Since the pandemic, employees have experienced record-high stress and burnout, and are increasingly drawn to organisations that genuinely support their wellbeing. In a financial landscape where universities are increasingly exploring ways to cut costs, resisting the temptation to jettison investment in employee wellbeing is crucial.
However, with this comes the risk of “carewashing,” where superficial gestures of care mask deeper issues. Many institutions fall into this trap – offering superficial solutions like mindfulness training or yoga classes in isolation, without addressing deeper systemic issues. Carewashing, akin to greenwashing, involves misleadingly portraying a caring culture while failing to enact meaningful change.
A 2024 Gallup survey indicates that the percentage of employees who strongly agree that their organisation cares about their overall wellbeing has plummeted from 49 per cent in 2020 to 21 per cent in 2024. This stark decline highlights the growing gap between organisational rhetoric and reality.
Token gestures are not enough; genuine care requires making structural changes and a solid commitment to addressing the issues affecting staff. For instance, universities must create policies that promote flexible working conditions, ensure psychological safety, and offer comprehensive mental health resources.
To match their actions with their words and tackle problems like work-life balance and psychological safety, universities must go beyond superficial measures. They must implement structural changes while demonstrating a deep commitment to supporting their staff. This may involve implementing policies that promote flexible working conditions, ensuring psychological safety, and providing comprehensive mental health resources. To avoid the pitfalls of carewashing, all levels of leadership need to implement and support these initiatives consistently. Your dedication to genuine care is vital in this process.
What causes carewashing?
Universities face several structural challenges that contribute to carewashing, not least institutional inertia. Many universities have deeply entrenched systems and processes that resist change, making implementing new policies that genuinely address employee wellbeing challenging. As a result, programs like mindfulness sessions or yoga classes are often introduced as quick fixes. While these require minimal structural adjustments, they lack the impact that more comprehensive changes could offer.
High-visibility but low-impact initiatives are often introduced to create an illusion of care. Token gestures, such as sporadic wellness workshops or one-off mental health days, are easier to implement and promote than comprehensive, long-term strategies. However, they fail to address the root causes of employee stress and burnout.
Lack of leadership commitment can be an issue. Actual change requires buy-in from the highest levels. Without a genuine commitment from university leaders, wellbeing initiatives often lack the necessary support and resources. In principle, leaders may endorse wellness programmes – but there’s a need to integrate these into the broader organisational strategy and culture.
Even when universities recognise the importance of employee wellbeing, they may need more resources to support meaningful initiatives. Budget constraints and competing priorities can result in underfunded programs that cannot provide comprehensive support to staff.
Institutions may prioritise other objectives, such as academic excellence or financial performance, over employee wellbeing, but neglecting wellbeing means they will never achieve the potential of these goals. This misalignment of goals can also lead to initiatives aimed more at enhancing the institution’s image than genuinely improving the working conditions for staff, resulting in a gap between the institution’s rhetoric and the reality experienced by employees.
Finally, universities must examine their policies, which are often all about compliance but lack the human touch. Examples include fertility policies hidden in maternity policy documents, bereavement leave policies that offer no provision for additional unpaid leave, counselling services, or flexible work arrangements during the grieving period, and grievance procedures prone to abuse.
Practice kindness instead
To properly support employee wellbeing and avoid carewashing, universities must make structural changes to support their commitments. This includes creating clear policies such as flexible working hours, remote work options, and adequate leave provisions. Additionally, it’s crucial to ensure psychological safety by cultivating a culture of open communication, trust, and clear reporting channels and understanding why this isn’t in place. Investing in mental health resources, involving university leaders in wellbeing initiatives, and gathering regular feedback are essential strategies for addressing carewashing.
Kindness plays a crucial role in supporting employee wellbeing and preventing carewashing. By embedding kindness into institutional culture, universities can create more supportive, engaging, and resilient work environments. Kindness fosters trust among employees and management, leading to psychological safety where employees can express themselves without fear of negative consequences. Acts of kindness also promote inclusivity and respect, creating a positive atmosphere where everyone feels they belong. Moreover, a kind and supportive environment can help build resilience and adaptability among employees, improving the organisation’s overall strength.
However, kindness can be challenging, especially in high-pressure environments like universities or when faced with challenging situations. It requires patience, empathy, and understanding and may necessitate setting aside personal biases or frustrations. It involves holding a mirror up to the dark corners of institutional culture, and the bad behaviour is ignored to the point that it is endemic and needs honesty. Despite its challenges, kindness remains fundamental to creating a supportive and inclusive work environment. Recognising the difficulties in practising kindness can encourage empathy and understanding among employees and help foster a culture where genuine acts of kindness are valued and appreciated.
To make kindness a central part of university policies and culture, institutions should implement training programs to educate staff and management on the importance and practice of kindness in the workplace. They should also establish recognition systems to reward acts of kindness and develop inclusive policies that reflect a commitment to kindness, such as flexible work arrangements and mental health support. Encouraging leaders to model kindness in their interactions and decision-making is crucial in promoting a caring culture.
Higher education leaders and policymakers: it’s time to join this movement. By prioritising kindness and wellbeing, we can set a new standard for academic excellence and create a more inclusive, supportive, and thriving educational landscape. Your teams will remember what you did for them.
Carewashing is fast becoming endemic in the sector, however killing with kindness also needs to be avoided. We could start by getting rid of the ‘disposable cog in the machine’ mind set (in)Human Resources departments engender and go back to a caring, personal, Personnel department with staff that actually care about people not just the maximum profit for minimum cost sausage making machine most Universities have become.
Cost sausage machine is a great description of how it can feel. I think it is systemic, not just HR per se (I am a systemic team coach) which is exactly what you are alluding too – we need more people centred thinking and the bravery to tackle the tough stuff.
I love the term ‘carewashing’ to describe offering a yoga class and ticking employee wellbeing off the to-do-list. Apart from financial and resource concerns, are there any other reasons why kindness is difficult for institutions to practice? I would suggest that too often fear is the reason kindness and flexibility are difficult to practice.
The grievance policy doesn’t consider an aunt or uncle as next of kin but an employee is in pieces because his aunt raised him and she passed away very suddenly? His line manager could make a decision to be flexible and make an exception, but;
What about all the other employees who complain that they didn’t get time off when their aunts and uncles passed away?
What about the calls of discrimination or favouritism?
Will the manager be in serious trouble with HR for not following the policy?
What if there’s no way to put the leave through the computer system?
What if there are cultural differences in how upset employees might appear on the surface making it difficult to judge who needs an exception anyway?
What if people start to abuse the kindness offered and start requesting leave for all sorts of distant relatives?
Can you lose your job because you were kind?
This is exactly what I am trying to change – it can feel like an upward battle and that fear of can you lose your job because you were kind is so real to so many. There is also the juggle of kindness to everyone – something I work with people a lot on is learning the difference between kind and nice. The Kind stuff is often the hard stuff – the advocating that a bereavement policy isn’t fit for purpose. It is deep cultural work that needs to happen. I am hear to support it, to help it happen but as you say we need to hear from the people in HR and at the top of our institutions to support it. Lead by example – I am passionate about training and coaching to help people navigate this environment so carewashing can be a thing of the past.
Brand it and sing about it…until next year. That’s the way this works, right? Run a few events – have a BBQ – stamp it, brand it, get it on LinkedIn…time for redundancies. Rinse and repeat.
I do agree, Helen. Rather than focus on values and behaviours where bad behaviour is still not tackled and where HR are more interested in upholding institutional reputation rather than supporting managers to tackle behaviours, let’s lead instead with and recognise kindness. And let’s not make the training optional so that those who really need it are excused.
I work for an institution where carewashing is standard practice. The senior management simply do not care about staff wellbeing, beyond providing the kind of stuff mentioned in the article that does nothing to actually improve things, and advice to call a phone number to an outside service if you feel a bit down (essentially a ‘don’t bother us with your silly problems’ attitude).
While middle management are sometimes outwardly more sympathetic, they are powerless to change anything of substance, and actively support senior management in their avoidance of actually having to deal with the more difficult questions relating to wellbeing. Classic example was a fairly recent ‘Town Hall’ meeting with the Vice-Chancellor, where there was encouragement to bring up questions for him. Staff in my team did this, then were told by the middle manager that they only wanted ‘positive’ questions and comments. This led to a pretty pointless meeting because it was mainly designed by that middle management to make it look like everything was fine. All they achieved was taking a couple of hours out of everyone’s day, adding to the sizable backlog of work and thus chipping away at what sense of wellbeing remained.
As for HR, they exist to enforce policy and that is pretty much it. The day that Personnel departments became ‘Human Resource’ was a disaster for staff wellbeing.
As I argue in this weeks edition of WONKHE, universities should begin by complying with the law – as most, in my view, currently most staff basic and fundamental health and safety protections. That’s not exactly respectful or catering.
https://wonkhe.com/blogs/staff-are-working-dangerously-long-hours-and-their-employers-should-be-concerned/