What Do Working Parents in Student Affairs Feel about Their Institutions?

Though it may feel like a distant, unwelcome memory, 2020 and 2021 were hard years. This was a tough period for everyone—I often reflect that we don’t exactly have great literature inspired by the Spanish flu pandemic of the early 20th century. During 2020 and 2021, even the most mundane communications from companies opened with the phrase “we live in unprecedented times.” Some workers who had the privilege to do so took the opportunity afforded by the COVID-19 pandemic to reflect on their life circumstances and employment. Many decided their current role was not meeting their needs and took part in what was colloquially called “The Great Resignation,” opting for change in work. For student affairs professionals, they contributed to many campus-level changes. They helped institutions change to become majority online. In implementing this change, they helped campuses adapt to safety protocols, figure out what housing was supposed to look like in quarantine, and build community in new ways, among other contributions. Working parents in student affairs—and elsewhere—faced an addition burden of navigating schooling format changes or daycare alterations, even if care continued. Stories of burnout abounded.

But for student affairs professionals, how much was this “new normal” really a change? What structures existed in institutions of higher education that the pandemic exacerbated or lessened? What did institutional leaders do to make people want to leave and want to stay? Building on our previous work researching working mothers and fathers in student affairs, my colleague Margaret W. Sallee and I talked to 25 working parents across the nation and one abroad to learn about what was keeping them at their institutions. More specifically, we were curious about what changed for student affairs staff in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and how that change impacted their perceptions of their institution. To understand these perspectives, we used a theory originally from the business literature called “organizational trust.” Briefly, this theory helps us see how institutions show trust in their employees and to their employees. It also looks at how employees perceive that trust and how they expect institutions ought to behave. Also, the theory considers the values the organization purports to hold but how those values operate in practice. We wanted to use this theory to learn how student affairs practitioners who were parents thought about trust between themselves and their supervisors, between the staff member and other employees, and between the employee and their institution, with a particular focus on 2021. In other words, what did institutions and their representatives do or not do to make employees feel like they could trust them?

Focusing here on institution-employee trust, we found that institutional messaging around campus re-openings were sources of distrust for practitioners. Student affairs staff, who were also on the front lines of many student-facing changes like residence hall re-openings and holding campus career fairs, felt marginalized when they were not consulted about re-opening procedures and the decision-making that went into them. One residence hall practitioner who had put substantial time and efforts into best practices in public health shared: “they concentrated . . . both the research and decision making processes with a very small group of people at the top and I didn’t feel like my expertise or my input was ever really sought out” (p. 13). Lack of consulting and confusion about how the institutions and leadership made decisions around mask mandates and the like had disproportionate impacts on parents.

Many participants were deeply concerned with the potential impact on their own health and that of their children and any partners. Some had immune-compromised people living with them. Therefore, the shift to on-campus, mask-free or mask-optional spaces felt like targeted disregard for their health and well-being. Eva shared that when her campus’ VPSA announced a “return to normal:”

“He wasn’t reading the room in terms of how staff were going to feel and it felt very much like we were just left to kind of figure it out. And there are moments that felt really stressful around feeding students that were here for welcome weekend and there was just a mass of students trying to get pizza in this very close quarters . . . you just get this kind of sense of safety around the social distancing that all of a sudden dissolves and you’re like “okay, is this a super spreader [event]?” (p. 13)
Additionally, though perhaps an obvious statement: as parents, participants’ children required care and if sickness were brought into the house, someone would likely have to stay home to provide caregiving, thus making parents either work remotely or dip into their sick or vacation time. Sickness is not solely an individual problem for working parents.

In all, how their institutions chose to make decisions about 2021 openings and health procedures deeply impacted the working parents in student affairs in our study. It particularly lessened their perceptions of trust in the institution. The participants had difficulty believing their institutions had their best intentions at heart. So, this perception caused participants to consider looking elsewhere for job opportunities, both at other institutions whom they thought they might be able to trust and even outside of student affairs entirely.

What is to be done, then? Based on our findings, we suggest that institutions should be careful in the transparency of their decision-making processes. More importantly, institutions should seek out and listen to those recommendations from the staff and faculty they serve, providing rationales for their decisions that account for voices from diverse stakeholders. Institutions also ought to consider the impact of system-level decisions on specific populations such as parents, as well as anyone who provides caregiving of any type. We think that building and sustaining organizational trust can contribute to employee retention. Trust is key to employee morale and institutions—and their leaders—should prioritize it accordingly.

Interested in diving deeper into this study? Read the full article here. 
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Dr. Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley (she/hers) is an assistant professor of Higher Education Studies & Leadership at Baylor University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of higher education informed by student affairs practice. Her research addresses staff in higher education, financial aid, community colleges and transfer, and gender in the academy.