I am staring out my window as I write. Slowly, a few of the trees in view are starting to turn orange and yellow, but interestingly, many still look vibrant and green. I am ready for fall, but nature seems to be holding on to the richness of summer. Holding on and letting go seem to be apt metaphors for the work of well-being of late.
Since my last missive, I’ve been learning to focus on the things I can do and let go (or postpone) the things I cannot. In a way, it has created a level of efficiency and organization that is novel, even for me. Ironically, this focused attention on key priorities has allowed me to truly dig deep into some strategic efforts that move Elevate Well-Being forward. Thanks to Kayla Cleveland and Michael Parrish, we were able to launch one of those efforts, the Well-Being Hub, in July of this year.
The hub aims to be the one-stop shop for well-being resources and information across faculty, staff, and students, so no one must go hunting for individual websites to find what they need. It’s also home to the guiding documents we’ve been building over the past two years: our monthly Elevate Well-Being Newsletter, the Elevate Well-Being Strategy — and now, the piece I’m most excited to finally put in your hands.
This month, Clemson released its first-ever Well-Being Guidelines.
Two years of listening led here. These guidelines translate everything we’ve learned about what a healthy Clemson looks like into six practical areas: capacity and renewal, communication norms, leave, benefits, meeting culture and leadership. They are designed so that any team, in any division or college, can start integrating well-being into their workplace habits this semester.
The guidelines were built with a working group of the Clemson Well-Being Council and reviewed by Faculty Senate, Staff Senate, Human Resources and the Office of General Counsel, so they arrive vetted, not improvised. And they’re honest about what they are: guidance, not a new mandate. Nothing about your leave balance or your supervisor’s discretion changes. These are guidelines, evidence-based best practices and resources you can use. What does change is that, for the first time, every part of this University is working from the same playbook for what well-being looks like in practice. We wanted to move beyond just what we say we value, but what we do about it, meeting by meeting, team by team.
Read the Well-Being Guidelines
Why did we put this document together? When we dug into the Clemson Health and Well-Being Needs Assessment data, one thing was unmistakable: our community didn’t need more encouragement to care about well-being, they needed to know how. How do we support it at the team and department level? What does it look like on a Tuesday afternoon, in a real meeting, with a real deadline? Who is responsible for building the culture we say we want? The guidelines are our first take at that answer. While we anticipate revisions in the years to come, this is our first step in that direction of guiding our institution to a place of well-being in practice.
If you do nothing else this month, please read them. If you supervise a team, start with the Leadership Practices section as it’s the fastest way to change what your team experiences day by day.
Otherwise, I invite you to pick one practice — one meeting you shorten, one email you schedule to send tomorrow morning instead of tonight — and try it. Struggle Well and the Wellness Individual Development Plan are still there when you’re ready to go deeper on your own well-being, and Tiger Training has plenty more if you want it. But the guidelines are where I’d start. They’re not one more thing to hold onto or to add to your to-do list. They are an invitation in writing for you to change some workplaces habits for the good, and how you can let some bad workplace habits go.
