by Michelle L. Boettcher, Bailey Bush, Eric Cottrell, Wen Xi, Marie Silver, and Sydney Wein
Emily's experience is not unique. Campus housing professionals around the world have experienced the traumatic effects of the pandemic. Along with the frightening statistics and health risks, having to work within that atmosphere pulls energy from everyone as they must learn new skills, broaden their knowledge, do old things in new ways, and constantly adapt. One of the groups most affected by these unpredictable times has been hall directors and other live-in staff. The truth for these staff members has always been that they often don’t know what their job will entail each day until they find out what happened the night before. This is true now more than ever.
As the number of cases decrease and campuses begin returning to full occupancy, there will be much exploration and review of the steps taken throughout 2020 to help prepare for future crises. But along with the typical crisis response issues, it will also be important to review how staff interacted and how they were managed and supervised throughout the pandemic. While almost all classrooms became virtual and campuses were largely emptied, housing staff in general – and live-in staff in particular – remained on the proverbial front lines. And while residence life professionals are often categorized as givers and creative problem solvers who are highly adaptable and innovative, they are also merely human, with limited capacity just like all other people in and beyond higher education. Add into the equation the fact that they sleep, eat, and socialize at work, because that is where they live. So when everyone is being tapped to do more and dedicate longer hours to the job, how can administrative leaders provide more compassionate supervision and still attend to the crisis at hand?
Odds are that more than once since the beginning of the pandemic you have heard – or maybe expressed yourself – the need to “show grace” or to be more forgiving, whether that is to a colleague, a student, a parent, or anyone else. But what does this compassionate approach really look like in a world where there are still responsibilities, deadlines, and important work that needs to be done?
Student affairs supervision is a topic that has been examined by a number of researchers. Roger Winston and Don Creamer, who have written extensively about student affairs staffing, identified synergistic supervision – a partnership between supervisor and supervisee in pursuit of individual and organizational goals – as the most effective approach. And both the supervisor and the supervisee have agency in these kinds of working relationships. Other researchers have built upon that work by further acknowledging the role of the identities of supervisors and supervisees as an important consideration. Jessica Bennett and her colleagues wrote about this in an article in Debunking the Myth of Job Fit in Higher Education and Student Affairs, making the point that despite student affairs having a specific culture, “Supervisors can create strong local subcultures that can build upon the best of what a university has to offer, counteract the worst of those cultures, or promulgate those structures and practices.” Similarly, in the book Identity Conscious Supervision in Student Affairs, Robert Brown, Shruti Desai, and Craig Elliott talk about the value of co-created supervisory relationships built on respect and care. Given that both supervisors and supervisees have a role to play, it is important to share information as challenges emerge with supervisors having access to resources and supervisees being experts in their own first-hand experiences.
While there may be relatively little scholarship on supervising student affairs professionals in a crisis, there is literature related to counselors and other occupations where staff play sometimes similar roles. For example, scholars have found that working in crisis situations can make individuals vulnerable to compassion fatigue and secondary or vicarious trauma. This can result in burnout, less empathy, and difficulty managing negative emotions.
Because there have been so many additional demands on live-in residence hall staff, finding ways to give them some control over their time when they can control so little else can be especially helpful.
Such scholarly literature about supervision and the effects of adverse conditions is helpful, but it doesn’t provide specifics about compassion. To better understand that topic means exploring the psychology of the subject, and mainstream resources are more timely in the current context of the pandemic. Madhuleena Roy Chowdhury, a certified psychiatric counselor who specializes in optimizing mental health, identifies three components of compassion: “understanding or empathizing with others and their problems, loving and caring for others, [and] selflessly helping others in need.” Compassion can be put into action in the workplace by noticing, listening, and accepting criticisms, and the benefits – beyond personal connections and employee retention – include the reduction of stress and care for one’s physical well-being. In addition, compassion “has an added component of altruism in it as the person showing compassion rarely expects to receive the same or does so to get something in return. In all its essence, compassion is ‘empathy in action.’” In the current context of the pandemic, these qualities – empathy, caring, and helping – are essential for colleagues and teams. As Kim Cameron notes in his book Positive Leadership, positive leaders cultivate a positive environment by “modeling and encouraging acts of compassion,” which helps employees to flourish and to perform to the best of their abilities.
One of the most important pieces of compassionately helping live-in staff navigate the pandemic is that there is a space to talk about what they are experiencing. As Nikalette Zina, a residence life coordinator at the University of South Carolina (U of SC) in Columbia, explains, “For me, it has been very helpful to have space in meetings, both smaller area meetings as well as larger all-staff meetings, to process what is going on. As well as working at a university in a pandemic, I am also a brand new student affairs professional, so having the space to process both learning a new culture as well as adapting to COVID regulations has been helpful.” Hannah Aksamit, coordinator of student development at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) in San Luis Obispo, says that their housing leadership team, based on concerns heard from student staff, implemented weekly meetings where professional staff could hear the remarks of resident assistants and consider changes.
Because there have been so many additional demands on live-in residence hall staff, finding ways to give them some control over their time when they can control so little else can be especially helpful. Mikey Miller, a hall director at The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, notes how his department showed support to live-in staff by reducing the number of days they are required to be in the office, virtually or otherwise. Sara Bartles, a community director at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing, says that leadership in her department allowed staff to have flex time and made academic year vacation time more available. Wen Xi, a residence director at Pace University Pleasantville, New York, says that the availability of flex days has been a huge asset to staff on her campus. “The idea behind this came from the fact that, as live-in professionals, there will be times at night or outside of work hours that we will be working, [there will be] things we can’t control [e.g., spontaneous conversations with residents] and things we can control [e.g., RA staff meetings]. Every week, RDs get five flex hours to use as they see fit.” Some staff use the hours at a regular time each week, and others use them for a longer lunch or to leave early some days depending on what the week entails. Eric Cottrell, a resident director at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, agrees with the value of having flex time. “I’m so fortunate to be able to [have flex time] often without needing to approve it with my supervisor . . . Just having the ability to leave early on Friday when the work is done increases motivation and morale among hall staff.”
For live-in student staff RAs, support has also been essential for managing work time. Miller says that at OSU, the housing department has “been clear with our communication that now more than ever, [RAs] using their allowed nights away is essentially a ‘no-questions-asked’ scenario and to please use them. If a staff member needs a mental health day or just wants a day to not be contacted about anything job related, we encourage them to request the time. The purpose for taking time away can be, ‘I’m just exhausted,’ and that is a perfectly justifiable reason for taking time off.” In other cases, added work responsibility can be balanced by flex time. At U of SC, for example, flex time was adjusted to accommodate the fact that staff had to work extended hours around a modified move-in process.
Schools across the country have experienced altered academic calendars, particularly in the form of broken up spring breaks to discourage traveling and large gatherings. Stacey Renker, the director of risk and emergency management at OSU, explains that directors in her division were encouraged to utilize these shorter but more frequent breaks to recharge themselves. Melissa Shivers, senior vice president for student life at OSU, says that they recognized the importance of being able to support self-care for their individual staffs and asked all directors to utilize these no-class days for only mission-essential meetings, and she encouraged her team to consider rescheduling other meetings to allow more time for this process.
For campus housing professionals, the pandemic has greatly expanded the already nebulous “other duties as assigned.” Not only were new tasks added to staff to-do lists, but pre-existing assignments and expectations were adjusted to make the work related to the pandemic more manageable. As professionals who are often called upon to manage complex situations on campus, many housing professionals anticipated additional or different types of work responsibilities as the pandemic spread. For example, Miller explains that RA staff could choose between conducting what the department called RA Chats with their residents and completing sociogram activities, depending on which best fit their needs for personal safety. Bartles says that MSU live-in staff were relieved from committee assignments and given lightened workloads when the department adapted its programming model. Even small changes can make a difference: At MSU, the staff evaluation process was adjusted from a five-page document to a single page, which made completing evaluations much less intense than in the past.
Compassion can be put into action in the workplace by noticing, listening, and accepting criticisms, and the benefits – beyond personal connections and employee retention – include the reduction of stress and care for one’s physical well-being.
Pitching in to help others is another way that compassion can be expressed. Lexie Johnson, an area coordinator at the University of Richmond in Virginia, noted that when her community was given a particularly challenging set of tasks to complete on a tight timeline, she was not expected to do the work on her own. Instead, a pair of colleagues, her supervisor, and even her supervisor’s supervisor showed up to help. Not only did this make the logistics of the tasks more manageable, but it also sent the message that she had joined a true team.
Though flexible work time allowed staff some needed latitude, work locations also needed to become more versatile. When many physical office spaces closed, home became the new workspace. Miller notes how at OSU there had already been a departmental initiative to provide staff with laptop computers, instead of desktop models. When the pandemic began, though, that program was accelerated to afford staff more flexibility. Similarly, MSU live-in staff were allowed to work remotely and even off campus though they still lived on. Jordan Viars, residence coordinator at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, says his department provided options to live-in staff not only in terms of their office, but also their home spaces. Live-in staff were given the choice to move off campus, and staff who chose to remain were provided spaces with exterior entrances and/or with buffer zones created by empty rooms between live-in staff and residents’ rooms.
As the pandemic spread on college and university campuses, so did concerns about the health and welfare of live-in staff, custodial and maintenance teams, and others working in close contact with residential communities. According to Miller, staff at OSU were given a choice about engaging in higher risk activities such as being on-call in quarantine and isolation communities. According to Zina, U of SC leadership restructured on-call and duty assignments and provided updated expectations to support the handling of crises in COVID-19 spaces, with special attention to staff safety and welfare. And at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, RA staff conducted exterior building walks rather than rounds on floors in quarantine spaces. Aksamit notes that it was important to her to let “RAs know that their safety is my priority, and not having them go onto floors had a positive student impact.”
While displaying compassion during trying times – whether the context is a pandemic, another crisis, or even a more high-intensity operation such as move-in – can take many forms and involve many practices, it often boils down to a simple acknowledgment and recognition of the amount of work and stress being experienced. While staff understand the work of supporting students in the communities where they live, they also need support; hall directors, graduate hall directors, and RA staff are trained and prepared to deal with crises, but those crises still take a toll.
Sometimes this recognition takes on a tangible form. Zina notes that the recognition committee in her department surveyed staff to find out what the team needed in terms of recognition, and they have taken steps to put those ideas into action. Recognition of this kind might include a note from a supervisor, acknowledgement at a staff meeting, or tokens of support such as gift cards or certificates of honor. Aksamit shortened staff meetings for her RAs this year and tried to incorporate recognition and gratitude into individual meetings throughout the term.
Recognition can take other forms as well. Being honest and transparent in the context of the constantly changing residential environments in the past year is a way for leaders to recognize the professionalism of the rest of the staff. Regular staff check-ins provide opportunities to listen to staff concerns, centering them rather than the crisis. Providing options to help staff manage their time is invaluable, as is allowing them to respectfully say “no” or to ask for help when needed. Recognition can also come from an evaluation and modification of work responsibilities that may even extend to the days when the pandemic is over. Making sure that staff are fortified with the knowledge, training, and equipment necessary to be successful is an acknowledgement of unprecedented challenges. And, finally, that acknowledgement can come from a leader’s willingness to show their commitment through actions as well as words by helping actualize last minute adjustments and transitions in the halls or assuming other shifts to provide others a reprieve. As Miller sums it up, “At the end of the day, we also try to frequently acknowledge what they’re going through and tell them how much we appreciate them. Recognition is important, especially now.”
Jessica Bennett, Travis T. York, Van Bailey, Marshall Habermann-Guthrie, Luis Jimenez Inoa, Meghan Gaffney Wells, and Akiso Yamaguchi, “Fit as Narrative Agency Through Inequality Regimes” in Debunking the Myth of Job Fit in Higher Education and Student Affairs (2019).
Robert Brown, Shruti Desai, and Craig Elliott, Identity Conscious Supervision in Student Affairs: Building Relationships and Transforming Systems (2020).
Kim Cameron, Positive Leadership: Strategies for Extraordinary Performance (2012).
Madhuleena Roy Chowdhury, “How to Foster Compassion at Work Through Compassionate Leadership" (2020).
Charles R. Figley (Ed.). (2002). Treating Compassion Fatigue (2002).
Cathlene E. McGraw, “Reflections on Building Capacity as a Supervisor in College Student Services,” New Directions for Student Services (2011).
Larry D. Roper (Ed.), Supporting and Supervising Mid-level Professionals: New Directions for Student Services (2011).
Ashley Tull, “Synergistic Supervision, Job Satisfaction, and Intention to Turnover of New Professionals in Student Affairs,” Journal of College Student Development (2006).
Roger B. Winston, Jr., and Don G. Creamer, Improving Staffing Practices in Student Affairs (1997).
Michelle L. Boettcher is an associate professor and student affairs program coordinator at Clemson University. Bailey Bush is a residence hall manager at the University of Colorado. Eric Cottrell is a resident director at Temple University. Wen Xi is a residence director at Pace University. Marie Silver is a hall director at the University of Louisville. Sydney Wein is a residence hall director at the University of Connecticut.
