This is a repost of an article I contributed to the trade journal for the student accommodation industry in the region, which is published by the Asia Pacific Student Accommodation Association (APSAA). The journal is simply called Student Accommodation. The piece was published in the June 2024 issue available here.
In the last six years, there has been a surge of culture reviews in the student housing sector. I believe this is a fantastic indicator of our sector’s collective willingness to examine and improve our practices.
But unfortunately, these reviews have varied enormously in terms of their depth, credibility, implement-ability and, ultimately, their impact. The unpredictable outcomes of such reviews seems to suggest we should more closely examine the ingredients that make them successful.
I recently led such a review at Emmanuel College within the University of Queensland. While it is too early to determine if that review will possess all of these qualities, my unique perspective as both a reviewer and an experienced practitioner in the sector helped me to identify some crucial elements of a high-quality review, which I would like to briefly share in this article.
my unique perspective as both a reviewer and an experienced practitioner in the sector helped me to identify some crucial elements of a high-quality review, which I would like to briefly share in this article.
First and foremost, let’s zero in on the one factor that’s most likely to ‘make or break’ a review: obtaining valid data. If there could only be one key to success, this would be it. Unequivocally.
Valid data is, quite simply, data that authentically represents that phenomenon you are examining. For this context, it means getting honest and thoughtful feedback from a genuine cross-section of your community. Without this, all the outcomes of a review – such as the final report – must be taken with a grain of salt. No matter how eloquently the findings are presented to your community, if it only mirrors the view of the powerful or the many, it will do more harm than good and make it harder to improve your culture.
First and foremost, let’s zero in on the one factor that’s most likely to ‘make or break’ a review: obtaining valid data. If there could only be one key to success, this would be it. Unequivocally.
So, the question ultimately becomes: how can you get this kind of high-value data? What pre-conditions and design choices will extract the most rich and valid data possible? What follows is a checklist of what I see as the most fundamental ones:
The reviewer needs to be independent, not just external.
The reality is that people will share things with an independent reviewer that they won’t share with you. If you want to understand what your team or community is truly feeling, seeking outside help is usually necessary. However, the value of external reviewer is deeply tied to their impartiality, and merely being external doesn’t make someone independent. Anybody can use the label ‘independent’ – there are no laws against that – so it ultimately hinges on whether your stakeholders, especially your students, believe the reviewer will speak truth to power.
Transparency is non-negotiable.
This is stating the obvious, but your people will decide if it is safe and worthwhile to participate in a review before they participate. That means your upfront descriptions of how it will work will play a massive role in the success of the review. Your people will want to know how their views will be collected, who will see their individual comments, who will see the final report, and what the leadership is going to do with it – in advance! You need to specify these things in the announcement of the review and stick to your commitments.
The goal must be to learn from people, not control them.
You need to be open to the possibility that you don’t fully understand your community, and you need to be eager to find out what you don’t already know. Starting a review for the wrong reasons, such as feeling obliged or wanting to validate your own hypotheses, can do a lot of damage. Not only will you miss out on a rich learning opportunity, but your community is probably clever enough to notice attempts to control the review (which, as far as I’m concerned, are impossible to disguise anyway), and that will breed cynicism and distrust.
Have a wide scope.
Culture shapes everything and is shaped by everything. Trying to exclude any aspects of the student or staff experience from a culture review will be counterproductive. From my experience, nothing annoys a participant more than hearing “I want to hear from you” followed by “but not about that”.
From my experience, nothing annoys a participant more than hearing “I want to hear from you” followed by “but not about that”.
When designing your review, keep in mind that what the community wants to talk about is rarely off-topic, and usually offers helpful clues about the dynamics of its underlying culture.
Moreover, if you want to do a review but are only interested in one of the sector’s ‘four horsemen’ of alcohol and drug use, sexual safety, student leaders, or incident management, you will be conducting a functional review of that specific area, not a culture review. In these situations, you should manage your community’s expectations by naming the review appropriately.
Be ready to take a few punches!
In any kind of independent review, there is going to be critique thrown around. In fact, this is probably the hallmark of a review that’s going well! You should expect your participants will raise criticisms at a rate at least 3 or 4 times greater than praise and remember that it’s just human nature. I have noticed that, when people believe a problem might get solved, they’re very willing to share incredibly vivid descriptions of those problems to the prospective problem-solver.
But this doesn’t change how painful it can be to hear that your organisation has problems – especially if you didn’t create them or can’t solve them. But it’s important to remember the alternative: if problems stay underground, they will persist and possibly even fester. It’s far better to entice them into the open, where you can at least discuss the options, than avoid the short-term discomfort of public critique. This is the harder route, and it takes real leadership. Be sure to buttress the resilience and support networks of your team before any fieldwork begins.
In conclusion, undertaking a broad, open-ended, bottom-up independent review is a tremendous opportunity – it is one of the single most valuable things a leader can do – but only if you set it up right from the start. To do so, you will need to prioritise valid data over your own comfort by having a spirit of openness and communicating clearly. In other words, you’ve got to show your community that you believe that getting things right is more important than being right.
In other words, you’ve got to show your community that you believe that getting things right is more important than being right.
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