Wellbeing: Rhetoric or Reality?

Something’s been nagging at me through the holiday season. I’ve been pondering a theme in the corporate messaging that seemed to emerge in the final few weeks of the year, shared with me by a number of my coachees (from within and beyond the HE sector) and observed by others on a couple of social media platforms. The theme essentially was a note of thank you to staff, who had not only ensured continuity of service during the ‘unprecedented’ challenges of the year, but who had also delivered x or y project on time, on budget, without compromise to quality etc. I’m sure the sentiments expressed were genuine. However, they seemed to be striking a duff note. Throughout the year, as far as I could tell, almost every corporate communication was advising staff to reassess objectives and previously agreed deliverables, focusing on what absolutely needed to be done to maintain service and cutting out everything else, mindful of likely reduced staffing and also the impact on wellbeing of such sudden and considerable change in virtually every sphere of life. So how come these other projects had continued? It left me wondering how many staff/teams had actually had something removed from their to-do list for the year?

From what I can tell the question is relevant to a number of sectors, not just for HE. However, for those in HE, the question sits well alongside Kate Tapper’s WonkHE article about wellbeing (Getting through Covid-19 means rethinking resilience | Wonkhe), challenging the sector to ensure that there is genuine intent behind the wellbeing discourse: beautifully curated wellbeing offerings may actually be counter-productive to the psychological contract if there’s too much of a disconnect with how the business continues to drive workload. Leadership style and awareness of how decisions impact different teams can mitigate some of the pressure and some leadership teams have worked hard to try and get the balance right in their institutions. However, the system, as in the sector beyond the organisation’s walls, continues to dictate much of this pressure: the QA regime requires that the course be re-validated this year, regardless of whether the course team are having to shift the entire pedagogy to an online format; recruitment will be even more challenging next year so we must look to accelerate the new CRM software; minimal notice to respond to new policy announcements, which don’t appear to have been drafted in consultation with anyone who knows how an organisation like a university runs – and which are then revised, repeatedly. For many this is simply how the HE market now plays out and staff need to understand the institutional imperatives to attend to these issues alongside whatever Covid has thrown at us. It’s naïve to think otherwise. But it can make the rhetoric around wellbeing sound specious. The topic of burnout seems ever present and many senior management teams are concerned about how close to this are their direct reports, with so much uncertainty continuing as we enter 2021.

Beautifully curated wellbeing offerings may actually be counter-productive to the psychological contract if there’s too much of a disconnect with how the business continues to drive workload.