The champions and challenges of wellbeing

Professor Sarah Dodd led a recent workshop for a group of female academics about wellbeing at work – here, she discusses how we can all benefit from looking out for each other. 

CYGNA is a group whose main objective is to promote interaction among female academics and provide a forum for learning, support and networking. Founded and led by Anne-Wil Harzing, Argyro Avgoustaki, Linn Eleanor Zhang and Shasha Zhao in 2014, there are over 260 members from more than 30 countries. 

CYGNA holds bi-monthly meetings and at our November meeting I was invited to focus on wellbeing, specifically – as it’s an academics group – academic wellbeing. Many of the issues we discussed are pertinent to all those who work in or study in a university or other sector, however, especially during these pandemic times.

We’re now through the holidays, the days are getting lighter (slowly!) but it’s still a good time to focus on our wellbeing. Who knows what lies ahead this year? There's been so much uncertainty in all aspects of life over the last two years that we still need to ensure we are doing all we can to look after ourselves.

Our meeting was online – naturally – and I’d asked everyone to prepare one or two postcards on the ‘champions and challenges’ of wellbeing. These cards were then shared with others in break out rooms and we created a collage of them on the Miro co-creation platform that I had set up. It was a great way to reflect on what stresses us out and what helps our wellbeing.

Champions of wellbeing

The postcards showed that flexibility and self-determination in an academic life can allow us to build healthy daily life patterns that together form a solid foundation for wellbeing. Support for wellbeing comes too from freedom, space and time for family, for exercise, for nature, for pets and for all our other passions. A work environment that fosters wellbeing is seen as one manifesting the freedom, space and flexibility to build individually meaningful life patterns, at home and work. This is particularly important since life outside work was also seen as a major champion of academic wellbeing, giving perspective, new ideas, new skills, practices and disciplines.

What was also evident in the postcard responses was the crucial role which collaboration, community, connection and compassion play in championing academic wellbeing – but, for all of us, supporting and being supported in the workplace is an important issue and emerged as a significant theme.

Mutual support, being able to foster collective and individual growth, development, belonging and wellbeing were all ideas that came up. Examples included mentoring, being mentored and inspiring others through our work and life path. Self-development of new skills was also cited as fulfilling; including rising to the challenges of new IT. But while challenging, it’s also something to be celebrated; a part of personal growth and learning.

Challenges of wellbeing

With regard to challenges, we found mirror images to the ‘champions’ - the dark and light sides of academic life again centred round time, tasks, (un)supportive cultures, (dis)connections, places and people, feeling (un)valued.

It can be challenging, too, to balance so many diverse tasks, new computer systems and communiques, especially when workload models and communication systems seemingly contribute to these challenges. Feeling pressured to engage with work at the weekend is one downside of flexibility and there was a powerful sense from the postcards of coercive work cultures – which caused fear of failure, rejection, apathy and aggression.

Job insecurity and precarious career paths were highlighted, showing deep job insecurity in an already highly challenging workplace context. The physical closeness of colleagues on campus is a comfort and support – that has been much missed during these online years by some, and loneliness can also be a burden to cope with. Many workplaces around the world will also have dealt with these issues.

Wellbeing matters

At the meeting, I reminded the group that "acorns can grow into big strong trees". I gave the example of Glasgow’s Suffrage Oak, planted more than a century ago by Louisa Lumsden (1840-1935) to mark the first votes for women. Dame Louisa was also one of the first five women to complete a degree at a UK university, like myself, at Cambridge’s Girton College. Glasgow’s Suffrage Oak, like these stories, grows with – and connects - the past, present and future stories of the fight for women’s equal rights.

We can all strive to make a difference on a daily basis. Small changes can have big effects as Anne-Wil Harzing’s blog Changing academic culture: one email at a time.... Perhaps the biggest difference we can each make is role-modelling kindness; to each other, to our students, to ourselves. Cultures of creative collaboration can house joyful places to learn and work, which – helpfully – tend also to be more innovative, productive, and cohesive.

I’ll be leading a similar workshop on sustaining researcher wellbeing, for the RENT conference’s online programme, on March 15. This time, with Friedericke Welter of Seigen University, we will be exploring scholarly wellbeing and flourishing within the fields of entrepreneurship and small business.

We are lucky at Strathclyde that wellbeing has been a key focus over the last two years. For example, in the early days of the pandemic, we were given Fridays off which, as lockdown eased, then transformed into a culture of ‘meeting-free’ Fridays. The University has a number of options for those feeling under stress to access help.

And in the Business School, David Somerville is our Wellbeing Champion. He has throughout the pandemic found ways to bring staff together when we couldn’t be with each other in person and found ways to share good news and give support to each other.

Let’s all look out for each other and our wellbeing in 2022!

You can find a fuller blog post celebrating the workshop, and with more resources here