The intrical relationship between communication and student engagement. Communication is the cornerstone behind every successful campus climate. Effective communication in higher education institutions of learning can help increase student engagement, student success, and student retention.
But what happens when communication channels are blocked? Higher education institutions suffer when communication channels are muted or nonexistent. Poor communication systems can leave students, faculty, and staff feeling disconnected from the campus and the overall community. Which in turn can lead to high poor customer service and a decrease in student satisfaction and retention.
That’s why robust campus communication plans need to include not only mass communication touch points to use to relay messages to the campus community but strategic well-identified channels for that purpose. Any communication plan should also include policies for student, faculty, and staff comments and should detail how each administration will a forum for community dialogue and discussion.
How To Facilitate Robust Communication:
To effectively optimize institutional communication, leadership must manage policies surrounding communication. Are the current policies effective? If not, what must change? If no formal policies are in place, how do you best approach creating them? Good communication begins with leadership creating clear channels. Communication channels within all departments from the bottom up.
To effectively nurture communication policies and procedures, leadership should examine student, interdepartmental, administrative, and campus-wide communication channels.
Administrative Communication
How the entire administrative team communicates is perhaps the single most important piece of the campus communication puzzle. If campus leaders are ineffective communicators, the entire communication climate on campus will suffer. Too often, administrators are isolated from faculty, staff, and students – the very people they are there to serve. Instead of instituting an open-door policy, administrators often let the business of academia dictate a closed-door and hard-to-reach atmosphere.
Instead, administrators should institute an open-door policy, or something similar, that offers faculty and students access to campus leadership. They should also not only allow for, but plan on, demonstrations of free speech on campus, and they should have policies in place for a healthy cycle of communicative feedback with all campus stakeholders.
Effective administrative communication should include…
- An open-door policy
- An efficient way for campus members, especially students, and faculty, to easily offer feedback and ask questions of the administration and its strategic decisions
- A reflective and flexible approach to communicating with campus community members
Interdepartmental Communication
Administrators also need to pay attention to not only how they communicate with faculty but to how faculty members communicate with one another, their students, and other departments on campus.
It’s important for administrators to establish healthy communication across departments. In order for students to feel connected to the campus, campus leaders need to remember to consider the “whole student.” If a student is suffering academically, it impacts other aspects of student life and vice versa. If a student is struggling, faculty and other departments within student life need to be able to identify the struggle, communicate concerns to the appropriate channels, and collaborate to get the student the help they need to succeed, both academically and personally.
Additionally, administrators need to ensure faculty and staff feel comfortable communicating with campus leaders and the “chain of command” about their workload, student concerns, and overall satisfaction with their professional life. Think of faculty and staff as a type of “middle management.” If they don’t feel comfortable communicating with their dean or other campus administrators, then important concerns – at both the faculty level and student level – can get lost in translation and leave campus leaders unaware of how students, faculty, and staff really feel.
Administrators can increase communication among faculty and staff by…
- Ensuring faculty and staff have a way to communicate their concerns about students
- Ensuring faculty and staff have a way to communicate their concerns about workload and professional expectations
- Ensuring faculty and staff from all departments on campus have opportunities to meet one another and build team morale
Student Communication
In some ways, students are better communicators than anyone on any other level within the campus hierarchy. They have grown up with the technology, and social media platforms, that make it easy to voice their concerns about the campus climate. In other ways, students can lack the interpersonal skills to communicate effectively with those closest to them in person – not online.
So, ensuring effective communication with students means examining how faculty and staff who interact with students on a daily and weekly basis communicate with them and how students communicate in return. Figuring this out requires more than surveying students on their experience. It means engaging all communication stakeholders in discussion to see what part of the communication chain works and what areas need help. HigherEd Advisors at Oracle Real Estate Group can help engage stakeholders in this discussion to bring real results to optimizing communication on campus.
Campus-Wide Communication
Changing communication on campus often means a focus on the entire campus culture. Although it can be difficult for administrators and campus leaders to hear criticism from students, faculty, and staff, it’s an important part of optimizing communication on campus.
Student and faculty engagement hinges on a healthy campus environment where all campus community members feel they can “speak truth to power.” A campus environment where students and faculty feel their voice is not only heard but is considered behind closed doors when important decisions are being made about the quality of their campus life, academics, and, ultimately, their futures.
Encouraging a healthy campus climate means encouraging dissent, debate, and, most importantly, discussion of campus affairs. Higher education institutions can increase campus-wide communication by…
- Creating a safe climate for campus discussion & criticism
- Creating online tickets for student complaints and suggestions (and making sure someone is reading those complaints and passing them on to administrators)
- Encouraging healthy debate in public forums like social media, newspaper editorials, etc.
- Responding with a supportive, listening ear to that public feedback
- Recruiting student ambassadors to help provide feedback to campus leadership
- Hiring a professional consultant to create a personalized communication plan for your institution
A Trusted HigherEd Advisory Team
At Oracle, we specialize in increasing campus communication as a means of advancing residential experience outcomes. Our trusted team of advisors can help your institution establish better communication policies to help overcome challenges and increase student engagement and retention.
Our mission is to provide best-in-class solutions to the problems higher education institutions and their students face. We offer a broad spectrum of professional advisory consulting services backed by research, including Student Life Optimization, Facility Optimization, Campus-Wide Communication Optimization, Student Experience and Engagement in Campus Housing, and more. So whether your institution needs help finding solutions to communication issues, or issues in campus housing, you can contact the Oracle Real Estate Group for personalized higher education support today.