Earlier this month a Director of Residence Life from a former institution of mine reached out asking about benchmarking practices for the re-evaluation of their four-year fixed contract for live-in Residence Directors. He reached out asking if our live-in hall directors were on fixed-term contracts – limiting our Residential Community Coordinators to four years in the position – and if they were, what our process to allow additional contractual years was.
As someone whose tenure as a Residence Director was only at institutions with fixed contracts and now finding myself in leadership at an institution where this isn’t something we do, I’m often perplexed by this practice. As a Residence Director, if I could go back in time, I would have structured my years differently, and as a leader, if I existed at an intuition with fixed contracts, I would re-evaluate their purpose.
As a Residence Director who was only allowed four years in the role, across the board, this policy was widely unpopular, and I personally struggled with it, for a number of reasons:
Fixed Term Contracts are Rare – If Not Non-Existent – Outside of Our Functional Area: Fixed-term contracts are rare outside of Housing and Residence Life; in most functional areas, strong performance allows employees to remain until they choose to leave or there is a dip in performance, leading to separation from the position. While working as an RD, equivalent positions in Student and Campus Life were not limited by an arbitrary length of time, and people could stay in their roles as long as desired. While some people argue that HRL positions should be limited by a fixed-term due to benefits (on-campus housing and often, a meal plan), and limited terms mitigate burnout, as long as someone is still finding joy in their role and doing their job, setting a limit on how long professionals can stay in a role is seemingly groundless. To be honest, the benefits of living on campus are usually an unequal trade-off for structuring your entire life around an on-call schedule.
Barriers to Advancement: A fixed term structure also creates barriers for advancement into leadership roles across the field, specifically within Housing and Residence Life. Job descriptions for leadership roles in HRL often require five to seven years of progressive experience, but a four-year cap (commonly the limit with fixed-term contracts) makes candidates less competitive, often forcing lateral career moves before leadership advancement. In my own experience, I began job searching in year three out of a four-year fixed term, out of fear of being without a job at the end of my contract. Although I deeply enjoyed my work and performed well, this fixed term pushed me to leave the first institution I worked at for a Resident Director position at a sister institution, despite trying to move up into leadership roles. I would have preferred the option to renew annually based on performance rather than being forced out. To add insult to injury, most leadership roles in Housing and Residence Life don’t exist on a fixed contract even though their hall director positions do – creating an even narrower path for advancement at a specific institution, amidst an already tight bottleneck for advancement in the field. Nothing ever felt fair about that.
Contribution to Toxic Culture and a Lack of Departmental, Institutional Knowledge: While some people would argue that placing caps on live-in hall positions keeps toxic or burnt out professionals from being able to overstay their welcome, it also creates unnecessary turnover and a lack of retention of talented, capable professionals who still have a lot to contribute and offer to a department. At my current institution, I appreciate that we do not have fixed terms. This flexibility has allowed us to retain strong staff – one of our top Residential Community Coordinators is now entering her fifth year, and her work is phenomenal. Additionally, because we do not have limits to our live-in positions, we’ve been afforded the ability to retain institutional and departmental knowledge when turnover does occur naturally. For most of our professional live-in staff, natural attrition still occurs around years three to four, and performance concerns are managed appropriately through accountability rather than arbitrary limits. Experientially, having a cap on a position can create toxicity within a team because professionals who come in at the same time sometimes feel the need to compete for professional opportunities within the same limited time-frame. Knowing that your time in a position is limited can push you to be cutthroat with the opportunities you are presented with, instead of professionally pursuing what interests you within the role, on your own timeline pursuing intentional goals. When people don’t feel threatened by a lack of opportunity and time, they are more likely to be collaborative and supportive, cultivating positive team culture.
Often, unless your leadership team is evaluating the purpose of limited term positions, there’s likely not much you can do to change when your time is up, but there are things you can consider to make the most of your role with the time that you have:
- Advocate to diversify your committee and collateral placements: Over the course of your time in a position, if you’re interested in moving up, consider making sure you get experience leading student staff recruitment processes, student staff training processes, advising Residence Hall Association and National Residence Hall Honorary, serving on professional recruitment committees, contributing to divisional committees, serving within professional associations, and contributing to programmatic/curricular and assessment work. Moving up in HRL often requires knowledge of multiple processes and networks, so getting diverse experience while in a hall director role is vital.
- Consider overseeing different student populations during your tenure, even if it means moving communities. If you are desirous of moving up into leadership roles, it can be helpful to have lived experience working with first year, second-year, upper-division, and non-traditional students, or affinity populations. It can also be helpful to have breadth of experience when it comes to working across community types – traditional halls, suite-style and apartment communities, along with public-private partnership communities, and/or with off-campus affiliated housing so that if you ever end up supervising professionals across differing populations, you can understand varied perspectives and provide insight and ideas.
- Evaluate leaving a role before you are forced to. While it can be difficult to leave a job you may love at an institution you’re used to, sometimes the most valuable form of experience comes from working at multiple institutions. Having multifaceted experience from differing universities can make you a more competitive candidate when it comes to facing the HRL leadership bottleneck. Plus, you never know what the job market will be like the year your contract term is up.
- Learn the Housing Operations side of Residence Life: Learn from professionals who want to teach you about StarRez, occupancy, bookings, room assignments, long term projection planning, working with contracts, etc. Even if your desire may be to stay in Residence Life, having more than a rudimentary understanding about how the Housing side of HRL works is crucial to be able to advance in our functional area.
While fixed terms had a purpose when they were instituted across the field, with roles that can sometimes feel like a revolving door having a fixed term policy can be limiting for professionals and institutions – maybe it’s time to embrace the at-will employment era across the field.
