One former student (now campus activities professional!) thought it would be amusing to embellish my business card with the title "Director, Associate Director and Assistant Director" during a year when two of my three administrative positions in the office were vacant. (Yes, the third being my own!) Even though her sarcasm was a little tough to hear at the time, I still kept the business card and keep it posted in my office as a reminder.
My experiences with navigating short-term staffing issues are more complicated than I can even believe. We've had to cover mid-year departures, hiring freezes, maternity leaves, and coverage of support staff and administrative staff roles and the strategies have covered a wide spectrum. Over the past ten years, all of the strategies did have a few things in common.
It's up to you to navigate it!
Everyone is busy, everyone feels they are short staffed, and everyone feels their office is the hardest working office on campus. Know that up front and remember that when you feel the urge to complain about the hand that you've been dealt. Moral of the story - you're in charge and it's your responsibility to fix it. You know who your "trusted people" are on campus that you can vent with, so outside of that "inner circle" you need to remember our Admissions director's mantra of being "honest but positive" in every interaction on campus.
"Honest"
Do an honest assessment of what you can and what you can't do during a time of staffing shortage. This isn't as easy in our area as it might be in others, because the "driving force" behind a lot of what we do is driven by students. So, you need to focus on things that are "staff-directed" and also quantifiable so that you can be sure that once it is crossed off of your list, it stays off until you decide it comes back. After that review process, find an opportunity to discuss the decisions that you (and your supervisor!) have made about what isn't going to be done anymore and share it clearly and concisely with your peer group. I did this at a director's retreat before the start of the year and I believe it was both a way to communicate the information but also a way to show my peers and supervisors that I was in control of the situation.
"Positive"
It's tough to be positive when you are feeling like a victim of really bad circumstance. However, the student leaders you have that year are still counting on you in the same way they would be as if you had a full staff. You certainly need to manage their expectations, but that's not going to make the needs disappear. To stay positive, take the step of reviewing and refocusing your goals for the year in the new context of reduced staffing and enjoy the opportunity to narrow your focus on a few "small wins" and keep things moving forward.
Ah, keeping things moving forward... a nice concept. Through our struggles in this area, I tried to stay committed to the need for students and more distant colleagues to never even notice a "pause" in our department's positive trajectory. It's the essence of a positive customer service strategy, but it also works to try to maintain your positive standing on campus. To get to that point, I want to talk about a few important sources for help that we found during some really tough times.
Students can help!
One big change we made over a few staffing shortages was to re-examine the roles that students played in our department operations. Through two of our most serious staffing shortages, new paraprofessional roles for students were born. Our first was a "Student Program Advisor' position that we created to help us address the planning needs for our smaller events and our smaller clubs. We assign each club to a SPA (those that aren't directly advised by a member of our professional staff) and they are the club's main point of contact for all of their event planning. The positions were created because of a staffing crunch, but we kept them a permanent additions to our team because of the huge timesaver it meant for our professional staff! It was a much needed shift in focus for us and ended up being a significant professional development opportunity for our most advanced student programmers. The other way we utilized student paraprofessionals was to create a Marketing Coordinator position to provide extra support to the marketing of departmental programs and services. Knowing that marketing might be something that would suffer when we are stretched by covering other responsibilities, this enabled our events to stay successful and gave us a way to give significant experience to marketing and graphic design majors.
Granted, a move toward more paraprofessional positions means that you will need to change your supervision approach and may take on new issues when you trade for the old ones. However, in a time of staffing shortage you need to make productive use of your time a priority.
Other colleagues can help!
Think of ways that your colleagues in other departments might gain something from increased involvement in your areas. Granted, don't make your staffing disasters someone else's problem... but you never know who might be out there who might have interest in advising student groups or getting more involved in your training of student leaders. For us, we found a resident director who had big interest in working with our international student population, we found a student looking for a practicum opportunity from a different school's graduate program, and we asked a colleague to join up as a co-advisor to the Student Government. All of these are significant contributions to our department's work, a big help in sharing the workload, and an opportunity for those individuals.
This will also force you to adapt your approach to supervision and in a different type of change than working with students. You will know best where the involvement of other colleagues will help or hinder the situation.
Also, I know every campus culture is different... but ask for additional compensation for these people. Even if you can only get them a one-time check or some other kind of compensation, it is worth it and will be helpful when you need to count on some degree of accountability to make things successful.
Technology can help!
Think of ways that technology could help you to deliver your content to students in a different way. Are there policy documents or forms that you can make available on-line that can save your staff some time? Are there programs you can deliver on-line that can make things easier?
We recently changed our "nuts and bolts of programming" training sessions to be on Blackboard instead of "live." We find that the change not only alleviated staff from having to do so many presentations, but it offered us some "gains" in that the content is now available 24/7 to students instead of just during the first 2 weeks of the school year. Gone are the days of the glazed looks on their faces because they didn't see the urgent need for the information. Our recent foray into podcasting for our Leadership Institute was also a staff/time saving strategy. We worked on the content development over the summer and the weekly time needed to implement the program was lightened a great deal.
The phrase "desparate times call for desparate measures" is one that you should take seriously. Be fearless in your approach to analyzing your work and this is definitely the time to call forward your most creative and objective thinkers to sit with you to analyze your next moves. You can't be afraid to eliminate programs, ask for help, and ask for additional resources to make your strategy happen. We actually ended up recommending the cancellation of our Leadership Awards this year due to these issues, but our SGA ended up stepping forward to coordinate the event. It was a great exercise in establishing priorities and it showed me a lot about what our students could accomplish.
You never know.... some of the best opportunities come from some of the most difficult challenges. I'll talk a little about those "results" in my next post!
Have a great day!
Cindy Kane