by Denise Golden and Maggie Guzman
Everyone knows the old parable about the family whose house had a hole in the roof. When the sun was shining, everything was fine and there was no reason to fix it; but when it was raining, it was too late to do anything about it and they were left to suffer the consequences. The story has become cliché, but sometimes those clichés stick around because they are grounded in truth.
For campus housing departments, this sentiment applies particularly to the area of crisis management. Many tend to think of crisis management as it relates to sudden, unexpected situations such as a fire or a student becoming ill or being harmed. But recent years (and, in particular, recent months) have shown that crises with a much broader impact – such as hurricanes, flooding, mechanical failures, and, yes, pandemics – must be considered as well. In these cases there is an immediate response in the hours following an incident. These responses are usually drilled repeatedly and occur almost on instinct. Once the danger has passed, though, the work must begin to resume normal operations, and while the desire is always to achieve that as soon as possible, reality often dictates that it will require a longer, more drawn-out process that requires planning, strategic decision-making, and broad communication.
Understanding the complexity of this undertaking, it is not surprising that crisis management has become an increasingly important part of the senior housing officers’ responsibilities. In 1990, when the Association of College & University Housing Officers-International published its Standards and Ethical Principles document, the top competencies considered necessary for the position included communication, supervision, training, and, listed sixth, crisis management. A second study done 15 years later highlighted the shifts as crisis management moved up the list from sixth to fourth in 2005. One can assume that a survey taken today would rank it even higher.
Several decades of research on crises and how they are handled across many industries have given us a better idea of the common factors in crisis management programs. These best practices are much more than buzz words; they are benchmarks and are evolving as improvements are discovered. There are also no silver bullets, but what is fully agreed upon is that committing time and effort toward even the basics is better than doing nothing and hoping for the best. Planning and practice are key to an organization’s health.
Pre-event planning is the process through which resources are identified, relationships that are needed during events are built and maintained, and competencies are polished. This entire process is, of course, easier to address during crisis-free times. Herein lies the problem: During calm times, college and university administrators, who are already doing more with less these days, may not devote the time to pre-event planning and practice. Part of this planning should include breaking down silos and communicating with student affairs and other campus partners. If partnerships help administrators serve their students during calm times, it follows that the communication flow is even more important during times of crisis.
It is also highly recommended that organizations take time to review plans regularly, and one good time to do that is when another organization has recently experienced a critical event. These times, in observation mode, can prove to be beneficial if used appropriately to take plans off the shelf and review them through discussions and tabletop exercises. Planning, training, and reviewing not only prepare the organization for crisis management, but also polish skillsets and competencies.
A review of crisis management literature illuminates the ever-increasing strain that is placed on college personnel and the potential impact of crises. These sources acknowledge that crises are mostly unavoidable, but the duration of the crisis events and their related recovery phases can be greatly minimized when crisis management best practices are employed. Unfortunately, many of these sources also acknowledge that some schools are not prepared with crisis mitigation plans, and those schools that have plans are not reviewing and practicing them on a regular basis, despite that being an important best practice. While practicing plans, it is also highly recommended that administrators spend time building relationships and lines of communication as a way of being resilient to disaster.
While preparing my dissertation, I (Denise Golden) found a number of sources that led me in the direction of studying a direct correlation between experience, relationships, and university leadership as influential factors in the adoption of best practices and crisis preparation. To investigate it further, I employed a survey that explored contributing factors in the adoption of crisis management best practices by housing personnel. I felt it was important to shed light on the ever-increasing need to be prepared to manage crises while also identifying experiences and resources that might be correlated with the level of preparation, with particular attention on senior housing officers. Analysis of the data revealed three significantly influential factors in the adoption of crisis management best practices: having time and resources to work on crisis management plans, having the support of campus leadership to work on plans, and having relationships with campus and local police.
Whether an organization experiences crises through a tabletop exercise or an actual event, an organization can learn valuable lessons from debriefing and analyzing events and responses once all phases of the crisis are over. This approach requires confidence and honesty. Training and reviewing procedures, like what is done through tabletop exercises, reveals weaknesses. Being supported in identifying and eliminating weaknesses in crisis management plans is important, and leaders who can reveal and eliminate weaknesses are needed so that campus administrators at all levels can embrace best practices, especially those that reveal areas for improvement. Using tabletop exercises as practice for evaluating resources, relationships, response, and recovery not only gets people around the table to massage those relationships, but also provides a time to update written plans and confirm that resources are still in place or need to be updated.
The importance of planning and training for better mitigation of crises is well established. Equally important to add to one's skillset is the altogether different but complementary practice of continuity planning.
When exploring crisis management, it is important to understand the difference between an emergency response plan and a continuity plan, as they each serve a different purpose for the organization. An emergency response plan should guide the department through the first hours of an emergency or crisis and should establish what the command and communication protocols are during the emergency. It should also include some basic procedures for a variety of emergency or crisis situations that may occur on a specific campus. For example, all campuses should have a plan to respond to fire in a residence hall. The related plan would dictate who should be called to immediately respond and what staff should immediately do to protect life and property. Other campuses may require additional plans in case of an earthquake, tropical storm, or other emergencies that are more reliant on location. A continuity plan, on the other hand, is intended to bridge the gap between the end of the emergency or crisis and the resumption of normal operations. Using the fire as an example, a campus would implement the continuity plan after the fire is extinguished and the damage is assessed. Then the plan would determine such things as where to relocate students and staff. In short, the continuity plan should establish how a campus would continue providing essential services until it is able to operate completely normally again.
The first step to creating a continuity plan is to determine what would trigger the plan. Not all crisis situations require a continuity plan; sometimes a campus can return to normal operations as soon as the crisis situation is over, particularly when there are no lasting or prolonged issues caused by the crisis. However, situations like the long-term closure of one or more facilities, long-term or unexpected absenteeism of a significant portion of personnel (such as in a pandemic), or the loss of information technology or data that impacts the department’s ability to perform certain services would all likely lead to the need for a continuity plan.
Some assumptions of a minimal standard of operations are required for a continuity plan, as is a common understanding of at what point the crisis is considered over and the need for continuity kicks in. For example, a situation resulting in the outage of utilities or a building’s heating and air conditioning would likely continue to be a crisis until utilities and HVAC are restored. Some examples of minimal services that would need to be restored before shifting into continuity mode include the operation and availability of emergency response services; functioning utilities, including water, electricity, and reasonable climate control; the ability to communicate with stakeholders; the control of hazardous materials including safe handling and proper disposal of toxic substances, biologically hazardous materials, and radioactive materials; and securing sufficient administrators and supporting personnel to continue the essential functions of the department.
It is also critical to consider how the loss of operations such as these will affect the campus’s ability to provide services to stakeholders. Consider, for example, if or how a campus could continue to operate if half of the housing or facilities management staff were unavailable. How would a campus continue operations following that type of disruption? What services would be most affected? These questions become critical as one defines essential functions and builds a continuity plan.
Determining a list of essential functions – what is absolutely necessary to remain in business – is the first step of creating a continuity plan. Other parts of the plan include establishing continuity teams (who, by title, is responsible for what); leadership succession (who steps in for whom, by name and title, for general responsibilities); dependencies (who the department depends on and who depends on the department); physical space needs (what amount of space and number of features are needed if the current space is rendered uninhabitable); and additional resources (such as information technology, data, or other elements).
There are several ways to create this plan, and, like any other large task, it can’t fall to just one person. The number of people needed to create a comprehensive plan depends on the size and complexity of the housing department. Regardless of how large or small the department is, it’s critical to make sure that each unit or area of the department is represented during the creation of the plan. Larger, more complex departments may consider a series of workshops to determine all of the plan’s elements. Smaller departments may be able to rely on a director and associate or assistant director to know all of the department’s needs.
After determining the plan’s triggers and assumptions, the next step is to determine the department’s essential functions. This list is generally restricted to five to eight items. One suggested method for doing this is to brainstorm everything a department does, from the housing application process to the end-of-semester closing procedures and everything in between, and then group them by themes such as housing operations, programming, safety and security, facilities and operations, dining, human resources, accounting and payroll, and others as needed. From there, organizers will need to prioritize these things according to how critical it is that they be restored within a certain timeframe. For example, it may be determined that safety and security (having functioning fire alarms, the ability to secure buildings, and staff on duty) are critical and have to be restored within 12 hours, while programming may be less critical and thus can be suspended for several weeks. The thing to keep in mind here is to focus on essential functions. As basic as it may sound, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs may be able to serve as a successful model for making these decisions.
What also may sound basic, but is invaluable, is to use this time to reassure other staff of their role in this process. It is important to remind them that just because their particular function may not be identified as critical at this juncture, it doesn’t mean that they, as professionals, are not critical to the overall success of the plan or the department. Throughout a crisis management and continuity plan, it is important that all staff understand their roles and responsibilities. When determining essential functions by theme, some are likely to lend themselves naturally to particular positions in the department. If one of the essential functions is facilities management, for example, then the facilities staff are likely going to be on that continuity team. Others in the department may not have a position that directly connects to one of the essential functions. That’s completely okay, because those people can and should be assigned to a different team. For example, if there is a staff person who normally oversees research and assessment for the department, their usual job responsibilities are not likely to be considered critical in the wake of a crisis. However, they can still be assigned to a continuity team that is related to safety and security because they could be trained to do rounds or other tasks as needed. The continuity teams do not have to directly correlate to the essential functions, but each essential function should be addressed by at least one team.
The succession of the department’s leadership should also be addressed in the continuity plan. While succession and continuity of duties is often considered through the lens of “if so-and-so wins the lottery and leaves tomorrow, who will cover their responsibilities?” it also needs to be considered as part of continuity planning. In these cases, most of the focus is on the high-level functions of key positions. For example, whoever succeeds the executive director will be responsible for oversight of the department. It can be easy to get lost in the many details of breaking down an individual’s job duties, particularly for positions that have multiple responsibilities or supervise multiple areas. Instead, the plan should consider, at a general level, who can succeed whom, a determination that requires consideration of an individual staff member’s experiences and knowledge. It will also require some systems to be in place that allow for the delegation of responsibility. For example, whoever succeeds the department head should have signatory authority for anything the department head does. Whoever succeeds the lead facilities staff member should have the same contacts as the primary facilities person. Essentially, this part of the plan tells the division or university leadership who is responsible for what if key department leadership is not able to function.
Whether an organization experiences crises through a tabletop exercise or an actual event, an organization can learn valuable lessons from debriefing and analyzing events and responses once all phases of the crisis are over.
As the plan continues to form, it will begin to encompass the dependencies that are both upstream and downstream from the housing department. Upstream dependencies are entities that the department relies on for services or to accomplish its essential functions. Whoever provides the department’s utilities, information technology services, maintenance and custodial services, campus security, or other tasks would be considered upstream dependencies. Downstream dependencies are those entities that depend on the services provided by a particular essential function. Human resources functions such as staffing and payroll constitute a dependency that is upstream from housing. However, a conference services department that utilizes residence halls to house guests would be downstream.
Next, it is critical to document any supplies or information technology resources that are needed to perform each essential function. It may not be possible to access specific software, enterprise systems or databases, and electronic records during the continuity phase, and it is critical to document how these operations will continue without these resources. There may also be specific supplies that are needed to perform each essential function. All of these things, including individuals with specific knowledge of how to use these resources, should be documented in the continuity plan. Also included in the plan should be who, specifically, is responsible for each essential function, as well as the recovery time objective for each function. The recovery time objective is the timeframe by which that function must be returned to service in order for the operation to continue. In addition, if there is a peak period for the essential function, that should be documented as well, so that stakeholders know whether or not it’s a priority at that time. A summer conference program, for example, may be an essential function that is critical in June, but less so in October.
Finally, the continuity plan should list alternative work sites. If there are spaces that can be repurposed within the facilities (turning a large meeting room into office space, for example), they should be noted. If alternative space does not exist within the existing inventory, the plan should document what the space needs are, since it is likely that information will need to be provided to campus leadership so they can help procure space.
Much like the family with the hole in the roof, campus operations are able to function normally most of the time, and it’s relatively easy to bounce back from a crisis. And while it’s not possible to fix the roof during the rainstorm, the period right after the storm, when the memory of the rain coming in is still fresh, is an ideal time to fix it. Crisis and continuity planning are similar: After a crisis is an ideal time to document how things were handled as well as how the department coped with limited operations until things were normal again. So, as campus operations continue to resume normalcy as the pandemic ebbs, take advantage of the good work done since March of 2020 and use that experience to create or refresh a continuity plan. The next time it is needed it, you’ll be glad you did.
Maggie Guzman is the assistant director of risk management in residence life at Texas A&M University in College Station. Denise Golden is the director of residence life at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania, and focused her doctoral study on best practices in crisis management amongst college residence life officials. Both have presented on this subject at conferences.