It’s November, and as I’m leaving for work, my phone vibrates with a voice memo from my friend, Kevin*. Kevin and I have been friends for almost two decades, as he was my resident in undergrad and then we ended up working in Housing and Residence Life together in the two years that followed. We regularly trade voice memos, as he works as a licensed counselor at our undergraduate institution, and I now work in Housing and Residence Life at a sister school. His voice memo opens with, “Girl, I need to pick your brain because why do we make our jobs harder for ourselves?”
This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “What is one practice ResLife departments need to let go of?”
Turns out, Kevin was experiencing a challenge at work because in his partnership with Housing, he was questioned as to why he hadn’t completed his semester requirement to host at least three all-staff in-services with Resident Assistants that semester.
Once I got context on the situation, I realized that Kevin and I share frustration around the same fundamental issue. Often, within Housing and Residence Life departments, we do things a certain way because “it’s the way things have always been done.” And, in my experience, it makes our already stressful jobs much harder. Kevin shared that he didn’t hold in-services because he and the in-hall staff he was working with hadn’t found a true need for them; they had found that RAs needed individual follow-up instead of large-scale training – and that the one-on-one supplemental training they offered was effective.
Similarly, at previous institutions of mine, we’ve typically held all-staff meetings and in-services once a month, equating to 3-4 gatherings a semester. To me, it was always stressful to generate meaningful content for a group of 115-130 staff members, especially when at a certain point in the semester, each staff team’s needs were different. Student staff formation committees that I led were often stressed trying to plan a 2–3-hour training meeting for all-staff that didn’t land well, or didn’t have as big of an impact on student staff development as we had hoped. And, in all cases, it was live-in professional and graduate staff that would put in an immense amount of work to coordinate the evening. Ultimately, maintaining this antiquated in-service requirement of Housing and Residence Life departments made an already demanding job more stressful.
The idea of HRL departments hosting required monthly all-staff trainings has often haunted me. I’ve thought, “Is this really what our student staff leaders need, and is this actually serving them?” and “What might happen if we move to assessing what our student staff leaders are struggling with, and designing trainings that are more individualized and data-driven?”
“What might happen if we let go of arbitrary requirements we’ve made up within the field, labeled them as “a best practice,” and moved to creating a structure that actually formed our student staff?” That’s a novel idea. Every department is different, but in advising my current student staff formation committee, when planning for the year, I encouraged them to move away from holding a required number of in-services, and to be creative with the format of all-staff meetings. We do in-services once a quarter (if needed), and content is cultivated based on data and trends that our student leaders share and show us they need – not what we believe is helpful. We have found that what staff really need are opportunities for connection. The data shows us that staff need to unpack their own experiences as RAs– not be “talked at” about something that may not apply to them. Our last in-service was a reflection night, and they loved it. We had student leaders share that it was one of the first in-services they felt they benefited from; other student leaders expressed appreciation that we are doing more impactful content with less time. Which makes me wonder, “As a field, what else are we doing that makes our jobs harder than they need to be?”
*Name changed
