The Power of People

Our world has been turned upside down not only by the pandemic but also by a long-overdue reckoning with inequity, racism, and injustice. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the protests that erupted across the country, we responded swiftly and strongly, owning racism as a public health problem. We reaffirmed our commitment to identifying concrete structural changes required to address racism head-on, both at the School and across society more broadly. This renewed commitment permeates all pillars of the plan, but it is particularly salient to our strategies for ensuring excellence by cultivating a diverse, inclusive, and anti-racist culture where people from all backgrounds can thrive. A culture of inclusion is deeply connected to a culture of health, wellness, and opportunity. Our plan recognized this interconnectedness, and we identified strategies to improve mentoring, training, and professional development, and to ensure financial support mechanisms and implement behavioral health and wellness programs. The exigencies of the pandemic and social unrest served to elevate the critical importance of these strategies, and we worked at multiple levels to ensure the well-being of our School community. We are resolute in our commitment to fostering permanent changes for the future.  

As our workplace environment changes, we are challenged to find bold new ways to address structural conditions that exacerbate psychosocial stress among our faculty, students, and staff. Moving forward, our work in this domain will be informed by a growing literature on worker well-being, which emphasizes the importance of participation in shared decision-making, providing employees opportunities to have input on work conditions, improved flexibility in when and where people work, greater attention to increasing worker demands that have become “unbounded by time and place,” and genuine support at all levels of the organization for promoting work-life balance.