Health and Wellbeing

For this final Faculty of HASSE newsletter for 2024, I want to wish you all a happy holiday season, and to encourage everyone to take care of yourselves and each other. Your health and wellbeing, and that of your families, comes before any other considerations.

It’s also important that we extend that care to the workplace environment too. Work forms such a huge part of our lives, and we spend many of our waking hours within our work environments and alongside colleagues. UNE as an institution has done a lot over the past twelve months to improve workplace health and safety [with a particular focus on addressing structural and psycho-social hazards], and, I’m pleased to report that the results of the recent Staff Engagement Survey has fuelled a range of activity designed to address staff concerns. But, workplace health and safety requires constant vigilance, and self-reminders that we, the people, are the most important part of UNE.

With that in mind, please let me remind everyone of UNE’s Safety Hub, which provides a broad range of workplace health and safety tools, resources and guides. Please be particularly attentive to the Staff Wellbeing Hub, which includes a direct link to the Employee Assistance Program [EAP]. The EAP has a broad range of resources, including counselling services, MyCoach programs for ‘personal and confidential support’, and details on several 24/7 Crisis Support services.

Enjoy your practice!

Connected with this, people find satisfaction and joy in their work in many different ways. It could be about contributing to a broader community culture, or advancing knowledge in new and innovative ways, or sharing that knowledge with students and the community and seeing their skills grow, or a combination of these and a myriad of other factors.

With this in mind, I’d like to encourage everyone to reflect on what brings them satisfaction and joy in their work, as a precursor to thinking about and planning for 2025 and beyond. For 2025, what would you like to build on? What would you like to do differently? What new opportunities would you like to explore? How can you, in 2025, lay the initial foundations for your path to greater satisfaction and joy in work? This may be a new research initiative that you’d like to get off the ground, or returning to a half-written article from many years ago that you’d like to finish off, or reaching out to local schools to see how they can draw on your expertise, or perhaps reaching out to a broader scholarly community to engage with one of your favourite journals. Perhaps those first steps just involve sending off an email to a colleague at another institution to see what they think about your idea, or maybe it’s just having coffee with a colleague here at UNE to see what they think about working with you on an article.

The important consideration here, particularly in a faculty as diverse as HASSE, is that we feel free to challenge the norm and think beyond established and traditional barriers and limitations. We have excelled in embracing non-traditional research outputs, and the outstanding quality of our Overall Student Satisfaction indices and the School, Faculty, and University citations, plus AAUT awards [Australian Awards for University Teaching] is evidence of the innovative and authentic thinking that HASSE-scholars bring to our teaching. The remarkably diverse range of service activities that we embark upon [and I’m particularly thinking of ‘service to communities outside of UNE’ alongside the well-recognised value of internal service roles] is something that we should all be proud to celebrate and support. So, what brings you satisfaction and joy in your work, and how can we make this happen?

Academic Promotions

Connected with this [and, I admit, an inspiration for the above], it was a great pleasure to be involved in the 2024 promotions round and to read the wonderful achievements of so many colleagues across the faculty. I want to wholeheartedly commend and congratulate all who were successful in the 2024 promotions round. I am particularly struck by the diversity of creative achievements and activities in HASSE, and this is particularly why I want to encourage people to reflect on what brings them satisfaction and joy, and to consider how they can plan for future activities. I also think there’s great value in learning from each other, and, with a view to getting a head-start on 2025 applications, I’d like to encourage anyone thinking (even remotely) about applying for promotion in 2025 to use this moment, right now, to reach out to colleagues for an initial discussion.

Thank you all for a wonderful 2024, I wish you all the best for the remaining weeks of the year and look forward to seeing what 2025 holds for us!

Kind regards,

Nathan Wise