This case study explores a student staff housing community team’s lack of engagement with a focus on the impact of student staff buy-in on team dynamics. The case discusses employee accountability juxtaposed to the supervisors’ goals for building staff rapport and supporting student staff holistic development. The discussion questions explore options for staff motivation, input, and the balance of empathy with accountability.

Keywords: Housing, student supervision, living-learning community, burnout, new housing professional

Character Descriptions

Joseph – Hall Director (HD) | He/Him/His

Joseph has worked at Pearson University for five years as a Hall Director. Joseph is passionate about housing, and his entire career has been in housing roles at various southeastern universities, from serving as a Resident Assistant (RA) as an undergraduate, a Graduate Hall Director (GHD) while pursuing a master’s degree, and now Hall Director.

Sophia – Graduate Hall Director | She/Her/Hers

Sophia does not have prior experience working in housing and was not an RA at the small, southern liberal arts college she attended as an undergraduate. Sophia is a full-time student pursuing a Student Affairs graduate degree alongside her assistantship in housing.

Aria – Senior Resident Assistant (Senior RA) | She/Her/Hers

Aria is a senior who has lived in the Honors Living-Learning Community (LLC) since her first year and began working as an RA in her sophomore year.

Context and Case

Sophia has just begun her first year as a Graduate Hall Director at Pearson University. Pearson University is a large, public, R1, land-grant institution in the southeastern United States. Pearson University is well-known for their student research in STEM fields.

The Pearson Honors LLC housing leadership team is composed of Sophia, Joseph (Hall Director), and Aria (Senior RA). Sophia and Joseph co-supervise a staff of 15 RAs. The resident population is composed of first-year honors students. These residents are high-achieving academically and highly involved on campus. Nevertheless, the housing leadership team for the Honors LLC has historically faced difficulty engaging their residents within the hall. A significant majority of the students are pursuing STEM degrees, and it is not uncommon to encounter both residents and RAs who are taking heavy courseloads.

The 15 RAs who make up the Honors LLC housing student staff are a tight-knit group. Ten of the student staff are returning RAs to the same community. Most of the student staff consider each other friends. Of the RAs, seven are seniors, four are juniors, and four are sophomores. Since Joseph is familiar with the majority of the RAs and their historically strong work ethic, Joseph centered trust and individual accountability for the student staff this year.

Aria is passionate about advocating for the experience of her fellow RAs. She pursued the role of Senior RA to build upon foundations set by a previous Honors LLC Senior RA that she is friends with. She enjoys building relationships with the staff and serves as a confidant and liaison for the staff to voice their concerns.

Repeated Behavior: Burnout and Buy-In

While the staff is tight-knit and Aria plans frequent movie nights and study sessions for the student staff, Sophia and Joseph have noticed that their rapport as a leadership team with the staff feels strained. In 1:1s, most staff members are quiet. When asked about the RA role responsibilities and goals, most staff focus on deadlines and describe their work duties as a checklist.

Joseph and Sophia learn through Aria that multiple staff members are disinterested in the leadership team’s approach to staff development and community-building. When Joseph and Sophia propose opportunities and ideas for staff bonding either outside of or built into work meetings, staff turnout and engagement is low. Sophia and Joseph are passionate about engaging the staff holistically and have collaborated with Aria to build monthly boundary-setting, self-care, and time management professional development sessions into staff meetings. During training, these are the topics staff expressed interest in. Some staff have told Aria they dislike the leadership team’s bonding and professional development sessions. Staff members have described these efforts as “fluff” and would rather have time back for studying or for themselves.

By October, Joseph and Sophia notice that between one-third to one-half of the staff are neither reading nor responding to emails and staff group chat messages in a timely manner, if at all. This behavior conflicts with expectations outlined during training and weekly reminders.

As a result, several student staff members are not completing time-sensitive tasks. Additionally, multiple staff members are missing checkpoint deadlines for intentional educational conversations with residents. Staff members tell Sophia and Joseph in their weekly 1:1 meetings that they are busy or burnt out with academics. They insist that they will not miss future deadlines. However, staff continue to request last-minute extensions for deadlines, miss deadlines, or show up late to 1:1 and staff meetings.

Rumors and Feedback Loops

To create a responsive work environment, Joseph and Sophia have collected staff feedback through all-staff meeting conversations, Senior RA-led group check-in conversations without the HD and GHD present, and an anonymous form about staff experience. Joseph and Sophia notice that staff provide conflicting feedback about what they prefer or expect from staff meetings. Some feel short staff meetings should be cancelled; others state that meetings that take the full time are draining and should be shortened. Further, several staff members have compared their work and meeting load to other staffs. They assert that other staffs do not have as many deadlines or staff meetings as the Honors LLC staff do. While some community leadership teams opt to cancel multiple meetings in the same month and do not enforce strict deadlines, these decisions contradict departmental standards. Joseph and Sophia schedule meetings and deadlines based upon departmental expectations despite other leadership teams’ failure to adhere to expectations and policies.

When Joseph and Sophia do opt for emailed “paper” staff meetings, they find that consistently more than half the staff do not read, retain, or respond by deadlines. Based on 1:1 meetings, Joseph and Sophia believe that many staff are “checked out,” have “senioritis,” and experience burnout from academics, campus involvements, research, and RA responsibilities. Joseph believes some staff members have become complacent in their RA responsibilities, as this is their second or third year working in the same residential community. What’s more, Joseph recently learned from a former staff RA that Aria is feeding into negativity about deadlines and the work environment during informal conversations and gatherings with other Honors LLC RAs.

The staff community events committee has not been meeting their expectations for event planning and execution. Despite 1:1 and staff meeting check-ins about events, Sophia found herself working a 12-hour day to finalize event logistics and secure supplies for their community Fall Festival. Most of this work was the committee’s responsibility. Joseph, Sophia, and Aria discuss the concern; Sophia develops an event planning worksheet to support committee planning and delegation which is approved by the housing department. Sophia introduces the worksheet at the next staff meeting.

At the next leadership team meeting, however, Aria tells Sophia and Joseph that the staff are very upset and frustrated about the worksheet and feel micro-managed. When Sophia asks committee about the worksheet during 1:1s, some staff share they think the worksheet will be helpful and others do not have much to say. Nevertheless, Aria continues to report that staff are upset about this worksheet based on both informal conversations and the feedback loops she has conducted when the HD/GHD step out of staff meetings.

It is difficult for Joseph and Sophia to get the staff on the same page and to improve morale, while ensuring accountability for meeting deadlines.

Discussion Questions

1. What role might the Honors LLC affiliation play in the experience of the student staff in this residential community? How can Joseph and Sophia respond to the unique needs of their staff?
2. What supervisory and ethical considerations should Joseph attend to rumors of Aria contributing to the negative staff dynamic?
3. How could Sophia have held the community events committee accountable while maintaining a growth mindset for the committee?
4. What could Joseph, Sophia, and Aria do to address staff issues related to timely responses and completion of action items when reminders have not worked?
5. What approaches could the leadership team implement to address staff morale?
6. How can Joseph and Sophia address “senioritis” and burnout on staff?
7. How should Joseph and Sophia respond to conflicting feedback from staff considering the different means of collecting feedback (1:1s, staff meetings, staff meeting conversations when Joseph and Sophia are not present)?

Author Biography

Savanna Vest (she/her/hers) is a second-year graduate student in Clemson University’s Master of Education in Student Affairs program. Prior to pursuing a graduate degree, Savanna worked as an Evaluation Program Coordinator for a college- and career-readiness program serving a west coast public school system.