Residence Life training programs have been under a microscope for the past decade, trying to evolve and seek out what is most effective at helping onboard staff members into critical roles within our halls. The biggest shift is understanding how to create a better balance to prevent burnout within the process. However, there are additional opportunities in which we can continue to evolve to better serve our staff and prepare them to cultivate critical relationships with students. Here are some ideas to help meet their needs:
This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “How can we re-envision ResLife staff training?”
Leadership of Returning Staff Members
This is critical to keeping your returning staff members engaged with the training program and helping to keep morale high on your team. A lot of departments approach training with a “Don’t Fix What Isn’t Broken” mindset and repeat a vastly identical training experience from year to year. When someone is in the position for more than one year, it quickly becomes overly repetitive with the same shared information from the year previous. It’s important to shake things up from year to year but, in order to completely address this problem, it’s helpful to give returning staff the mic to assist in the presentation of the training topics. They may have different ideas on how to encourage engagement and have unique perspectives in seeing what it looks like from the frontline in the previous year. If returning staff don’t want to present, you can utilize them in mentorships throughout the department, helping new members get acclimated to the role and providing returners an opportunity to cultivate connections through their previous experiences. Treating returning staff as if they are new to the position diminishes their experience in the role and squanders an opportunity to have them serve as a leader.
Utilization of Campus Resources
In my mind, this comes two-fold: utilizing different spaces on campus for training sessions and integrating campus partners into the training schedule. Most staff training programs are several days, if not weeks, in length and being stuck in the same room on campus can make your training a monotonous, mundane mess. By using different meeting spaces around campus, it helps staff become more familiar with the institution as well as gives them a chance to refresh and get moving before jumping into the next session. Having campus partners present on the intersecting information from their office and how it pertains to Residence Life is also a great way to break up the monotony of speakers and to give your staff a break from presenting. You’d be surprised how willing campus partners are willing to speak to your team: all you need to do is ask.
Integration of eLearning Opportunities
Given our pandemic pivots just a few years ago, a vast majority of staff are very familiar with online learning opportunities through Canvas, Blackboard, and other platforms that support our institutions. Utilizing this technology to shorten the daily in-person schedule helps reduce the social energy we expect of our staff. Providing eLearning sessions provides students with the opportunity to continue different training modules in the comfort of their rooms. And, if extroverted staff prefer to go through the session together, they could always meet in larger spaces to have that more traditional method. Certainly some sessions may be more appropriate for this than others but, by providing this as an option, it helps to meet students where they are at.
Ongoing Training
The fact that we have put student staff through two weeks of training, throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, and expecting them to be up the speed by the time other students move in is kind of bonkers. The feedback I’ve consistently seen from students is that they are overloaded and overwhelmed during the training process and it doesn’t give them the time they need to acclimate to the role. I’m not suggesting starting staff training on July 1 but I think it could be helpful with the onboarding of our staff to emphasize the critical information needed for success. If there is more of a balance, it provides an opportunity to educate staff members while also helping them to connect with other members of the staff and to consider how they can make their floor a welcoming community for incoming students. One of the departments I worked for shifted to having monthly all staff meetings, where all RAs from across campus would come together and essentially have an additional topic session that was moved from fall training. It can be difficult to discern exactly what topics can wait over others but, for the mental health of our staff, it’s something to consider for their holistic success.
Re-envisioning staff training is essential for departments that want to keep their staff engaged throughout the program and equip their leaders for success within the roles. By leveraging the leadership of returning staff, fully utilizing campus resources, integrating eLearning opportunities, and considering how to provide ongoing training for staff, organizations can create a more flexible and effective training environment. Investing in the continuous development of employees not only enhances their skills and knowledge but also boosts morale, engagement, and overall organizational performance.
