Words and phrases like burnout, work-life balance, and turnover have found a commonplace in student affairs conversations. We’ve come to accept these as inevitable trials without pushing back on what causes and solutions exist. We advise overworked newbies to, “find places off-campus to re-energize”, “only answer emails during work hours”, and my favorite, “say no”. But the reality is that when your job is to mold the minds and experiences of our future leaders, you struggle to turn a blind eye. Instead, you provide the best possible service you can with limited resources, cut budgets, and great enthusiasm.

It’s the field we jokingly say we fell into; the one that we certainly didn’t choose for the money. Salaries are low, growth is slow, but the love of service is strong. Without a doubt, student affairs professionals are some of the most devoted workers you’ll find; committing nights, weekends, holidays, and personal time to meet their students’ needs. We live for the thank-you emails and joyous encounters on campus when they tell us about how helpful our advice was. Day after day, we stumble into our offices, still exhausted from the day before and jump right into emails, appointments, meetings, webinars, and campus events. During summer retreats, we map out our strategic plan. We set goals for student contact, draft our list of events for the year along with assessments we’ll use to measure efficacy, and we think, “we’re going to kill it this year!” What we often don’t realize is that it’s killing us. We martyr over how busy we are and are satisfied with a few memes that help us laugh away our pain. But student affairs professionals need intentional support.

This means more than providing a space for rants and small budgets for occasional conference attendance. Supporting these selfless professionals means putting systems in place to ensure that they are consistently happy, healthy, engaged, and growing in their roles. It's time to stop being so puzzled by what drives these hardworking professionals out of jobs they once loved so much. It’s time we invest in their development as much as they invest in their students'. It's time we get serious about talent management and staff development. At a time when student needs are changing and university budgets are being slashed, we can no longer afford to focus solely on the work of student affairs while ignoring the workers. Without resources that encourage your staff to talk openly about their experiences and aspirations, you’re essentially asking a luxury vehicle to run on fumes.

Conversations that we need to start having include ones about:

Strategically recruiting, selecting, and on-boarding skilled staff

Examining workplace engagement and addressing red flags

Championing job satisfaction, well-being, and work-life balance

Encouraging training and learning development beyond conference attendance

Discussing career development and succession planning

Examining leadership and teamwork

Fostering innovation, motivation, rewards, and recognition

Offering coaching and mentorship opportunities

Tackling productivity and performance management

Admittedly, talent management and staff development can be cumbersome goals for department leaders who are already stretched thin. But the beauty of student affairs is it's collaborative nature. Our love for continued education should be evident in how much time we invest in learning and implementing the aforementioned HR functions. Start by sharing and discussing this article. Follow up with contacts to people who are experienced in talent management and staff development. Stay the course by turning this into an industry-wide conversation. It's our only chance to save our field but we can do it, one overwhelmed #SAPro at a time.

I look forward to continuing this conversation with you here and beyond. If you're on twitter, share your thoughts using #HESAHR or email me directly at RaynaAAnderson@gmail.com.