Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a new column on how to improve the higher-ed workplace. Read the first essay, “Colleges Are Still Failing Their Employees.”
There came a point in her recovery from thyroid surgery when Elizabeth Popp Berman questioned if she could continue being a professor. In the middle of teaching a class on research methods, Berman advanced the slide in her presentation and fell silent. “I couldn’t make sense of it,” she told me. “My head was just swimming.”
For Berman, a professor of organizational studies at the University of Michigan, that surgery had followed on the heels of treatment for breast cancer and led to a two-year battle with fatigue and brain fog. Those moments — when the fog descended and remedies proved elusive — left her terrified, she said. “I wondered: Is it just that I don’t have the capacity to think anymore? And that really lasted a long time.”
During my research on the higher-education workplace, I have interviewed dozens of staff and faculty members similarly working through extreme hardship. Some were coping with long-term or chronic illness; for others, it was heartrending loss or complex caregiving responsibilities. Berman was ultimately able to stay in a job that she loves, but many others told me they weren’t supported when their minds or bodies wavered, when tragedy struck, or when caregiving duties couldn’t be sidelined for work. Some joined the exodus of employees who left higher education.
I’m sharing their stories here to explore steps that colleges, supervisors, and, really, all of us could take to more effectively support employees and colleagues facing a personal crisis.
“Idiosyncratic” support. Berman’s plight might surprise outside observers. She was at a career high point, having been recruited in 2019 to Ann Arbor. There she put the finishing touches on her second book, Thinking Like an Economist, published to widespread acclaim in 2022. The timing of her cancer diagnosis coincided with her first anniversary at Michigan — just long enough to be eligible for part-time sick leave. The onset of the pandemic also provided unanticipated but much-needed flexibility: namely, the chance to lay low while “bigger things were going on.”
How did she manage her health and work? With “idiosyncratic” support, she said:
- She had earned a sabbatical and used it as unofficial medical leave.
- When she became director of the university’s organizational-studies major, she was able to adjust her schedule and work when her mind and body were up to it.
- She was still teaching some but, after a particularly grueling semester, her administration provided her with a one-time course release.
It also helped that she had a dean at the time who, she said, “was very humane, very friendly to treating us as whole people.” As an organizational sociologist, Berman knows that not all workers in higher ed fare so well.
For example, one student-affairs leader I interviewed received her breast-cancer diagnosis before the pandemic, when remote and hybrid work arrangements were less common. She planned to do chemotherapy on Friday mornings and work from home the rest of the day. However, her supervisor deemed the request to work remotely — even for just one day a week — as too disruptive to the operation of the office and forced her to use her sick leave. During the course of treatment, she asked if she could join larger meetings by Zoom from her office on the campus, since she was immunocompromised. Her supervisor questioned if that was really necessary. Eventually, she got sick and her doctor said, “Listen, in all cases, I tell people to work during treatment, but I am now telling you to stop working. I’m worried about your health and work flexibility doesn’t seem to be an option for you.’”
Ultimately, this student-affairs leader went on unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and then took a job at a different institution. “I felt as though I wasn’t being treated with basic care and compassion as someone going through the worst experience of my life — something we constantly strive to do in student affairs for our students.”
My research suggests that issues like this continue to happen today. Supervisors like that are still around, and many staff members in higher education are still unable to access hybrid- and remote-work options.
The limits of leave policies. Taking a leave of absence is higher ed’s go-to solution when employee lives get messy. The problem is that leave policies only cover select situations, such as having a baby or caring for a sick family member. FMLA, which provides up to 12 weeks of job-protected, unpaid leave, is the only federally mandated leave policy. Yet by one estimate, 44 percent of workers in this country are not even eligible for FMLA because they hold part-time positions, work for small organizations, or haven’t been in their current jobs long enough. Plus, most employees can’t afford to go three months without a paycheck. Leave policies beyond FMLA exist, but their availability varies considerably from institution to institution and position to position.
Figuring out whether you’re eligible for leave and how to apply presents many hurdles for staff and faculty members. An instructional designer I interviewed was the primary caregiver for multiple family members with terminal illnesses. For much of that time, she was an adjunct and nervous to disclose her family health crisis to colleagues out of fear of seeming needy or inconvenient. When her father started failing, she was in a full-time position and decided to go on leave.
“I had talked to HR several times leading up to this,” she told me in an interview. “I wasn’t sure what kind of leave to take. Like, are we talking disability? What is in my best interest? And it was like I stumped them.” Finally, her supervisor intervened on her behalf, and she filled out paperwork for temporary disability while keeping vigil beside her father’s hospice bed.
Dependent on a sympathetic boss. Over and over in my research, I heard faculty and staff members say that the reason they were granted flexibility to cope with a health or personal crisis was because of a supportive manager, department head, or dean. Supervisors sometimes bent the rules or filled in gaps in campus policies with creative workarounds. But leaving such consequential workplace decisions to a single manager invites personality conflicts, jealousy, and confusion into an arena where equity, transparency, and empathy ought to preside.
When supervisors fell short, other colleagues sometimes played a mediating effect, offering help and commiseration. Yet that kind of informal support from co-workers varied, too. For example, the instructional designer found herself not only drowning in medical appointments but also additional work because of a slacking colleague who wasn’t even pulling their own weight, much less able to help in her moment of need.
When I asked people if they talked about personal-life difficulties openly in their department or institution, many said no. They often sensed an invisible signpost warding off such emotional exchanges. After all, airing these difficulties would reveal shortcomings in campus employment policies. Those shortcomings would be seen as incongruent with excellence and, therefore, professionally dangerous to express.
The sociologist Charlotte Bloch once observed that higher education is home to strong emotions — they are, in fact, what often drives staff and faculty members to dedicate their lives to developing students and advancing knowledge. At the same time, academe has an “organizational self-understanding” premised on “rationality, methodological principles, objectivity, and logical argument.” Within higher ed’s unique “culture of emotions,” Bloch said, certain feelings like sadness or fear “appear to be alien, irrelevant, or disruptive.”
Masking becomes an important survival tool in the campus workplace when you’re in pain or mourning. What I’ve learned in my research is that people are exhausted with masking in the higher-ed workplace. They want a sense of wholeness within themselves and in relation to others. Instead of sympathy, they seek compassion.
The thing about compassion that often gets overlooked is that it is an action word. Researchers explain that compassion is a multi-stage process that begins with noticing and making sense of others’ suffering and culminates with change to help those we care about.
Having spent time with these stories, I now notice just how ubiquitous hardship in the workplace is. I’m able to see that a colleague’s challenge today could easily be mine tomorrow. Based on my many conversations, I’ve been able to identify four key changes that would help institutions respond to employee hardships in a more consistent and compassionate way.
No. 1: Set campus parameters on how to support employees through hardships. Would anyone prefer that their supervisor be replaced with a human-resources office or a bureaucratic decision-making process? Probably not. There are genuine upsides to empowering supervisors to reassign tasks or offer more-flexible schedules to people coping with a personal crisis. At the same time, we don’t want supervisors deciding everything — they need policy guardrails, even if the policies themselves grant the supervisor some leeway to customize a response.
When it comes to personal-leave or remote-work requests, supervisors need more training and structure on how to guide employees through campus policies. Matthew T. Hora, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote about his experience with traumatic brain injury and advised institutions to train all supervisors on how to handle health disclosures and discuss accommodations. Many institutions have left choices around hybrid and remote-work arrangements up to supervisors without providing clear parameters for how those decisions should be made or how such potentially charged conversations should be handled.
Colleges need to temper a supervisor’s absolute discretion on these matters. Workers may benefit by having additional voices involved beyond the immediate supervisor, and by having the chance to appeal built into the process. When trying to figure out the right support to offer someone facing hardship, it may be appropriate to take a team approach or, if available, bring in the expertise of an ombudsperson or disability-services professional to arrive at a solution.
No. 2: Devise more leave options. There are common human experiences, such as divorce or the death of a parent, that aren’t routinely covered by leave policies. Bereavement leave, for example, is laughably short for many higher-education workers, hewing to the national average of five days. Creating leave options (ideally, paid) for a fuller range of life experiences — as well as written policies for short-term reduction of workload for complex situations that don’t fit neatly in a predefined category — would go a long way toward better supporting employees navigating hardship.
It turns out that tragedy doesn’t always wait until you’ve been on the job for a year.
Option B, an organization founded by Sheryl Sandberg to provide compassionate, everyday advice for people navigating loss, notes that best-in-class companies offer 20 days of paid bereavement leave. It also recommends employees should be able to take days off nonconsecutively because “grief is not one and done.” Beyond bereavement leave, the organization advocates for “compassionate leave” — a “catch-all category for life-altering and emergency losses and hardships.” According to Option B, research shows these practices increase employee morale and retention.
No. 3: Allow a partial return to work. After an employee takes leave, the assumption is often that they’ll return and hit the ground running — as if nothing has changed for them. But the reality is that returning to work can be a fraught proposition for many people. For instance, someone returning from a medical leave may not be 100 percent, physically or mentally, but simply ran out of leave time and had to either come back to work or quit (and certainly some do the latter).
Allison Whalen, chief executive of Parentaly, which helps companies improve workers’ parental-leave experiences, told me: “We just hear nonstop praise from employees about phase-back programs.” As an example, she mentioned an employer that provided 10 weeks of parental leave plus an optional part-time month to phase back in. “It feels nicer than suddenly returning to full-time work,” Whalen said. Some of the top companies in Parentaly’s research have also jettisoned or reduced the amount of time an employee is required to have worked there to be eligible for leave, allowing these benefits to be used immediately. It turns out that tragedy doesn’t always wait until you’ve been on the job for a year.
No. 4: Notice and check in on colleagues. Many of us tend to assume that interpersonal challenges are the sole responsibility of management. But there’s also a role for the rest of us to play. For example, we can take the first step in compassion and make a point of noticing our colleagues, considering how the realities of life can interfere with work, and making time to ask what’s happening in their lives. This may require slowing down the pace of our schedules, proactively inviting them to meet, and signaling an openness to talk — even about difficult subjects.
Since many circumstances in our lives don’t cleanly resolve overnight, we may need to check in with colleagues multiple times. The goal isn’t to be intrusive or demand that colleagues disclose personal information. Let them be in the driver’s seat, share what they have experienced and what supports would be helpful, and adjust our approach based on what they need.
In her 2022 presidential address to the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Joy Gaston Gayles declared, “The Great Resignation, I believe, is in response to the machine culture that has always been present in higher education — a culture that prioritizes productivity over humanity.” In my work, I’ve considered what it might look like for higher education to be a more humane workplace. Central to that transformation is acknowledging and valuing the intrinsic qualities that make us living, breathing humans. Our bodies and minds are fragile. We cannot avoid death and loss. And we need one another to survive and feel whole. The “machine culture” of higher education is particularly adept at discouraging us from noticing those things.
Whether you’re a university president, a faculty member, or an admissions counselor, I urge you to notice the people around you at work. Take an interest in their lives and recognize them as whole people. All of us should seek to reimagine campus culture in ways that make it just a little easier to be human at work.
