Academic work-life balance isn’t just about reducing the load
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Ask any academic about the personal cost of a “good week” at work, and you’ll get a version of the same story: marking eats into the weekend, a grant deadline swallows an evening spent with the kids, the low hum of unanswered emails distracts from the dinner table. Conversations around well-being in higher education have, understandably, been dominated by the framing of work as something that depletes home life, with the goal being damage limitation.
However, we could be asking, “How can professional experiences enrich, rather than hinder personal lives? Our research, which involved surveying 357 academics at Vietnamese public universities, examines that question. We surveyed participants twice, four weeks apart, to accurately measure sentiment.
The findings map a practical framework: social support leads to “harmonious passion” (a sense that your work is authentically part of who you are, not an external demand you feel obligated to carry out), which leads to personal enrichment.
Peer support at work matters: colleagues who step in when something’s going wrong or offer constructive feedback do more than lift people’s mood. They build confidence and practical skills – the ability to plan, prioritise and cope under pressure. A comment from a colleague reminding a lecturer why they enjoy the job can lead to renewed passion that carries over into home life. In this context, a demanding week can leave people with more to give at home.
Harmonious passion is fundamental: staff who described their work as core to their identity and values reported substantially higher work-home enrichment. We measured this by asking participants to rate statements such as “My work is in harmony with other activities in my life”, and “After a demanding week I crave quality time with family and friends”. We found that the more staff agreed with the first, the more they agreed with the second.
Using one’s strengths feeds personal enrichment: picture two equally passionate academics: one who plays to their strengths at work, and one who’s just as passionate but isn’t using their strengths. Our data suggests that the first person brings noticeably more energy and enthusiasm home. Support helps everyone, but it does the most for those who haven’t yet found their footing. And once someone is both passionate about their work and actively using their strengths, the payoff in their personal lives increases.
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How can we make demanding work more enriching?
1. Build support structures that are relational, not just transactional: mentoring, collaboration and communication aren’t well-being tick-box exercises – they’re a direct lever for sustaining harmonious passion for academic work and preventing a feeling of obligation and burnout.
2. Help staff identify strengths deliberately: during a check-in, this could be as simple as asking, “which tasks felt effortless because they played to your strengths, and which felt like a slog?” then adjusting someone’s workload in response, rather than filing the answer away. Peer review, self-reflection prompts and conversations built around that question determine whether passion for the work energises or exhausts.
3. Pair flexible work policies with strengths-aligned task design: a gifted lecturer who dreads administrative work might be spending three afternoons a week on rostering and compliance paperwork that a colleague would find far easier, and more energising. Redesigning who does what by trading some admin load for extra teaching or supervision hours, for example, could energise staff working from home.
Catering to differing cultural contexts
We conducted our research in a collectivist, high-interdependence cultural context, which shaped our findings. In such a setting, social support isn’t just a nice-to-have HR initiative; it’s a core resource that people are primed to lean on and reciprocate.
Does the same ring true for institutions with more individualist academic cultures where self-reliance and personal autonomy are often the default cultural script? We believe it does, but the support should be framed differently. In a Vietnamese setting, peer support works partly because helping each other is simply what colleagues are expected to do, and accepting it doesn’t threaten anyone’s sense of independence.
In a more individualist culture, the same gesture may land better framed around choice rather than obligation: a mentor who’s available if you want them, rather than a scheme you’re expected to join, or a manager who hands you the resources and lets you decide how to use them, rather than stepping in to solve it for you. The support still matters – it just needs to reinforce someone’s autonomy rather than their sense of belonging to a group.
For university leaders managing genuinely global, multicultural academic workforces, this is a caution against a one-size-fits-all well-being strategy. Take a mentoring circle: in a more collectivist-leaning team, it can work well framed as a shared responsibility: senior staff are simply expected to look out for junior colleagues, and everyone takes part. In a more individualistic team, the same circle may land better as an opt-in scheme. A similar logic applies to a peer-support scheme (a team-wide buddy system versus an on-demand, confidential coaching line) or a strengths-based development programme (group workshops built into team meetings versus private self-assessment tools staff use to guide their own choices). Same substance, different framing.
None of this requires large budgets. It requires treating academic staff well-being as something built through everyday support – not something bolted on afterwards during a wellness webinar. For a sector under sustained pressure globally, that’s a distinction worth taking seriously.
Diep Nguyen is an associate professor of leadership of human resource management at Newcastle Business School, the University of Newcastle Australia.
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