Committee Corner: Staff communication

Reducing 'island mentality'

among your students

By WARREN KOZIRESKI, President of College Broadcasters Inc.

From walking the halls and listening to conversations at fall and spring conferences for many years, I know this issue permeates throughout most of our organizations.

How do we get students who are involved in one area of our operation (an island) to be aware of how their actions or inactions affect other areas (islands)?

Case study (and a real one from the past semester): Your women’s basketball team gets a bid to the playoffs and has a game scheduled for 5 p.m. Thursday. The sports department will be broadcasting the game with pre-game scheduled to begin at 4:45 p.m. The department drafted a live promo and produced a recorded promo for the broadcast.

What other departments in the station should the sports department communicate with to make this last-minute addition to the broadcast schedule come off without a hitch?

Answers: Programming (who will communicate with the DJ staff scheduled to now operate the board at the event and schedule the live promo), news (who had a scheduled newscast at 5 p.m. that will be pre-empted), production (so they can schedule the produced promo), Web site (so they can add the special event to the home page and sports schedules), public relations (so they can move the giveaways that were scheduled during the now-basketball broadcast time), engineering (for a remote equipment check) and training supervisor (an opportunity for new trainees to shadow game board-oping).

What happened in real life: none of the above.

This isn’t just a sports problem but the example is an illustration of day-to-day life in a broadcast facility. Some students become so immersed in their own projects and doings, that they lose sight of the bigger picture.

How do we help them overcome this? A few ideas that could/should be used periodically throughout the year to reinforce:

• Develop several specific case studies that are closer to what happens in your own operation and spend a significant period of time solving them at staff training. One case study per student leader should be about right.
• After the fact, sit down and do a post-mortem on every event or instance to help students see beyond their blinders.
• Once or twice per year, bring in an outsider to training with a case study and have your staff explain everything in detail. This works even better with someone who doesn’t know anything about the media business and will ask lots of follow-up questions.
• Utilize alumni to bring back case studies from “their day” and the hindsight/expertise in what they did or could have done better. The medicine goes down easier if current staff doesn’t feel picked on.
• As an extreme, maybe cancel an event or broadcast that didn’t meet the organization’s required expectations of communication. Embarrassment can be a motivator.
• Have a monthly award or recognition for the group or person who demonstrated teamwork across departments the best.

We’ve all said it — we are in the communication business but we don’t do it very well. With electronic communication, this difficulty (what I refer to as “island mentality”) with student staff communication will not dissipate, but instead will/has become even more of an issue.

If we don’t make an effort to address it on a regular basis in training and daily life at the station, we have no right to complain.

Warren "Koz" Kozireski is the general manager of student radio station WBSU and an instructor of communication/broadcasting at SUNY Brockport.