by Nick Hulbert-Williams
Comment
11/09/26
The loss of staff belonging in higher education
Nick Hulbert-Williams argues that what looks like low morale and change fatigue in HE may really be a crisis of belonging
by Nick Hulbert-Williams
Comment
11/09/26
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Nick Hulbert-Williams
Nick Hulbert-Williams
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10/09/26
Nick Hulbert-Williams is a Chartered Coaching Psychologist and Professor of Applied Psychology at Edge Hill University
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Belonging
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Nick Hulbert-Williams Nick Hulbert-Williams is a Chartered Coaching Psychologist and Professor of Applied Psychology at Edge Hill University
Tags
Belonging
staff
As a practitioner-academic I often feel like I inhabit several different worlds at once.
What I love most about being the head of an academic department is that it allows me to bring those worlds together – drawing on my experience as a psychologist, coach, and academic leader to think about how we can better support staff and students in university settings.
It won’t be news to anyone that higher education is struggling. Here in the UK, we’ve seen unprecedented financial pressures, workforce shrinkage and organisational change on a scale that many of us have never experienced before. Some institutions are faring comparatively well against much of the sector, but even there, staff are still feeling the ripples of what’s happening elsewhere.
Like many colleagues in leadership positions, I often find myself holding two seemingly contradictory feelings at once. On one hand, I share the sense of sadness and uncertainty that these changes are creating across the sector. On the other, I find genuine challenge and purpose in helping to lead my team through the necessary process of adaptation, reorganisation and strategic change.
However much I may enjoy that leadership challenge, I can’t ignore what I am hearing from colleagues. Comments that once felt rare in academia – “I’ve checked out,” “I’m just doing what I need to get by,” “I’m keeping my head down” – now seem commonplace.
Making sense of the response
Recently, I attended the British Psychological Society Division of Coaching Psychology conference, where the theme was belonging.
Sitting in the audience, I realised that what I was observing across higher education wasn’t simply low morale or change fatigue.
The more I reflected on this, the more I realised that what we are witnessing may be a crisis of belonging. Belonging can be defined in many ways, but I particularly like Thissen et al.’s definition in which belonging reflects “…being valued, needed or important for others in a specific context and the feeling of fitting in through shared or complementary features.”
In psychology, belonging is generally understood to be a fundamental human need rather than a workplace luxury. Decades of research have shown that feeling accepted, valued and connected to others is closely linked to wellbeing, motivation and resilience. When belonging is disrupted, people don’t simply become less satisfied at work: they can begin to question their identity and place within a community.
Seen through that lens, many of the responses we are witnessing in staff across higher education suddenly make more sense.
Finding your tribe
I often talk to coaching clients and mentees about the importance of finding their tribe – a group of people, sometimes surprisingly small, with whom there is shared understanding, common purpose, and mutual trust. Tribes create that sense of individual belonging. They also provide psychological safety, creating spaces where ideas can be explored openly and where we can show up as our authentic selves.
You might imagine that authenticity would come naturally within universities. They are often viewed as intellectually curious and socially liberal environments.
Yet I’m not sure that was ever entirely true. Academia has always been competitive.
Expectations around performance and outputs can feel relentless. Challenging accepted wisdom or established ways of doing things is not always as comfortable as we might like to believe.
It’s not a surprise that many working in academia feel a need to filter their authentic self in the workplace.
In that context, belonging does not happen by accident. It has to be actively created, nurtured and protected through thoughtful leadership and supportive communities.
Most of us belong to multiple tribes, but during the middle years of life our work tribe often becomes one of the most important because it is where we spend so much of our time and energy.
What concerns me is that many of those tribes are disintegrating around us, both physically and metaphorically.
The physical loss is perhaps the most obvious. Through restructuring, redundancy programmes and sector contraction, many of us have watched valued colleagues disappear from our day-to-day professional lives. Some move into different roles. Others leave institutions. Some leave higher education entirely.
The consequences extend beyond those who leave the sector. For those who remain, there is a quieter loss that often goes unrecognised. Years spent building trusted relationships, developing collaborations, creating shared projects and supporting one another can disappear remarkably quickly. The professional networks that took years to cultivate can fragment within months. We’re left with uncertainty and unease across many facets of our working world.
There is also a more subtle, metaphorical loss.
A different kind of loss
Compared to even a decade ago, academia simply feels different. Smaller workforces mean that many of us are being asked to do more with less. Research, scholarship and knowledge exchange activities are often squeezed by the demands of keeping core operations running. Beyond the obvious implications for universities and wider society, this shift may have important psychological consequences.
Psychologists have long recognised that our identities are shaped by the groups to which we belong. We do not simply think of ourselves as individuals; we understand ourselves through our membership of communities that matter to us.
For many academics, professional identity is not primarily tied to a particular institution. It is tied to being a psychologist, historian, engineer, biologist, or sociologist. It is forged through years of collaboration, conference attendance, mentorship and shared intellectual endeavour. It is built through specialist communities that provide meaning, purpose and belonging. When those communities begin to fragment, the loss is not merely practical. It can feel deeply personal.
Perhaps that is why so many colleagues seem lost, and as though their only means of survival is to “keep their heads down.” The challenge is not simply increased workload or uncertainty about the future. Many people are also navigating the loss of communities that helped define who they were professionally.
In some respects, what we are seeing resembles a form of collective grief. Not only grief for colleagues who have left, but grief for ways of working, professional identities and communities that once gave meaning to academic life. This creates an important challenge for university leaders.
There is no denying the scale of the task facing those in leadership positions. Financial sustainability matters. Organisational structures matter. Policies matter. Institutions cannot function without them. Yet these are fundamentally systems-level responses.
Coaching psychology makes excellent use of Self-Determination Theory to explain a range of workplace stressors. We know from this work that people are more likely to thrive when they experience competence, autonomy and meaningful connection with others.
Universities have understandably invested enormous energy into redesigning structures and securing financial stability. But if belonging continues to erode, many staff will struggle to reconnect with the motivation and sense of purpose that drew them into academia in the first place.
The challenge for leaders is, therefore, not simply to redesign organisations. It is to create the conditions in which communities can reform, and people can reconnect with a shared sense of purpose.
Belonging is not something that can be manufactured through a policy document or achieved through a single initiative. It requires time, investment, and genuine attention. It grows through relationships, trust, and shared endeavour. Academic leaders – myself included – need to recognise that something important has been lost. Alongside the difficult work of organisational change, we need to think much more creatively about how we help staff rebuild connection, rediscover purpose and find new tribes.
Because if we fail to do so, and somewhat urgently, I fear we will lose something far more significant than funding, structures, or organisational capacity. We risk losing the very communities that make academic life meaningful. And that is a loss from which the sector may struggle to recover.
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Helen O'Sullivan
10 days ago
Hi Nick – thank you for this. I think that many colleagues across the sector will recognise the analysis. I feel that the covid lockdowns created and then solidified a sense of isolation with home working becoming normalised -firstly, can you create a sense of belonging without the pre-covid physical communal presence? And secondly, what can senior leaders do to recreate that sense of belonging into the future?
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Bobby
10 days ago
Reply to
Helen O'Sullivan
In my experience it is not COVID lockdowns which are the cause. We did actually have social events on zoom and so on and there was a clear “we are in this together to continue teaching students” atmosphere.
It is the redundancies.
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AssocProf
10 days ago
Reply to
Bobby
Yes. The massive job losses are the elephant in the room in a lot of the analysis on this site, and it is noticeable how rarely the view of staff (as opposed to students, SUs, and leadership, administrators etc) is reflected. I enjoyed this article, which did resonate with a lot of my experience; but even then it is an indirect reporting of staff views from a university leader.
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Sadmin
10 days ago
Reply to
AssocProf
100%! As someone who is part of a professional services team, over half of which are leaving due to VS, I am very worried about the future. Many institutions seem dead set on cutting without any plan as to what will happen to teaching, student experience or services once people have left. How can we possibly retain any motivation and positivity in this environment?
In my institution I have a feeling the next round of savings will be dropping the V and retaining the S, and if that happens the students and remaining lecturers are going to have a very bumpy ride indeed. For me it will be a sad end to a rewarding career where I really felt for a few years I was making a positive difference.
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Leo
7 days ago
Reply to
Helen O'Sullivan
Personally my sense is not that covid and normalised working from home are the issue, so much as that organisations realised how much more work people can do from home through an extended and uninterrupted work day – so your travel to work time, your move between meetings time, your wait until you can have a meeting room to have this meeting time – well you don’t need any of that anymore! You probably don’t need lunch or a few moments outside either.
Nowadays people beg your indulgence to be running a couple of minutes late to their next meeting so they can go to the toilet. It is not because I am working from home that work became this.
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Naga Sai SK Dinavahi
10 days ago
Dear Professor Nick Hulbert-Williams, many thanks for sharing such a wonderful, deep, and thought-provoking message in your article. I relate to your words through my own experiences. Gratefully appreciate it. Belongingness is intrinsic commitment, morality, and empathy. Are we (and our Leaders) in that state, or at least anywhere closer to that?
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Snowdrop
9 days ago
For a significant number of researchers stuck on temporary contracts for years with the threat of redundancy never far away, I’m not sure there has ever been much of a sense of belonging. For many postdocs with little hope of a permanent job in the sector, especially those who go overseas for a role (and especially where a visa is tied to the employment contract), it’s hard to feel a part of an institution when you know you are a transient cog in the machine.
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Simon Wallace
7 days ago
Reply to
Snowdrop
Temporary and hourly paid contracts are a big part of the problem. Every summer I face schrodingers job. Last week I was involved in a first year project (before proper teaching starts) followed by a meet the staff event I had to sit out of despite teaching on several modules across year groups – just because I’m not on a full or part time contract year round contract.
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Sherrill Stroschein
7 days ago
If staff are feeling this disconnection, students will be as well. Places that can keep people connected to each other will be better environments for students.
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Stephen Baker
7 days ago
I recognise and agree with much of what Prof. Hulbert-William has written here.
But I don’t think the current leadership of UK HE has the will, incentive or imagination to tackle the problems identified in the article – the loss of professional identities and belonging suffered by HE staff. If it had, it would have acted to remedy the situation already.
Instead it is making staff redundant and demoralising who ever is left. Frankly, only university workers can amend their dire circumstances, and a start to that would be chasing the current UK HE leadership out of the sector.
As it is hard to imagine such a thing happening, checking out, keeping your head down, doing what you need to get by, in the interests of self-preservation seems fair enough.
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