ResEdChat Ep 99: Care & Connection: Enhancing Your Resident Support with Roompact with John Hughey

Paul Brown:
All right. Welcome back to Roompact’s ResEdChat. I am Paul Brown. I use he/him/his pronouns, and we have a podcast episode today that’s going to focus in on a use case of Roompact software that I think is pretty useful to everyone. And even if you don’t currently use our software, I think there’s also some takeaways you might be able to get from it as well. So I’m super excited and happy to have as my guest John from University of Mary Washington. John, do you just want to introduce yourself? Give us a little bit of your background?

John Hughey:
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here this morning. I’m John Hughey. I’m the Assistant Director for Residence Life and Housing at UMW, at the University of Mary Washington. I oversee our residential education initiatives and have been now that we’re in our second year of Roompact, part of the leadership team trying to implement all those features.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, awesome. And also, John and I had the pleasure of presenting at the Virginia Student Services Conference, actually, what are you at, two weeks ago? I don’t know.

John Hughey:
Couple of weeks ago now. Yeah.

Paul Brown:
I’ve already been through multiple cities at this point. I have no idea where am I even right now. But John, you’ve been involved with that conference for quite a while, is that right?

John Hughey:
Yeah, I was actually lucky enough to be part of the planning team for it the past couple of years and have been an attendee, oh shoot, since about 2015 now. It’s one of Virginia’s longest running conferences, it’s for all student service professionals in the state or the commonwealth. And we also this year had some folks from up in DC come and join us as well. So we’re always happy to expand our reach and help grow some professionals within the whole DMV area.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, that’s great. Yeah, we’ll include a link to the site in our show notes, so if folks want to check it out, they absolutely can. I appreciate that you corrected yourself and said commonwealth, because I’m also currently in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not a state, right?

John Hughey:
Exactly. As a Midwest transplant, I still get that confused sometimes.

Paul Brown:
I love that. I love that. Well, so let’s talk a little bit about what we presented on together because I think that’s what I wanted to highlight for folks today. And maybe we should backtrack a little bit. So one of the things that we talked about was using it for case management related type functions. Can you give us maybe a little bit of an overview of how that process works, what teams you have there at UMW?

John Hughey:
Yeah, absolutely. This is a light bulb moment for us because we realized the software is not only useful for the Res Life side of things, but our Dean of Students Office houses our two care teams, and it’s really proven invaluable working with our residential student caseload there. So we have what we call our Coordinated Care team, which focuses on our first year students and really helps keep track of their progress through their first year seminar class and those first grade reports that come in, so we can provide support at that angle. And then we have our Behavioral Intervention team, which focuses on the more escalated cases to where it could be a first year through graduate students who may be suffering some struggles and need some resources and support that way.

Paul Brown:
That’s great. That’s great. There’s another school that I work with, University of Texas at Dallas that has a very similar setup and they actually use it in a very similar way to you. And I think really when I think of Res Ed, I feel like that case management piece is something that we don’t talk about enough. I see Res Ed as having three pillars. You got your community, which is the basis of everything, fun stuff, get to know each other. You’ve got your educational function often designed like a curriculum of what are we hoping them to take away, but then also the individual care and support and how do we organize around that.

John Hughey:
For sure.

Paul Brown:
So after you got a Roompact software, how did that integrate into those processes for those teams? Those teams also exist outside of Residence Life, right? But include Residence Life, is that correct?

John Hughey:
Yeah, for sure. It includes pretty much every aspect of student support on our campus from academic services to disability resources. Our registrar has a representative there for folks who may be thinking about withdrawing or needs some support with those sort of things. We also have student activities present and new student programs, especially for the first year of student team there, since they help a lot with that first year experience.
And one thing we’ve noticed is that before we had Roompact, especially for our residential students, things lived on multiple Excel spreadsheets and you’d maybe send an email to somebody to follow up on something, it would go into an Excel spreadsheet, and then it was incumbent on that person then to go in and update the Excel spreadsheet later on maybe after they’d had that intervention interaction with the students. What we found with Roompact is it really with the staff alert function, with the notes function, it streamlines a lot of that because it all goes into one place. So while our case manager who’s at the Dean of Students Office still manages one overall spreadsheet that also includes off-campus students, we’ve been able to use Roompact to consolidate everything else for our on-campus students and make it one place to find everything that she needs for that overall spreadsheet.

Paul Brown:
Got it. And does she have access to Roompact? Do you give her staff-

John Hughey:
She does. We loaded her in as an admin so she can do everything herself, but she can also then use the staff alert functionality if she needs to follow up with a concern that maybe somebody didn’t see right away, but she just happens to be looking at that page and see something too.

Paul Brown:
And staff alert for people who may not be familiar is the ability to send quick messages to staff. And I think the nice thing about it in terms of the way that it was designed is it’s not just type the staff member’s name into this box and send them a message. You can actually type the resident’s name and then click some boxes and it will send it to the staff members that oversee the floor or the building that the staff member lives on. And then that way you don’t have to go through the whole where does this resident live, who’s their staff member? What’s that staff member’s message, email address or what have you. You can just type in the resident’s name and it will send it in there, which is a unique little feature, sometimes not really used that much actually. I don’t actually pull statistics on that, but I do know that there are some schools that use the heck out of it, but quite a few that don’t see how it works into their flow a little bit.
One thing that a lot of schools that do use our software run into with either staff alert or even just notes, leaving notes on residents is what goes in Roompact versus what goes in something else. Like let’s say the care team uses Maxient or something like that for students of concern. Where does Roompact begin and end for you? How does it fit in with all those other systems that may be doing some similar case management?

John Hughey:
Certainly, and we actually do use Maxient as well, so that’s a great example. So where we draw the line is if there is a concern that could be a student conduct issue or anything that could involve Title IX, we always have them put that into Maxient. Anything else really can go into Roompact and we’ve created categories for the notes so they can categorize what sort of interaction this is. And then what we’re able to do is if somebody does receive a Maxient report, maybe from a professor or somebody else at the university with a concern about that student, they can then just go into Roompact, copy and paste the note from Roompact, put it as a note in Maxient saying RA note from this date, pull from Roompact. And it all integrates seamlessly that way.
I think one thing that we have seen this year is the ability to tag supervisors in a room conflict form has really been nice because if an RA is dealing with an escalated situation where maybe they don’t need immediate support but want their supervisor to know the next day, they can then tag that supervisor in their roommate conflict form. So we’re aware that there’s this higher level conflict that doesn’t then need to go into Maxient, it can stay in Roompact, but we have all those other notes.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of schools will use that. It’s called the sharing enabled function in a tag question on forms if folks aren’t familiar, and it just sends that in media email to the person that says, hey, here’s what it is. So if it’s standard routine that a staff member’s filling out, it should be in there, but no one really needs to take any action. You don’t need to tag someone, it won’t notify them, but you can basically select to notify them. How do you train your staff on that? So I know one thing that schools struggle with is getting staff members to leave notes, one. Two, getting staff members to leave notes well, good, useful, written well. How did you get particularly your student staff, because they’re really the front line that are interacting with that, how did you go about building that culture or training them into a way that gave you the useful information that you would actually be able to use and need?

John Hughey:
Yeah, absolutely. I think there’s still some progress being made on that. I won’t say we’re the experts just yet, but we’ve taken a multi-pronged approach where to start off, we just wanted to get them familiar with the system, using it, leaving notes, whatever they could. So we were more focused on the quantity of notes at that point, just to get them in there and just see what it looks like to make sure you’re leaving a note on the resident and not the room or the suite, if you’re trying to leave a note for that resident. And then once we got that baseline standard established, what we did is we looked at our training. So not only just our fall training, but also our ongoing training that happens throughout the semester. So we’ll do two to three what we call in-service trainings where all the staff comes together during staff meeting time, and we’ll sometimes do refreshers during that.
And really the two most effective things that we’ve seen are like a behind closed doors type scenario where we will have some of our senior RAs or more experienced RAs actually act out a scene, and then we’ll work in small groups with the RAs to talk about what are your next steps, what should you be logging right here? And have them do almost a case study type thing also to where they’re maybe reading some scenarios and saying, here’s what you’ve been told, what are your next steps? How do you notify your supervisor? How do you log that in Roompact? And then we also, using the inside features in Roompact, we pull stats on the number of notes left, these categories that are being used for those at our staff meetings. So we can say, hey, y’all as a staff left 300 notes in the past week.
Maybe a hundred of those were un-categorized. Let’s talk about that. What categories are we missing? What are you seeing there? Is it maybe you’re just forgetting to tag them? So then we do those refreshers of [inaudible 00:11:39] throughout the semester, and based on the RA feedback, we’ve been able to add two to three more categories of notes that they found useful and that made more sense to them that were pretty similar in verbiage to what was already there, but it wasn’t quite clicking. So one thing I really found is the customizability of Roompact to the institution is really great.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, and you also hit on, I think, one thing that schools could do better at, and our schools that do really well with this, they always do this one thing that you actually just mentioned, which is they close the loop on the assessment data, meaning staff members are putting in all this information, but if it just goes into the ether, they don’t know how it’s being used, they can’t see any results of that, they’re just less likely to invest in it and that, hey, we can just pull a report, click, click very easily, bring this information back to you, show where you’re doing well, where we’re not doing well, how we’re using it. It just increases that buy-in from the staff, right?

John Hughey:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Paul Brown:
Northern Illinois University actually does this extremely, extremely well. They share that data back out. So it’s actually one of those numbers. So those insight reports which are we’re looking at your data in different ways, that’s actually when I work with a school, the most important number to me that I look at, because if that number is low, that means you’re just collecting data and not doing anything with it. If that number is high, presumably, I mean, you still might not be doing anything with it, but at least you’re looking at it, right? And I feel like that to me is probably the biggest indicator of the quote, unquote, “health” of how you’re using the software. That’s cool. I love that you do that.
How do you balance staff time versus the information that you need? In other words, it takes time to leave notes and student staff could rightfully sometimes complain, this is taking too much and it’s such a burden. How do you balance the, okay, here’s what we need and we want to get what we need, but we also don’t want to overburden our staff with having to do too much?

John Hughey:
Yeah, that was actually a great question we had, or a great discussion we had with the whole RA staff was that when we first started, we were asking them to leave between four to eight notes on a resident over the course of a semester. So we do half semester check-ins, so each check-in, we’d expect them to have between two to four notes per each residence. And what we found is they were really struggling to make that time investment. They would take notes in their head or on their phone, but they wouldn’t always leave themselves enough time to put everything into Roompact, and they felt like they were just struggling to manage that.
So then we moved our discussion to what is a quality note more than quantity then. So we have now backed that down to one note per resident per check-in, but we’re asking them to see, I don’t want to just say their favorite color is blue. Tell me more about that conversation. What led you to talk about your favorite color is blue? Give me what interaction you’re having with these students. And we’ve seen a lot of folks who are able to buy into that idea and really understand where we’re coming from there. It’s still a work in progress, but we’re seeing a lot more consistency with having more than just the half sentence or even just a single sentence note to where we’re seeing that quality feedback now.

Paul Brown:
Well, I’m also wondering too, because I know you do a form of intentional conversations, right? I think they’re called Eagle Chats.

John Hughey:
Yeah, those are our Eagle Chats.

Paul Brown:
How does that fit into this mix as well?

John Hughey:
The delineation we draw is whereas a note can be any casual conversation or just maybe a chat you have at a program you’re having. An Eagle Chat is more intentional in nature to where it has an educational or developmental component with it. And we were actually pretty excited to see that the template that Roompact provides is basically 90% of what we were doing anyway. So we were able to take it, make some changes to it to fit our specific institution and just directly use that to where an RA can go in and see some of the suggested topics to maybe talk about during a time of the semester, really get those reminders about keeping it a casual conversation. This does not need to be you sit down and say, hello, it is my job to now grill you for five minutes about these things. So for some of the RAs that are very procedurally-minded, it’s a great way for them to remind themselves to just be natural in the moment.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Funny thing about those templates. So yeah, so I create some templates that are like, here’s an example. If you’re going to do this kind of thing, here’s how I might design it. Not knowing a specific campus context, thinking that folks are going to modify it to fit their needs, but at least gets the majority thing together. Earlier on when I started at Roompact, because I haven’t worked at a software company before, I’ve never done this kind of thing before, I would design those templates where I would include some questions where it’s like, insert your own questions here, or you might want to do these things.
And what I discovered is because Residence Life people are busy people, I meet with them annually to go over, hey, how are things going? And I take a look at their templates. They would leave that in the form that their staff were filling out, and I’m like, no, no, no. Also take that part out. So now I don’t include any, I put it in a blog post because I’ve had too many times that I’ve gone into a school’s form and it says, add other questions here such as blah, blah, blah. And it’s like-

John Hughey:
That’s so funny. I can imagine RA reading that and being like, oh, I can just add whatever questions I want. Let’s go for it.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. So now I don’t include that kind of stuff. People are busy. Sometimes you’re like, click, click, and I’m like [inaudible 00:17:37], but I also think that’s a great distinction though you made in terms of there’s a reason why they’re called intentional conversations and not just conversations. There’s a purpose behind them. And that’s a great delineation between what’s a note, what’s a form, how specific do we have to be on the type of information? How much time does that take staff to fill out as opposed to something that’s just making an informal observation or a random check-in or things like that. That’s really useful. Is there anything else that we didn’t highlight related to this that you think would be useful either for people that do use our software or people that don’t in case they’re curious about how you use it and how it’s changed things for you?

John Hughey:
Yeah, I realized I didn’t talk about the hub and how you’re able to respond to notes. So that has been pretty key too. So if I send a staff alert for someone to do a wellness check with the residents, they leave a note on their profile saying we chatted and everything was good, I can then reply to that and say, hey, when you say everything was good, did you happen to touch on these things? And then it sends them an alert that I replied, and then they can then go back and reply again or leave a separate note. So having that interactive feature within Roompact where everything again is in one place where I can see it and remember, oh, we have asked them to recheck with the student, is so great.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. You’re in the top-ten percent of people that utilize the hub notes.

John Hughey:
That’s awesome.

Paul Brown:
By far. It’s one of those things that I’d see a vast majority of our schools don’t touch the hub at all, like 90% and then the 10% that do use the heck out of it. And so I’m always trying to figure out ways to share here’s how it could be useful. Because there is a group that is like, “No, why aren’t you doing this? This is super useful.” And it’s a good chunk of our schools that haven’t figured out how does this fit into our flow? Why does it matter? How could it help us? So they don’t often don’t see what that would be. So I’m always trying to think of new ways to explain that.

John Hughey:
Yeah, I can see that. I think for Mary Washington specifically, we made the intentional choice once we brought Roompact on board that, aside from StarRez and Maxient and where we keep our housing inventory and then our conduct, we had probably four or five different services that we used to achieve our goals for our RAs and to let them track things. And we really decided to just really go all in on Roompact being the one solution. And so I think we’ve been very willing to try different things, and we’ve had a lot of great times figuring things out.

Paul Brown:
Great. Great. Well, thanks so much, John, for sharing your knowledge and experience. I’ll include also some links out to folks who want to dig into some stuff in the show notes if you’re curious of how does this work and things like that. For those of you who use our software, the support portal is going to have a good chunk of that, but I’ll also try to include some other cases as well. Well, thank you, John. I appreciate your time. You’re coming in. I usually don’t mention episode numbers in the episode in case we move them around, but I know for sure this is episode 99, so..

John Hughey:
I’m excited for such a great number.

Paul Brown:
You’re on the cusp.

John Hughey:
Right on the cusp there.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, that’s great.

John Hughey:
I’ll have to check out episode 100, see how we all stack up together.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Episode 100, we’re going to do a little reflection one, so that’s actually-

John Hughey:
That’ll be great.

Paul Brown:
Yeah, we’re going to hire some new hosts for the podcast and things like that, so we’ll do a reflection one.

John Hughey:
Cool.

Paul Brown:
Thanks for being our penultimate episode here.

John Hughey:
Happy to be here and share my experience. Looking forward to seeing Roompact at our VSSC conference again next year.

Paul Brown:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks John. And for all of our listeners, hope you have a great day.