Top Safety Risks For Higher Education

Higher Education represents some of the most complex set of institutional risks today, and needs special attention to manage these wide-ranging organizations. There are few spaces that constitute such a degree, depth, and scope of safety, security, and emergency preparedness needs. Diversity of mission, complex and dispersed facilities, business and political affiliation, program and research specifics, brand and reputational aspects, youth and young adult age-related issues, large-scale operations, private-public funding and enrollment business models, global travel programs, and working at the leading edge of social/political/cultural movements are examples to name a few. These organizations define a risk management regime full of unique challenges at scale, demanding comprehensive collaborative systems and planning to endure the broad exposures colleges and universities face daily. This outlines some of the core risks and actions facing higher education.

Campus Safety

College campuses have historically been a target for violence, and we are seeing that trend continue today. Active shooter scenarios, targeted assassinations, protests and political unrest, and sexual assault and community crime are ongoing threats to campus safety. These risks are compounded with residential dorms and the often-blurred interface between campus and community how organizations define their scope of responsibility. This expands to foreign and temporary locations through study abroad, satellite campuses, research and travel programs that operate in austere environments, locations with limited resources and within jurisdictions that present unique differences. Organizations may claim the same expectations, rules and status of their home campus in these other locations and this present difficulties for logistics, capacity, and executing standards for duty of care and best practice.

Travel Programs

Travel, and travel programs are long-standing components of higher education. Staff and faculty travel, president travel, donor travel, alumni trips, affinity group travel, study abroad, outdoor programs, research, conference and other business travel shows a wide variety of travel types. Some Universities have massive programs with thousands of global travelers per year. The volume, range, and diversity of travel in higher education is matched with broad operational risk and safety concerns to manage the health and safety of people, facilities, groups, customers and communities impacted by this activity. Whether a field research team in a remote location, administrators at a conference, or students studying abroad, Travel Safety is a world unto itself. Typically, programs and processes are contracted out across layered networks of vendors and providers managed differentially across departments. The programs are often managed by administrators on an upward career path that promotes management duties for operations they don’t have the adequate background and skillset. Structure, systems, staffing and capacity, and program and departmental coordination combine to form a nexus of specific risk and security concerns few organizations manage completely.

Cybersecurity

This is an increasing area of risk for colleges and universities, as it is for all modern business. More and more sensitive data is digital, and more facilities operations, educational content, personal information, confidential content and other systems rely on secure cyber environments to keep things running smoothly and protect information. Higher education is regulated by specific rules and laws directed at students, minors, and other guidelines relevant to their populations and the nature of education that brings additional management needs. Breached data and ransomware, PII, health info, medical centers, social engineering, hacked systems and complex cloud and physical storage server facilities and services all apply here. Like Travel Programs, this is an ever-changing environment and requires sharp, modern systems and personnel to manage these risks.

Brand and Reputation

With such large and diverse communities, colleges and universities face broad risk of brand and reputational harm coming from multiple internal and external sources. There are simple more failure points when involved in so many things. The public heaps massive expectations of educational in general, and certainly higher education so how ‘failure’ is defined is more nuanced and delicate. From internal behavior scandal to political and funding associations, to changing social/cultural alignments, to how an organization manages safety and responds to crisis, reputational harm can be devastating and have an outsized impact on funding sources and enrollment, where a single unfortunate incident can have lasting impacts on the successful business management of the school, and take a long time to shake off a poor reputation. This is all amplified by the speed of modern media, perception and social reaction.

Enrollment

Due to a range of economic, social, and demographic reasons, higher education enrollment has been steadily decreasing, and organizations facing this ‘enrollment cliff’ need to reimagine capacity and impacts to their bottom-line and ability to operate normally. An enrollment risk is especially existential as organizations have increased administration staff and operating budgets in the last decades to make most organizations less resilient to adapting to this trend. Like other organizational risks, this is linked to performance across programs, and how they offer value to students, attract funding and productive partnerships, and adequately support their name and brand throughout.

Business Operations

With such complex programs and organizational structure, the business risks are many and large due to the diverse operational needs. Broad institutional missions attract more complex risks and problem sets. Along with all the external challenges facing colleges and universities, these organizations chronically fight their own structures and hierarchies. Distributed teams and dispersed programs and facilities, large bureaucracies, siloed departments across thousands of staff, redundant overlapping programs and systems, internal communication barriers, operations bound by historical hierarchies slow to change equals grinding against your own structure and systems. This makes it difficult to create efficient systems and overcome inherent organizational friction. Compliance, legal issues, procurement, vendor services management, facilities, extra campus programs and activities all aggregate risks into a complex map of strategic planning responsibilities. Among my clients this is always the single most chronic impediment to improving systems, developing new programs, and implementing change.

Actions and Considerations

Risk Assessments and Safety Reviews

Most education clients I work with have never completed a risk assessment, and don’t know what they don’t know. It is impossible to manage risk you don’t know is there - assessments identify risks, review operational systems and programs, policies and standards and can take a wide or forensic look at operations in s way to outline a risk landscape, benchmark standards and performance, and develop a baseline to start building a risk management system. These are simple, useful, affordable tools that are a great way for programs and organizations to start leaning into managing their operational risks.

Organizational Structure

Simply mapping hierarchies within higher education can be difficult, and is a crucial exercise for determining how structure supports operations and management. Simply outlining who does what, why, and how do business units engage and interact is often a good starting place and a needed action. There are likely redundancies and inefficiencies that can be retooled to streamline business and communications. With so much risk beyond our control, this is a process that can be well managed and can make a huge positive impact.

Professional Competency

So many important risk management roles in higher education are given to staff with the wrong background or embedded in the wrong position. While public safety, security, and IT a generally recognized for sourced specialized talent, most operational risk is not. Extending the use of specialized professionals, whether hiring directly or contracting service and consultants, will better match capacity with executing on program quality and success.

Capacity and Mission

A chronic higher education risk is the dual pressure of trying to do everything and the world expecting all things from these organizations. My clients that recognize capacity limits and plan in staged program growth and improvement over time to staff and plan reasonably, are the ones that manage their risk well. Focusing and narrowing mission and program scope usually reduces incidents and risk, and increases program quality resiliency. Regular top-to-bottom reviews of program alignment with mission, purpose, capacity, and strategic planning is key to effective risk, safety, security, and emergency preparedness.

Risk Management System

This is a series of processes and procedures that bind and link systems and policy with resources and tools that link your strategic emergency prevention, response, and assessment plans. Coordination of these processes and tools is essential - what’s the point of good resources if they don’t work together? A chronic weakness in higher education, this can fortunately be overcome through a holistic approach, regular risk assessment and safety reviews, and a commitment to build cohesive tools and resources in a linked system across organizational operations.

Safety Culture

Defining organizational risk appetites, tolerances, standards, and approach aligning with mission builds value and trust with systems and through the community. This needs to be intentional, consistent, and demonstrative. This is the special sauce that makes all the other process-oriented tools work, the connective tissue that binds the platforms and services and planning together so and organization can plan, prevent, respond, and review together, and move forward through their work as one entity.

By Todd Duncan, Owner/Principal Consultant, SeaBear Safety Solutions