SEAHO Report - Summer 2019 - 19

SEAHO Feature Articles
4. Student staff are well aware that other positions pay more. Reinforced by a focus group led later on in the
semester, a small but certainly correct sample of our respondents were aware they could make more money in
other positions on campus. Further, our Desk Assistants recognized that their role after hours was potentially
more strenuous during the day, and urged us to consider raising that pay rate to reflect the work they do as
security agents during those hours.
We've paired this exit survey with a move to have semesterly "Round Tables" between myself and our current
Community Desk Assistants, which for this semester was a focus group where they could discuss seven key
areas of the job and tell me what's working well and what's not. For this, we asked that each community have
two representatives join me in our main office conference room, where I had taken oversized Post-It notes
and created headings in some key areas: Communication, Compensation, Training, Scheduling/Hours, Sense
of Team, and Relationship with Supervisor. I armed everyone with a marker in the color of their choosing,
asked that they provide a positive and negative experience, and set them to it. Once they were done writing, we
discussed the findings over pie and I wrote "Action Items" under each area and summarized their points while
we were together. I spent a lot of time letting them explain what they wrote and allowing the group dialogue
to flow freely as one person sparked their neighbor to chime in. I left that conversation with six oversize
Post-Its on my office walls as a reminder, and our team reviews it periodically. It's given us more of a sense
of marching orders for our operation when coupled with the data we collected - it also filled in some of the
gaps about the four takeaway points above and what is taking place on our smaller teams that is contributing
to some of the dissatisfaction across the board. It also highlighted some real "best practices" that some of our
in-hall supervisors have put in place to manage their teams, something our leadership team is taking note of
and providing opportunities for sharing going forward. We have some amazing supervisors out there that our
students appreciate, so we should capitalize on that and allow supervisors that are still emerging to have an
opportunity to learn from their peers.
This has certainly been a long process, and we're not
entirely in the clear yet, but we have learned some
valuable lessons going forward and are using this
combination of information gathering going forward
to make decisions. Our biggest takeaway is that we
must continue to build pools of students to work these
roles and anticipate this will most likely happen again.
We've created a series of proposals to change hours
and pay rates where we are able and standardizing
our staffing pattern to create stronger teams in our
communities. We're also continuing to gather more
information were possible, digitizing our Community
Assistant and Graduate Community Director exit
surveys in a similar fashion and launched them this
spring as part of an ongoing staff assessment process.
If you can take anything away from our situation it
would be to begin drafting your own exit surveys for
your positions and put it into practice, coupled with
opportunities to have face-to-face sharing for those
that are currently whatever role you are looking at
revising.

SEAHO Report Summer 2019

SEAHO Report - Summer 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of SEAHO Report - Summer 2019