compiled by James A. Baumann
Ask anyone if they desire well-being, and there are pretty good odds they will answer in the affirmative. However, ask anyone to define well-being, and the answers will be all over the place. Why is it that something so universally desired can be so difficult to quantify, let alone achieve?
That’s one of the more pressing questions being considered within the campus housing profession. Most recently, it has been considered by a host of researchers and writers who contributed to a themed issue of The Journal of College and University Student Housing. Helmed by guest editor Jason Lynch, the issue explores the topic in a way that will help readers better understand what well-being looks like, how to manage their own, and how to advocate for the well-being of those whom they supervise.
Participants in this conversation include Lynch, an assistant professor of higher education at Appalachian State University; Max Schuster, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Pittsburgh; Brittany McDaniel, associate director of residential life at Washington University in St. Louis; Joshua Gaylord, an assistant residence director at Colorado State University; and Jillian Sturdivant, the associate director of housing and residence life at Winston-Salem State University.
Jason Lynch: Within the workplace, well-being is the ability to maintain your sense of self, feeling that you are meaningfully contributing, and feeling psychologically safe.
Jillian Sturdivant: Well-being means that the majority of your physical, mental, and spiritual (if applicable) selves are in alignment and that you can function at a thriving capacity rather than a surviving capacity most of the time. I would include financial well-being on the list as well. These areas look different for each person and will differ according to the intersectionality of their social identities.
Joshua Gaylord: Well-being means a sense of safety, agency, and fulfillment. Well-being can exist in stressful and challenging environments, and only by empowering well-being can we exist in those spaces sustainably.
Max Schuster: For me, well-being is about gaining personal and professional fulfillment, being relationally focused, giving and receiving positive energy, expressing gratitude, and finding the internal peace that comes from openly embracing life’s uncertainties.
Brittany McDaniel: Well-being for me means feeling content. I know I am well when I'm feeling satisfied, at peace, and just generally grateful with where I am and how I'm doing in life.
Sturdivant: Often there are demands required of housing and residence life from external and internal entities. As a supervisor and leader, I must look at what is essential to the foundation of the organization and consistently keep a pulse on my staff’s well-being. It’s also important to learn to advocate for staff and to understand that saying “no” to campus partners does not mean we are neglecting relationships; it means we are prioritizing how successful the work will be with a staff who is thriving more than surviving. I believe there is a balance to supporting and creating solid relationships with campus partners without affecting staff well-being.
Internally, we need to consistently review our practices and the why behind what we do. Innovation is an important part of higher education but should not be detrimental to staff well-being. We cannot talk about well-being without acknowledging the mass exodus of talented student affairs professionals from the field. If we just talk about well-being and do not implement consistent practices in our work, then we will continue to see the mass exodus. We have to include physical, mental, financial, and spiritual well-being in the conversation.
Gaylord: Over my six years of working in housing and residence life, I've seen well-being as a privilege rather than a fundamental necessity. The more upward mobility I've experienced, the more I've been able to maintain my sense of well-being. However, as a previous resident assistant, and from what I've heard from those I supervise, well-being isn't always accessible. Generalist student staff, such as RAs, live, work, and study within an environment that forces them to respond directly to crises and student needs. In a position of power, I've been able to create distance between myself and the demands of my profession, thus giving me room to prioritize my well-being, an ability we don't provide staff who are the frontline of student affairs.
Lynch: I began my career in housing in 2010 as an ACUHO-I intern. Since then, I have certainly seen an uptick in the expectations for housing professionals. Most notable is the response required by the severity and frequency of student mental health issues, including suicidal ideation, as well as increased demands from other areas of higher education to serve students in various ways. Housing departments seem to be the first ones called to deal with student emergencies or provide staff for various campus events, but they continue to be underpaid and overworked.
Schuster: More than a decade ago, I started my career in higher education in residence life as a full-time hall director. It was meaningful and fulfilling work that I enjoyed and appreciated immensely. Although responding to student emergencies was a crucial part of the job, it was a part of the job that happened just some of the time. By the time I ended my tenure as a resident director six years later, serious crises in the residence halls were occurring frequently. Since becoming a faculty member, I’ve advised a number of graduate students who served as assistant hall directors or held live-in roles in other departments with on-call responsibilities, and I continued to hear about the uptick in both the frequency and severity of student crises on college and university campuses. While it is important to provide robust care to students in times of emergency, we already know that ongoing exposure to traumas can have physical and psychological effects on the helpers. I think the surge in student crises on campus has substantially challenged staff well-being.
McDaniel: Over the past decade we have seen a greater emphasis on providing quality customer service to our students and their families. The rising costs of university coupled with the competition from off-campus student housing has resulted in a need to provide an experience for students that is not only educational, but also makes students believe they're getting their money's worth. This can lead to a feeling of dissonance for staff who might feel strongly that their role should not be oriented to customer service. Additionally, an increasing number of students are entering college with significant needs related to their mental and emotional well-being, and our staff are the individuals responsible for providing support. However, staff do not always enter their roles with the kind of educational background and training needed to sufficiently support these students, nor may many realize the degree to which they will be expected to support students with high levels of mental and emotional needs. Both the customer service expectations and the need to support students above and beyond what used to be the norm are contributing to the exhaustion, frustration, and burnout of staff.
Lynch: This is a complicated question and really centers on the intersection of several areas. First, our field is really bad at teaching boundary setting and managing up, yet we expect professionals to come to the job somehow automatically having these skills. Additionally, as higher education institutions become more competitive given enrollment declines, more pressure is put on student-facing staff to be customer centered, though customer service is often at odds with job expectations within housing, including educational, community building, and policy enforcement duties. Finally, there is a significant generational divide in the expectations of work environments and labor expectations within the housing field. New generations of professionals reject the notion that they should give more time than they are compensated for in the hope of moving up, but mid- and upper-level housing professionals remain stuck in mental models of the past.
Gaylord: As housing and residence life staff, we live where we work, and work where we live. It's hard to define self-boundaries and disengage when we don't have the space between our roles as people and professionals.
Schuster: As a faculty member in a higher education and student affairs program, I know that the graduate students in my classrooms genuinely care about and value the students they work with. Helping professionals, like resident assistants and hall directors, often invest high amounts of emotional labor into their roles. Though some staff can continually thrive in this environment, it can easily become fatiguing for many others. Well-being gets tricky for many staff to balance because of residence life’s very nature. Residence life is one of the areas of higher education that is always running, and its staff positions have broad duties and far-reaching responsibilities. Coupled with unexpected student crises and concerns, this all can create structural tensions wherein individual well-being for staff can, at least during certain times, be quite difficult to obtain.
McDaniel: One factor that contributes to this struggle is the chaos and unpredictability of our work. For live-in staff, needing to work nights regularly can make it harder to establish a regular routine outside of work. Additionally, when you live where you work and your neighbors are the students in your area, it can be hard to motivate yourself to leave campus and socialize with folks not associated with your institution.
Sturdivant: Housing and residence life staff are first responders for higher education institutions. I believe we have to be comfortable with acknowledging that the work we do is not typical and that it does affect our well-being. We deal with a lot of trauma, and often we do not categorize the experiences as that. We need to promote having a life outside of higher education and make sure that professional development conversations include the understanding that our title does not define our worth.
Sturdivant: Protocol and policy can have an enormous influence on the well-being of staff. I believe there is a difference between creating solid protocols and policies that cater to the success of students versus protocols and policies that cater strictly to the perspective that “we have always done it this way.” You cannot create protocols and policies that do not make sense for staff, especially if they cannot see how they are centered on student success.
Different generations are entering higher education, and their perspective tends to be centered on well-being more than it was for previous generations, and this forces us to do the work of understanding the why behind what we do. I am all for it! The questions and conversations hold me accountable as I ascend in my career.
I believe in staff taking time off and utilizing their paid time off often. I have encouraged my staff to take time off even if they do not feel like they need it. How the foundation of an organization is set up is essential to the well-being of staff. You cannot sustain a plant if the soil is tainted from the beginning. It does not matter what type of weather is occurring around the plant – the soil is what keeps it sturdy.
Schuster: Supervisors play one of the most crucial roles in promoting staff well-being, and each supervisor needs to be given the right training and resources to cultivate an environment that supports staff well-being. I recently co-authored an article that describes how a good supervisor can foster well-being among staff by being an attentive teacher and supportive mentor who regularly builds individual staff capacity, develops positive team dynamics, practices appreciation, and establishes trust. Together, these supervisory actions can create an affirming environment for staff.
Lynch: Listen to them. I mean really listen. In many research and consulting conversations I have with new housing professionals and their supervisors, there is often strife that seems to result from half-listening (primarily due to the overwhelming amount of work). For example, I sat with a supervisor who spoke to how they are always telling their staff to take flex days and to seek counseling resources from the school's Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Yet when I talk to the staff, they say they have told their supervisor that these suggestions aren't helpful. Taking a day off doesn't help when you live on campus, and particularly in an area that may not have a vibrant off-campus community, such as rural schools. Staff also relayed their mistrust in EAP programs and the limiting options for counseling due to cost, location, or the difficulty of finding a counselor who fits their needs.
Gaylord: As supervisors, for better or worse, we are proxies for every supervisor our staff has had. It's our responsibility to redefine that relationship and commit to actions that demonstrate how we prioritize individual well-being, honesty, agency, and communication. Helping others manage well-being starts with creating a relationship where being unwell isn't defined as a sign of incompetence but instead as an indication of resilience.
McDaniel: Use your knowledge and experience to coach your staff on ways they can care for themselves in the role. Many supervisors were once in a live-in role and likely experienced the challenges mentioned in the previous question. Have conversations both one-on-one and in team settings that prompt folks to think about how they are flexing their time, establishing a routine, and getting off campus. It can be hard to get outside the bubble of your institution depending on where you're at geographically, so having ongoing conversations that encourage staff to meet new people and sign up for a group, hobby, or class that occurs off campus are effective ways to help staff manage their well-being.
Gaylord: I would suggest de-generalizing staff roles and training more specialists to handle mental health and crisis response.
Schuster: Right now, we’re at the exciting intersection where theory and research are more and more meeting practice in some bold and resourceful ways. For example, the new residential staff model I’ve read a lot about at George Washington University is an inventive approach that completely re-envisions the traditional staffing structure, with professional community coordinators instead of resident assistants or hall directors. Similarly, more institutions are embedding social workers, case managers, or clinicians in their residence life operations, which can keep residence life staff from being pulled in multiple directions. Additionally, low hanging fruit exists for improving professional staff well-being as human resource and management research continually tells us that giving staff more vacation days and personal time off boosts overall well-being and improves productivity. Over time, continuing to advance this work will require both small-scale fixes to address immediate issues and large-scale overhauls that focus on long-lasting solutions.
Lynch: Many housing departments have switched to a contract model for full-time, live-in staff, where these professionals cycle out every three to five years. As a result of such policies, these professionals are pushed out right as they begin getting a feel for the job and learning how to set healthy boundaries. When I was a new professional, I often looked up to those who had worked in live-in roles for many years as they taught me how to keep perspective, say no, and maintain my well-being.
Sturdivant: I believe that Employee Assistance Programs, as they relate to counseling services, should be talked about more and given as a professional development tool.
McDaniel: As soon as staff start in their roles, have an open conversation about what flex time means at this institution and remind them to utilize flex time after having a long duty night or working an after hours program or event. Along the same lines, remind staff to use their vacation time and take sick time when they're not feeling well. Let them know that the job will always be here, but they need to be well before they can take care of others. Additionally, share information about EAP resources on a regular basis with staff and explain the array of support an employee can receive through this program.
Gaylord: Offer trauma-informed, restorative, and authoritative leadership training for both supervisors and staff. Sharing a collective language and respect for boundaries creates a culture in which we can achieve our goals and encourage, protect, and create space for staff to prioritize well-being.
Schuster: There are a number of structural factors that make balancing well-being difficult for those working in residence life. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how higher education and student affairs (HESA) programs can teach well-being maintenance strategies to graduate students so that they can be adequately prepared to handle the effects that come from responding to student crises during the course of their careers. Right now, I’m not convinced that most of these programs are doing enough to directly teach these skills to graduate students before they are encountering or responding to a crisis for the first time. At the same time, I’m sure that some HESA programs do this type of training exceptionally well. As a field, HESA has a lot to learn from other relationally focused disciplines that regularly respond to crises and trauma, like social work, counseling, and emergency management. If we get better at teaching these skills at the graduate level, we could potentially help promote staff well-being for the long term. This is just one of the many pieces of the overall organizational puzzle that can help open new possibilities for student and staff well-being in residence life.
Sturdivant: We have great conversations surrounding well-being, but action is needed to hold the conversation about staff being appreciated and being heard. As I have gone up the ladder of housing and residence life, I have learned to be aware of my title, and when I give a task to someone this can look different from a peer doing the same thing. They might feel like they have to rush to get it completed, when in actuality they have a few weeks or a month. Planning (if an organization can) and being aware of the influence of titles is something to think about.
Lynch: Many things need to change, but two immediately come to mind: (1) Senior housing officers need to understand that the housing jobs of today are drastically different from when they were new professionals. Acknowledging this, they must be braver in advocating on behalf of their staff to senior leaders at their institution in order to protect staff from unreasonable work demands and lack of resources. (2) Housing professionals desperately need ongoing formal supervisory training at all levels. In almost every study I read related to staff well-being, and even within my own research, the one common thread that comes up is poor supervision.
McDaniel: We need to start critically considering if we are sufficiently staffed and resourced to support the well-being of the students who are entering our institution. For institutions in urban settings, how can we partner with community organizations to offer resources and supports that our staff don't have capacity to offer? How are we communicating transparently with prospective students and families about the level of support we are able to reasonably provide should they enroll at our institution?
James A. Baumann is the editor of Talking Stick.
