This article first appeared in Academic Leader on February 19, 2024 © Magna Publications. All rights reserved. If you are interested in reading more articles about the trends, challenges, and best practices of today’s academic decision-makers, check out a monthly or yearly subscription to Academic Leader!
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities were ramping up their services to address the mental health crisis among students as depression, anxiety, loneliness, suicide, and other issues were on the rise. The pandemic exacerbated these mental health problems and also made it clear that students are not the only ones experiencing mental illness or mental distress—faculty, staff, and administrators are as well, and vocally so for perhaps the first time. Because the primary mission of most institutions of higher education is to serve students, it’s easy to understand why attention to faculty and staff well-being was considered a lower priority. Moreover, workplace well-being initiatives often reside in human resources organizations, while faculty often do not consider themselves employees, thereby not knowing about or taking advantage of HR offerings that might support well-being and overall wellness.
But avoiding or ignoring faculty and staff mental health and well-being is no longer an option. There has long been a deep stigma around mental illness in academe; faculty, whose livelihoods depend on their ability to be intellectually present and exceptional, to take on the often competing weights of teaching, research, and service, are no longer willing to let their work lives be their entire lives. Since the start of the pandemic, faculty and staff have grown far more comfortable being vulnerable and discussing their mental and physical health as well as acting to protect that well-being in ways they might not have in the past. Higher education professionals will no longer accept overwhelming stress, expectations of being always on, or the “do more with less” refrain heard every day.
So where do we even start in thinking about improving the mental well-being of faculty and staff in higher education, where the stigmas around mental illness, mental disability, and neurodiversity keep so many from acknowledging problems or seeking help?
As someone who engages with faculty across the country on issues of burnout and well-being, I was excited to be introduced to the U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being (2022). Workplace well-being is one of six primary priorities for the Office of the Surgeon General. This is the first of a series introducing and exploring the framework in the context of the well-being movement on many campuses in the country. In this article, I’ll introduce the framework and the first of its five essentials for mental health and well-being: protection from harm.
What is the U.S. Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being, and why should higher education pay attention?
As a result of the pandemic, people across all sectors of life and work became more open to discussing mental health and less willing to sacrifice “their health, family, and communities for work” at the altar of work and productivity (4). Multiple studies cited by the report show that “rates of anxiety, depression, social isolation, job burnout, and insecurity related to food, housing, and income rose between March 2020 and mid-2022” (7). From this standpoint, the surgeon general reports, “The pandemic has presented us with an opportunity to rethink how we work. We have the power to make workplaces engines for mental health and well-being” (4). These are certainly conversations I see happening at institutions across the country, and the framework provides a way to step forward with real care and consideration for campus communities.
As the introduction to the framework argues, “Organizational leaders must prioritize mental health in the workplace by addressing structural barriers to seeking help and decreasing stigma around accessing mental health support in the workplace” (8). The framework is the surgeon general’s response to this public health priority, “a starting point for organizations in updating and institutionalizing policies, processes, and practices to best support the mental health and well-being of workers” (11). The framework defines five essentials for workplace mental health and well-being (11):
- Protection from harm
- Connection and community
- Work-life harmony
- Mattering at work
- Opportunity for growth
Each of the essentials is partnered with two human needs that ground our understanding. Safety and security, for example, are the needs paired with protection from harm, while dignity and meaning connect with mattering at work. In this first essay in the series, I explore the first essential, protection from harm.
Why does protection from harm matter to higher education professionals?
As I continue to support institutions across the country as they come to terms with cultures that are causing significant stress, overwhelm, and burnout among faculty and staff, protection from harm lies at the foundation of work that needs to be done. Faculty especially talk about their holistic well-being going ignored in the name of student success, needed accommodations or leaves being ungranted, and lingering feelings of betrayal for how the pandemic and return to campus were handled in many places.
And in the wake of the loss of Lincoln University’s Dr. Antoinette (Bonnie) Candia-Bailey to suicide in January, higher ed is yet again faced with crucial questions about the well-being of faculty and staff, not just our students. Emails from Candia-Bailey reveal a pattern of bullying from her supervisor and multiple unfulfilled attempts to gain accommodations for anxiety and depression. We cannot allow workplace cultures and behaviors that lead our colleagues to believe there is no other way out.
This essential goal is to provide a “safe and healthful work environment, protected from physical harm, injury, illness, and death. This is done through continued efforts to minimize occupational hazards and physical workplace violence, as well as psychological harm such as bias, discrimination, emotional hostility, bullying, and harassment. Security builds on safety to include financial and job security” (12). It suggests doing so by taking on four actions, listed below with my suggestions for enacting in higher education:
- Prioritize workplace physical and psychological safety, which includes “examining workload and adequacy of resources to meet job demands (e.g., staffing and coverage), reducing long working hours, and eliminating policies and productivity metrics that cause harm” (14). For example, leaders among faculty and staff could work together to audit workloads across the institution and establish baselines, metrics, and evaluation processes that honor well-being.
- Enable adequate rest and recovery time because “long work hours have been shown to raise workers’ risk for exhaustion, anxiety, and depression. Fatigue diminishes productivity as the risk of burnout soars” (15). Leaders can model taking real breaks and vacation time while authentically encouraging others to do so, which might mean creating conditions for faculty and staff not on nine-month contracts to have more vacation or sick time available.
- Normalize and support mental health and decrease mental health stigma “by validating challenges, communicating mental health and well-being as priorities, and offering both support and prevention services” (14). Research shows that many faculty decide not to disclose mental health information about themselves even when they could benefit from accommodations, because they fear stigma and alienation, even losing their jobs, in the culture of higher education that values logic and brainpower. Creating “mental health matters” working groups, offering workshops and opportunities to learn about mental health and cultural stigma, and training chairs and other leaders to engage with faculty about mental health could all support this action.
- Operationalize DEIA norms, policies, and programs by “confronting structural racism, microaggressions, ableism, and implicit bias” (15). Diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) is under assault from the political right, so creating action here might be harder than it was even a year or two ago, but it’s crucial nonetheless. How that happens will depend on the climate of the state and the institution.
In the next essay in this series, I’ll review the second and third essentials in the framework: connection and community as well as work-life harmony, further exploring how leaders in higher education can create workplace cultures that support faculty and staff mental health and well-being as well as students’.
Rebecca Pope-Ruark, PhD, is the director of the Office of Faculty Professional Development at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. She is the author of Agile Faculty: Practical Strategies for Research, Service, and Teaching (Chicago, 2017) and Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (Johns Hopkins, 2022).