Amid rapid shifts in funding appropriations and the evolving landscape of postsecondary education, workplace wellbeing has emerged as an institutional imperative rather than a peripheral concern. The viability of colleges and universities increasingly depends on their capacity to cultivate environments in which faculty and staff can thrive professionally, psychologically, and socially (McClure, 2025). When the wellbeing of those who sustain the academic mission erodes, so does the institution’s capacity for innovation, excellence, and trust. While administrative leadership often experiences cyclical turnover, faculty constitute the enduring core of institutional culture. They anchor the academic mission, embody institutional memory, and sustain continuity through successive changes in senior leadership. Recent data from CUPA-HR’s Higher Education Workforce Turnover Report (2025) affirms that faculty have the lowest voluntary turnover rates among all employee categories. Provosts, however, now average just over three years in their positions (ACE, 2024). This volatility at the senior level—coupled with frequent structural reorganizations—can destabilize the academic community and erode the very conditions that foster faculty wellbeing, including job satisfaction, organizational trust, and work-life integration (Hyett & Parker, 2015) and faculty thriving including trust, belonging, and autonomy (McClure, 2025 and Boysen et al., 2025). When neglected, educational quality and student outcomes are compromised, undermining the institution’s mission and public trust.
Essential Components of Workplace Wellbeing
An evidence-informed approach to workplace wellbeing in higher education centers on five interrelated components: growth, mattering, harmony, protection, and connection. Each reflects both individual and systemic commitments that advance equity, mental health literacy, and inclusive institutional culture (Office of the Surgeon General, 2022). By attending intentionally to the areas relevant to workplace mental health and wellbeing, higher education leaders and change agents can directly transform the entire educational eco system starting with the user experience. The importance of acknowledging, facilitating, and modeling wellness in the workplace is only gaining momentum. According to the Surgeon General (2022), employees have the right to feel safe, learn, grow, connect, and belong in their places of employment.
Opportunities for Growth
Faculty wellbeing flourishes when professional growth is supported through meaningful development opportunities, recognition of scholarly and pedagogical innovation, and pathways for leadership. Such investment yields institutional dividends—enhancing teaching quality, research productivity, reputation, and competitive advantage in securing external funding.
Mattering and Institutional Dignity
The sense that one’s work is valued and consequential cultivates intrinsic motivation and organizational commitment. Institutions that operationalize dignity and purpose through transparent recognition systems and shared governance mechanisms reinforce the reciprocal relationship between individual fulfillment and institutional success.
Work–Life Harmony and Autonomy
Autonomy in course design, research agendas, and scheduling fosters intrinsic motivation and protects against burnout (Santiago-Torner et al., 2025). As faculty increasingly balance multiple institutional and community-based initiatives, flexible structures that honor professional discretion enable sustained engagement and creativity.
Protection from Harm and Moral Injury
Beyond mitigating burnout, addressing the phenomenon of moral injury—the distress arising when faculty are constrained from enacting professional values—has become urgent. Recent scholarship (Boysen et al., 2025) highlights inadequate administrative support and systemic barriers to quality instruction as precipitating factors. Institutions that cultivate psychological safety, procedural justice, and transparent communication structures can safeguard faculty from harm while strengthening trust and retention.
Connection and Community
A sense of belonging and collegiality remains central to academic identity. Intentional structures that promote collaboration, mentorship, and cross-departmental engagement mitigate isolation, foster collective efficacy, and align with the broader movement toward campus wellbeing and inclusion.
A Call for Institutional Integration
Through the process of integrating mental health literacy and wellness education, institutions of higher education have the opportunity to strengthen infrastructure, utilize strategies to maximize engagement, ensure innovative relevant curriculum, and build accessible equitable service delivery approaches to enhance workplace wellbeing. As a practice of integration, customized mental health literacy and wellness education can shape the culture and climate of each unique campus (Both Gragg & Lockhardt, 2025).
In an era marked by fiscal uncertainty, shifting student demographics, and public scrutiny, the intentional integration of workplace wellbeing principles is both a moral and strategic necessity. Institutions that invest in the wellbeing of their faculty are not only better positioned to retain talent and ensure instructional excellence but also to sustain the trust and vitality of the academic community they serve. Sustaining institutional health requires intentional infrastructure, not episodic programming. This requires attending to key aspects of implementation including infrastructure, psychological safety, impact, policy, and institutionalization. Following are key considerations.
- Build Infrastructure, Not Just Programs. Create or reimagine administrative roles—such as Health and Wellbeing Officer or Director of Workplace Wellbeing—to ensure that mental health and wellness are strategically integrated across divisions and decision-making processes. An alternative would be to ensure existing higher education leaders gain the essential training needed to integrate the skills required to meet the mental health and wellbeing workforce mandate.
- Foster Psychological Safety. Model transparency and care by training managers and deans using the Surgeon General’s Framework for Workplace Mental Health and Wellbeing (2022) to reduce stigma, address burnout, and mitigate moral injury. Ensure the use and integration of mental health literacy and wellness education campaigns including the National Workplace Bullying Coalition and End Workplace Abuse.
- Measure and Communicate Impact. Adopt assessment tools grounded in The 7 Vital Conditions to track and report outcomes, reinforcing accountability and positioning institutions for recognition through initiatives such as Mental Health America’s Bell Seal for Workplace Mental Health.
- Align Policy and Practice. Integrate wellbeing principles into HR policy, workload expectations, and collective agreements to ensure congruence between institutional rhetoric and lived experience.
- Institutionalize Shared Leadership. Form cross-divisional Workplace Wellbeing Committees to promote equity, represent diverse voices, and ensure sustainability beyond individual champions.
Ultimately, advancing workplace wellbeing in higher education requires leaders to model the very values they seek to promote—care, connection, and accountability. Doing so not only supports faculty and staff thriving but also strengthens institutional resilience, innovation, and mission alignment.
Actionable Next Steps
Senior faculty interested in facilitating change within departments are in a strategically powerful and enduring role to discuss and/or help implement these changes. Their longevity allows for the continuance of these policies through the volatility of institutional restructuring and administrative turnover once they have taken effect. Further, they benefit from positional power to help advocate for junior faculty as they may be aware of pitfalls within the institution and/or department. Helping people feel like their work matters is one crucial component of promoting an inclusive culture within workspaces to facilitate workplace wellbeing. The following interventions based on the Surgeon General’s (2022) Mental Health and Workplace Wellbeing initiative are designed to empower faculty and administrators to cocreate workspaces where everyone can thrive.
Work-Life Harmony
Work-life harmony should be made possible for faculty and staff, and not just aspirational by encouraging flexible scheduling policies and aligning workload with realistic expectations; this can include having staggered flex days/hours if possible. Flexible scheduling allows faculty and staff to make time for other professional pursuits, family, and working around high personal productivity hours. This practice promotes efficient performance at work and faculty agency in deciding how to best balance work and life. Moreover, yearly mandatory check-ins to make certain faculty teaching, service, and administrative assignment loads are distributed equitably may further ensure that all faculty members have opportunities to achieve professional and personal goals. At the administrative level, one can track projects that are already discussed within monthly organizational meetings and determine whether some personnel are consistently shouldering a majority of the responsibilities.
Mattering at Work
Work and alignment will understandably change across the developmental lifespan of a faculty member. Conducting purpose alignment check-ins with faculty and staff can be as simple as drawing attention to how projects drive the mission of the department or college and have them provide feedback on where they feel the project may be misaligned with the overall goal. This procedure emphasizes transparency on projects and highlights how faculty work helps achieve institutional goals. Additionally, check-ins can also be used to identify alignment of institutional mission, or whether skills and passions may be best addressed through different projects. For example, if a faculty or staff member’s main passions are to improve student services and the students’ experiences, they may feel misaligned within the institution if their projects are predominantly administrative in nature. Fundamental aims of purpose alignment help transform routine tasks into meaningful contributions that support wellbeing within an institution.
Protection From Harm
Moreover, senior faculty and seasoned staff can work alongside administrators to create accessible documentation stipulating promotion pathways. Understanding how growth is supported within an organization fosters belief and trust that the process is fair, efforts worthwhile, and professional growth feasible. Explicit pathways through faculty and staff handbooks may reduce disengagement stemming from uncertainty related to advancement and perceived favoritism. Implementation can be accomplished by clearly defining descriptions of skills, experiences, and performance expectations required at each level. Further, promotion criteria should be accessible and comprehensively indicate how one is evaluated (e.g., performance metrics, contributions, peer feedback), when review cycles occur, and how the process works. Removing ambiguity from this process allows for transparent and fair practices that will improve morale and engagement. Importantly, both staff and faculty leaders should be expected to prioritize evaluative work as a contribution toward the collective wellness culture including the evaluation of administration. Conversely, designing, instituting, and following policies for addressing behavior known to contribute to psychologically unsafe work environments is paramount in creating a caring culture.
Opportunity for Growth
Providing routine professional development supports a culture of engagement. Whether through in-house expertise or learning stipends, this process signals institutional interest in workforce wellbeing and growth beyond immediate duties. Such opportunities promote creativity, autonomy, purpose, and belonging within institutions and enhance equitable opportunities for those who may not have the means to attend conferences or workshops otherwise. Small stipends ($150-$500) can be utilized for educational materials or to attend conferences or workshops and obtain online course certifications. Implementation may require a one-page statement of purpose outlining the learning opportunity and expected personal and institutional benefits. By having a brief and simplified process, these stipends are easily attainable for faculty and staff without a burdensome reimbursement process. Furthermore, recipients can share what they have learned with their department so that others are made aware of potential opportunities.
Connection and Community
Similarly, by lowering procedural barriers and affirming faculty, each of the initiatives above help counteract the dynamics Bechard and Both Gragg (2020) describe in which first-generation and underrepresented faculty are expected to “assimilate” into dominant academic culture without reciprocal institutional investment. Encouraging seasoned faculty to engage in the process of institutional structural enhancement reinforces collective competency development where belonging is the behavioral reframe on individual adaptation. Here, behaviors such as showing up, inviting others, bearing witness, and saying the quiet parts out loud (Patel, 2023) move us toward a more collectively caring culture.
These small yet impactful steps can meaningfully enhance satisfaction and belonging while addressing the institutional strain that results when people feel overextended or disconnected from the academic community. Perhaps most importantly at this crucial juncture, any action toward a healthy higher education workforce is sure to advance learning, evolution, and innovation.
References
Bechard, A. J., & Both Gragg, J. (2020). Microaggressions and the Marginalization of First-Generation Faculty. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education, Summer 2020, 139–147.
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Boysen, G. A., Luebbers, B. E., Schmidt, P., & Wylie, M. M. (2025). Moral injury among college teachers: Prevalence, types, and negative effects. College Teaching, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2025.2559950
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