When discussing health and well-being, we primarily focus on students. Our missions surround students, which leads us to, understandably, center our efforts on their well-being challenges. This work is critical, complicated, and requires a level of attention that may cause us to overlook the well-being of the entire campus, including the faculty and staff who interact with students every day.
Why is faculty and staff well-being important?
Campus life is an interconnected system which students do not shape alone. All types of professionals on campus — professors, advisors, residence life staff, safety personnel, counselors, nurses, and countless others — are experiencing the conditions of and helping to create the campus environment.
Faculty and staff are among the most influential determinants of a student’s college experience, providing support, mentorship, and care day-to-day. A Healthy Minds survey found that faculty and staff are seen as a mental health resource on campus, with majority of campus professionals reporting regularly discussing mental health concerns with students.1 If faculty and staff are burned out and exhausted, offering support to students becomes much more difficult, and the campus struggles to thrive.
Ensuring faculty and staff well-being is a strategic imperative for higher education, as described by the American Conference of Academic Deans, where institutional innovation, excellence, trust, and educational quality depend on environments in which faculty and staff can thrive professionally, psychologically, and socially.2 When those conditions deteriorate, educational quality and student outcomes can suffer.
How to support faculty and staff: A systems issue
From a systems-thinking perspective, well-being functions much like any other campus outcome. It emerges from the interactions between policies, practices, relationships, leadership, and culture of an institution. When the workplace leads to burnout, stress, and anxiety, mental health is likely to decline, along with student engagement, capacity, organizational trust, collaboration, and improvement efforts. On the other hand, individuals who feel supported, valued, and connected to their workplace experience better mental health outcomes, are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors, can promote a thriving campus culture, and uphold an institution’s academic mission. When one part of the system is struggling, the effects ripple outward.
The Office of the U.S. Surgeon General highlights five essentials for ensuring mental health and well-being are embedded in each corner of a workplace:3
Protection from harm:
- Prioritizing workplace physical and psychological safety
- Ensuring adequate rest, mental health support, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) norms and policies
Connection and community:
- Creating cultures of inclusion and belonging
- Fostering teamwork and collaboration
Work-life harmony:
- Respecting boundaries between work and personal time
- Increased access to paid leave and flexible scheduling
Mattering at work:
- Engaging workers in workplace decisions and connecting individuals to the organizational mission
- Providing a living wage
Opportunities for growth:
- Offering quality training, education, and mentoring
- Fostering clear and equitable pathways for career advancement
These components reflect individual and systemic commitments that advance equity, inclusive institutional culture, and mental health — creating workplaces that are engines of well-being.
Moving toward whole campus well-being
Successful campuses often recognize that student, staff, and faculty well-being cannot exist without overarching campus well-being, including all people in all facets of the institution. Even still, a thriving campus is more than well-being among its populations — it includes healthy settings and healthy systems.
Frameworks such as the Okanagan Charter help illustrate what this shift can look like in practice.4 The Charter, a globally recognized framework for health-promoting colleges and universities, calls on institutions to embed health into all aspects of campus culture. Rather than viewing well-being as the responsibility of a single department, or as the goal for a single population, the Charter promotes a whole-campus approach in which policies, leadership, operations, academics, physical environments, and relationships all play equal roles in well-being.
Faculty and staff well-being are an important part of the equation for creating the healthy systems and settings that allow entire campus communities to flourish. If institutions truly believe that health and well-being are foundational to learning, belonging, and success, that belief must be reflected not only in student-facing programs but also in how faculty and staff are supported.
As higher education continues to evolve toward a more comprehensive vision of well-being, the Okanagan Charter offers a reminder that thriving campuses are built not only by supporting individual students, but by cultivating healthy people, healthy places, and healthy systems across the entire institution.
A thriving campus is not created through isolated well-being programs or individual efforts alone. It is built through cultures, systems, settings, and relationships that enable everyone to succeed. When the system supports faculty and staff well-being, they are better equipped to educate, mentor, and care for students. When the campus that supports students thrive, students are far more likely to thrive as well.
Resources:
- Healthy Minds Network (2024). The Healthy Minds Study: 2023-2024 Faculty and Staff Report. Accessed on July 30, 2026. https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/HMS-2024-Faculty-Staff-National-Data-Report.pdf
- Gragg, J.B., Cervantes-Borges, A. (2025 Nov). American Conference of Academic Deans Faculty Wellbeing as a Strategic Imperative in Higher Education. Accessed on July 30, 2026. https://acad.org/resource/faculty-wellbeing-as-a-strategic-imperative-in-higher-education/
- Office of the U.S. Surgeon General (n.d.). Five Essentials for Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being. Accessed on July 30, 2026. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/five-essentials-workplace-mental-health-well-being.pdf
- Okanagan Charter. (n.d.). U.S. Health Promoting Campuses Network. Accessed on July 30, 2026. http://ushpcn.org/okanagan-charter/
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