February 28, 2022

Dear Campus Community,

Last week, we celebrated our achievement of Carnegie R1 classification, joining the highest level of research institutions in the country, and held a watch party for Amazon Prime’s “The College Tour” featuring UM. As a community, we have many reasons to be proud.

We have returned to enrollment growth, bolstered by a larger incoming class and improved retention rates, and we have launched the largest infrastructure improvement in UM’s history. Our University is on an exciting positive trajectory.

And yet, these accomplishments sit alongside a worrisome trend of heightened stress on campus and across society. Two years after the arrival of COVID-19 in Montana, it remains difficult to fully appreciate the profound costs of the pandemic or adequately account for the ways political strife, challenging economic conditions and social isolation have introduced new anxieties into our lives.

Even as the pandemic recedes, many of its impacts will be lasting. As we adjusted our professional lives to continue serving students and our community, workloads increased. And just as we were turning the corner to generate new revenue that could be invested in the UM family, we faced an extremely challenging job market and rising cost of living in our community, further exacerbating already heavy workloads and stress.

The simple truth is that our University’s success depends on how well we support our employees. I wish we at UM could address all of the factors that threaten the well-being of our colleagues. We cannot. But we can take steps to meaningfully influence well-being in the workplace.

Employee well-being has been a top priority for me personally since joining UM. When establishing our institutional “Priorities for Action” in 2018, we identified as one of our priorities to “Embody the Principle of Mission First, People Always,” leading to the creation of the Office of Organizational Learning and Development, the Employee Week of Excellence and other employee recognition opportunities, and new onboarding experiences and manager trainings.  

But the heightened stress our employees have experienced calls for a more comprehensive response. In January, I convened an Employee Well-Being Taskforce charged with developing a set of recommendations for supporting employee well-being. This group is considering many inputs, including recent faculty survey results and input from our Staff Senate and other groups.

This group will share their recommendations with me in mid-March, and we will work swiftly to begin implementing many of those recommendations, which will focus in three categories:

• Near-term actions we have the autonomy and ability to take immediately and with the broadest possible impact.
• Longer-term actions that will influence employee well-being and take more time to implement, such as structural and policy changes. 
• Items that deserve more analysis so that we can better understand the disproportionate impacts on some members of our community, the “why” behind those impacts and the steps we can take in response.

I am deeply grateful for the input many across the UM community have provided to paint a more complete picture of their experiences. Faculty Senate and our University Faculty Association have provided survey results that highlight the experiences of faculty. And our Staff Senate has provided insight into the lived challenges of staff – both through the annual employee engagement survey and through effective advocacy. Meanwhile, I am grateful for ASUM’s efforts to call attention to the mental health challenges experienced by students.

These insights position the Employee Well-Being Taskforce to better design interventions. Our best, most-meaningful steps will result from this continued partnership.

While we cannot control all of the variables that impact lives, as your University’s leaders we have a responsibility to improve well-being in the areas where we can make a difference. There is, of course, no quick fix to these problems. But in the coming weeks, we will have a specific list of steps we will begin to implement immediately as we also work toward longer-term solutions.

Thank you again for your contributions to the University and for your unwavering commitment to our students. We will continue to work through this together.

Seth