mediator role. That’s all you do. You don’t have to worry about the other stuff that you’re not good at.
The other thing that’s really helped out with also, and you said you were an RA, maybe others can identify with this, I remember when I was an RA it was always like, “You’re a student first. You’re an RA second, and then you can do everything else in college.” And then I would get so upset because my friends would get into honor societies or other things would happen. They’d be like, “Well, why didn’t you get in? Or why aren’t you doing this service project?” I’m like, “Well, I’m having to work and I don’t really know what my schedule is and I can only do 10 hours. I have to check with my supervisor.”
Well, under this type of a system, we can move to hourly pay for the students, and if you can do six hours a week, great, we can schedule you for six hours. You want to do the full 20, we can still schedule it for the full 20. And so that was really, really important because we’re like now we’re letting these students, we’re not praying is almost too strong of a word, but I know from our interviews with RAs, and I know from my own experiences, when I got that RA sophomore year, I don’t know if you were in a similar situation, but when I got that, I was like, “Wow, this is my ticket. I’m going to be able to pay for college. This is huge.”
And I knew students were a lot of times being like, “This is my ticket. I can pay for college. I cannot lose it. I have to be making sure I don’t lose it rather than being creative.” And now we could work with all students. Again, if you need to take some time away, you don’t have this huge responsibility for like, gosh, all these residents on my floor are depending on me. No, you can actually take time away because you need to take time away. We’ve got other people taking care of those residents and we’ve got people that can be interchangeable there.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. I love that some of these experiments kind of just exactly like you described actually take into account the flexibility, the what am I passionate about, of the student staff members themselves. I mean this is what professional staff are calling for right now in terms of the restrictive nature of the hall director role is, “I’m overworked. I’m always expected to be here. I feel like my compensation isn’t high enough relative to what you’re asking me to do,” and that’s what they’re calling for is more flexibility, more rethinking of that role, and that’s also something that our student staff need too because that’s also what they’re going to encounter in the work environment. A lot of work environments, jobs, do not look like this very structured higher ed/Res Life boom kind of way, but involve skills and adapting and what are your circumstances and how can I find something that fits for me, not just in terms of what I’m doing, but how that position is constituted and what it allows me to do in my life? Is it remote, is it not? Is it this, is it that? And I just think that’s such a good service for our student staff.

Stewart Robinette:
Well, and you’re hitting the nail on the head that also role models the way we should think about for our professional staff, right? One of the big decisions that we made, and it was a great conversation with our student conduct officers and our director, we all ended in the same place, but it was getting to the professional staff part of it about that work-life balance. One of the things that we thought about is who’s going to do rounds? Now, what was helpful for me that kind of made me think, “Hey, maybe you don’t need to do it,” is when I got to GW, little known fact, the RAs weren’t doing rounds there. Residents were calling GW Police whenever there was a noise complaint or wherever something happened, but the RAs weren’t doing rounds. While I was there, we instituted it. Students hated it, RAs hated it. Then went to this model, we got rid of it again.
But the question came up, “Well, are your professional staff going to do rounds?” And the first response was, “Well, we didn’t do it before.” And then we’re like, “No, no, no, let’s actually think about the why and what happens with it.” We ended up not putting rounds in. Oh, I’m sorry. We ended up doing rounds, but we would only do rounds on Saturdays and Sundays when the offices were closed and we weren’t trying to do it at night. We would do it a little bit earlier in the evening to get toward the goals that we wanted.
And there were a number of reasons that we did it. And I just want to list two examples that I think are really on the continuum of the why. The first reason was we went back to what our values were. Are we trying to create community or are we trying to potentially police? And we looked at different industries and we were like, “Okay, who else does rounds in the way that we do rounds in the residence halls?” And we were like, “Okay, middle school overnight camps do, like sleep-away camps. Prisons, detention centers. High schoolers that are on trips, they get rounds done by whoever, chaperone, things like that.” But we were like, “Okay, who isn’t doing it?” And we looked at like they don’t do rounds on cruise ships, which is basically a floating residence hall. They don’t do rounds in theme parks. And by the way, for all the campuses that have students living off campus, I guarantee the landlords and others aren’t doing rounds.

Paul Brown:
They’re not doing rounds.

Stewart Robinette:
Right. And so we said okay, and we could go further into that, but the other thing we said is like what are we actually catching on rounds and are we accomplishing our mission there? And we looked at our data between when we were doing rounds and when we weren’t doing rounds at GW, and all of the important incidents when you thought about how many students we had on campus and everything like that, we’re pretty much the same. We caught the same number where people were really intoxicated and needed assistance or help. We had created the communication scheme of where students knew they could call in and get help, and there was a Good Samaritan clause there with it. For sexual violence, we had created a culture where students were calling and we’re getting help for that, and we didn’t see numbers really change that with rounds.
What we did see is that the one-off, “Okay, you’re 19 years old and you’ve been caught with a beer can, and we didn’t catch 40 others that were in the hall. But now we’re going to go through the process of where we’re going to schedule this conversation with you where it’s going to go back and forth. You may not show up for the first time, which means we’re going to schedule with you again. The professional staff member is going to spend 30 minutes trying to build rapport with you, but you’ve had this discussion in seventh grade, you were only having a beer. The professional staff member is getting frustrated because you’re not connecting over this conversation that really isn’t the type of conversation we’re going to have the best type of connection.” The inefficiency of that, we’re like, “What if we try not doing that? Is it going to be that detrimental to students?”
Not saying that we can’t still have programs on decision making, how to help students understand how they are mitigating risk if they’re going to make decisions, how to help students understand there are consequences when you violate law, and also making sure they know they can go to their professional staff member to get help rather than get punished or have this type of a conversation if they really need it. We’re like, “Let’s try a different way and see what the numbers,” and the numbers bore out that the important things, the things that we would need to intercede with and students need our help, we’re able to help them. But cutting away all those other conversations that were probably at best just harming the relationship that our professional staff member and the student we’re going to have walking away from that because this didn’t make sense anymore, we found that also, which was good.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. It strikes me that as people start thinking about this, the answer is simple and yet somehow hard to consistently do. And that is that there isn’t just a, “Oh, you tweak this one thing and that solves the whole issue.” It’s really taking a deep look at what are our goals, what are most important to us, what is less important to us? How do we allocate staff time in a way that’s thoughtful to them? And then really rethinking through building up that system to do it. Someone’s not going to watch this podcast and you’re going to say, “And so we didn’t do rounds,” and they’re like, “Great, we’re going to get rid of rounds, and now we’ve solved the problem,” right, that it’s much more comprehensive than that. And it’s really just as simple as taking a step back and thinking through what is most important to us, now let’s reexamine this system and try to build a system that fits to that. Right?

Stewart Robinette:
I agree with you on that because that really is what it is. I think the difficult part though, and this is why I was really scared when we were first even proposing this, and again, I am very thankful we had a very strong Vice President of Student Affairs in Sissy Petty that was leading at the time before she decided to retire, but she really helped us navigate the challenging part of telling the why and having enough champions that are going to let us take this risk.
So quick story related to this, and I think this is what everybody’s always scared about, what if you fail? What’s going to happen? Which again, let’s go back. What do we tell students all the time? Make mistakes, this is time to make mistakes. Yet what are we scared of death of doing? We’re scared to make mistakes because our margins are so razor-thin on revenues and expenditures in universities right now, but that’s another podcast too.
But here’s the point that I want to make though. When we were telling the story to the President and the CFO of GW, the question that we knew we were going to get and that we had to prepare for is, because they’d already asked for it, “Tell us all the other universities that are doing this.” And I was like, “I can go internationally. I can get you some universities internationally, but that’s not going to help. In North America, there’s some Canadian universities, but not many there. There’s a university, one of my friends Frankie Minor worked at where they actually kind of did this back in the ’80s, but that’s kind of dated now. And that’s about it. Vassar had kind of a different mode. There was maybe one or two other, but I don’t have anyone else that’s doing this. So yes, we will be the first. It’ll be a risk. However, rather than saying who’s done it before and what is the outcome, everything like this, wouldn’t it be exciting to say, look what we think the outcomes are going to be and look what the data points to that we can get to the outcomes and be the first to do it? But it was hard. It was really worrisome.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah. As we get towards the end of our time here, one thing I wanted to ask is you got some press when you started doing this. It showed up in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, it showed up in a few different places. And I having worked at American University also in Washington DC also know that when you work in the DC area, you do tend to get picked up by news outlets more frequently because they’re down the street from you. What did they get wrong? What did they gloss over? What did they maybe not give enough value to when they talked about what you were doing in that space?

Stewart Robinette:
Yeah. I’ll never forget when the Chronicle printed the headline and it said, “One university does away with RAs.” No, I forget it. Basically it was like, “University gets rid of RAs,” and I was like, “No, we didn’t do that.”

Paul Brown:
We didn’t really do that.

Stewart Robinette:
We’ve increased the number of student staff that have roles. Everybody that was going to be an RA got hired back and actually they can make as much as they were making as an RA when you really work it all out. Yeah, that was a headline where I was like, “Oh,” and of course our communications person’s like, “Stewart, you got to realize the story gets written and then the editor slaps the headline on.” It’s like, “Okay, okay.”
The bigger thing that was really left out though, and I think this is the place that we are going to be going even more into and I think we as a profession are going more into it now, is what did these concepts mean for your frontline professional staff, your hall directors, your community directors, like you were saying earlier, right? We had already been thinking about some of that and implementing some of it, but there’s still so much more I can do with that, right? Because you’ve got professional staff that have made this decision that this is going to be their career. They do 40 hours a week where it’s not like a part-time employee or a student staff member that’s doing maybe up to 20 hours.
The creativity and the passion, the zeal that they bring to it, we really thought about how to focus their energies too. And I feel like we were scratching the surface on that of what that’s going to look like in the future, and I’m really thankful as I hear other universities of the work they’re doing to really figure that out and think more about it. Because that’s not only going to help us deliver a better service to the students, I think it’s going to make the positions even more fulfilling than what they are right now for our team members out there.

Paul Brown:
That’s the hope, right? Is there any kind of final parting pieces of advice or things that we didn’t talk about that you’re like, “I really want to make sure that we talked about this.”?

Stewart Robinette:
I think one really, really important piece that I would mention is the storytelling about it. And you mentioned DC earlier, we’re always talking about what’s the spin, how are you going to spin it? It’s not about spinning. It’s about realizing that I think we as humans in no matter what we do, we always look back on rose color glasses. I go back to my experiences, whether it was when I was first starting out as professional or other stuff, I loved it. I think about it now in all of the aspects. I truly, truly just have wonderful memories of it. However, if I take just a little bit more of a step back, there are parts of it where I was like, “That part really just stunk like nobody’s business. That was horrible.”
And I bring up this point because the storytelling is key because I think one of the missteps that we made and one of the lessons that we learned is that in doing a major, major change, you have to make sure that you are continuing not only to tell your story to those that are most directly involved in your stakeholders, but also how you’re involving them in that story. And it’s very easy, at least when we were at GW, to get so focused on the mission and so focused on what we were having to do and react to to not involve and not to continue to retell the story about how things have changed in what we were doing and how it’s actually shaping things, rather than people going back to, “Oh, bad thing happen, different model. If we had the old model, this would never happen.”
I’ll give one quick story. One of the greatest things that happened as a professional staff member, especially for my assistant directors and my directors at GW, is our parent questions and complaints and everything went down substantially. And the reason is because, one, we have professional staff members that were directly resolving issues before they got big. It was that whole if you respond to it quickly rather than responding with a perfect answer two days late, it’s going to be a much better outcome.
What was funny is that when we would get that one really bad parent thing that happened, and you’re going to get them no matter what if you’ve got a lot of students, we all know that in the profession, but someone was like, “Oh, if we had RAs, this would never happen,” from somebody outside student affairs. And our entire team would be like, “What are you talking about? We’ve had one of these last year or three years ago when we had RAs, we would’ve had 25 of these by now that had made it up to the President’s Office.” So that was a part where it’s like how do we continue to tell that story and show the great things are happening from this and how it’s actually actualizing the things that we thought rather than being behind the curve where the narrative would be written by somebody else that’s looking back on thinking about, “Oh, when they had this, it was perfect,” when it was like, “No, it was not. It was not perfect.”

Paul Brown:
It’s not.

Stewart Robinette:
Yeah, but that would be one thing that I definitely want to pass on to others. One of our most important partners in doing this was our communications team for the university. They knew this was a big thing, but we also knew that as far as being able to get the information out in a way to where people can understand it, they were going to be one of our key partners, and it was wonderful to be able to work with them.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, that’s amazing. Thanks for sharing your story. I could talk about this endlessly because it hits organizational change, it hits all the things that kind of make my brain sing.

Stewart Robinette:
It’s such a good conversation and there’s so many professionals talking about it, and even some of the podcasts that Roompact has done right now on it, I’ve watched and I sit there nodding in my head being like, “Oh, this is good, and where they’re going, this is a great way to see where that would go for their university.” So I just appreciate you having me on here to be able to talk about it.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, yeah, and we’ll have to have you back because I mean I think in the course of this episode, we already identified at least five others [inaudible 00:37:29], so we’ll definitely have to have you back to go down those rabbit holes as well.

Stewart Robinette:
Wonderful.

Paul Brown:
Well, thank you for joining me, Stewart, and thanks to our listeners today, and we look forward to seeing you on a future episode of Roompact’s Res Ed Chat. Catch you later, everyone.