#library-burnout — Public Fediverse posts

Researcher’s Corner: Bullying and Burnout in Academic Libraries

In this post, Maggie, Rachel and Kelli talk about their research exploring library work environments. I particularly appreciate their discussion of how difficult bullying and burnout can be to identify, especially within library culture where we see “being exhausted and busy as a badge of honor.” While perhaps not directly about hiring, this piece is about our careers and the quality of our environments, and I look forward to reading more of their work, because of it’s potential to help us create better experiences for library workers.

I think you will find the following post very interesting, and if you’d like to read more, see the following citation:

Albro, M., Stark, R. K., & Kauffroath, K. (2024). Checking Out Our Workspaces: An Analysis of Negative Work Environment and Burnout Utilizing the Negative Acts Questionnaire and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory for Academic Librarians. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 19(3), 2–22. https://doi.org/10.18438/eblip30472

We’ve been researching bullying, burnout, and how employees experience library work environments for the past two years, and if we’ve figured one thing out it’s that everyone is a little surprised by at least one event or experience they’ve had at work. For some context, we came to librarianship in different ways. Maggie began her career in academic libraries right after completing her undergraduate degree. Rachel has worked in a variety of library settings, including youth services and hospitals, before finding her way to an academic library. Kelli came to academic libraries as a second career after a first career as a nurse. One thing we all had in common in our library experiences, though, was navigating uncivil behavior from our coworkers and feeling exhausted by it. And, as we’ve started talking about these experiences, we’ve come to find that they’re a lot more common than any of us expected when we were entering the library workplace. 

“Checking Out Our Workspaces” is a result of our quest to better understand how common these experiences are and how, if at all, they are related. Given the range of our own work experiences we wanted to look at a variety of factors that shape work experiences, so we focused on employment characteristics (e.g., the kind of contracts people had), whether or not librarianship was a person’s only career, and what differences might happen between generations. Since there hasn’t been a lot of research on how things like bullying and burnout interact, we found it best to start with survey research to give a sense of how big these issues are. We also made sure to use tools to measure bullying and burnout that had already been tested and proven accurate to make sure we were being consistent with other studies.

While we were surprised to find there wasn’t a strong relationship between bullying and burnout among our participants, we found that both phenomena were present at low to moderate levels across the group. We didn’t observe differences based on demographic or career variables, which suggests that the experience is fairly universal even if not the “dramatic” type of behavior people might think of. Both bullying and burnout are experiences that can, even at a low level, lead to health consequences if left to persist unresolved. And based on our findings, they’re persisting. 

One of the tricky things about bullying in library work, or really just adult life in general, is getting people to recognize what is happening. So often we equate bullying to something that happens in the K-12 environment, and workplace policies, if they exist, don’t always differentiate between personality differences, bullying, and harassment. It’s really difficult, when it’s not spelled out directly, to tell if this is a pattern of behavior targeted towards you or just a colleague who has a lot of bad days. When you pair that with victim-blaming and the shame that can come with self-identifying as a victim, it makes it easy to label yourself as “too sensitive” or a colleague as “just difficult” in order to avoid what can be difficult terms to define. If you work in a library where your supervisor or coworkers add on to this idea that “it’s all in your head” and that being congenial is more valuable than being collegial or authentic, it’s not a surprise that negative interpersonal experiences slip right down to burnout.

Identifying true burnout can also be trickier than people realize. We talk about being exhausted and busy as a badge of honor, and we live in a world where work makes up a huge portion of our identity. When this is paired with the intensity of the emotional labor that goes into library work, which can come from putting on the customer service face to help a patron when you’re having a bad day of your own or biting your tongue when someone makes a comment in a meeting that devalues your work, the lack of resources combined with the mental toll of library work life slips us into energy debt faster than we tend to notice. Navigating the line between being busy or tired and being burnt out can be a struggle because it’s not a line that you wake up one day and cross. It’s what happens when you work in conditions for too long with too few resources that aren’t sufficient to support all you do. And the tipping point is different for everyone. So it can be difficult to tell if you’re in burnout when all your friends, neighbors, family members, and colleagues say they’re burnt out twice a week. 

Adding to this challenge, after someone recognizes they’re struggling, figuring out how to talk about it and what can be done about it safely, can make the workplace even more difficult to navigate, creating a feedback loop of bullying and burnout. All three of us have worked with colleagues or supervisors who have told us how the value of the services libraries provide should be fulfilling enough and left us with the impression that asking for better from our colleagues or employers is being in it for the “wrong reasons.” When this vocational awe is invoked, especially by someone else, it makes it difficult to have conversations about how you, as a person, matter just as much as the people you are serving. This is where we need our managers and administrators to do better. The persistent level of bullying found in libraries suggests a need for clear anti-bullying work and policy that protects library workers. The moderate level of burnout shows us there needs to be an adjustment to organizational cultures to address this experience that contributes to low morale and longstanding fatigue and decreased performance. Taking measures to address persistent issues that drain people can move towards making a workplace where people want to come work and with better retention for the people who already work there.

Our ongoing research on this topic is taking a deeper dive into these experiences relating to addressing these persistent issues and exploring the specific consequences of bullying and burnout related to retention. We’re currently examining how these experiences impact early career librarians, who experienced different levels of bullying and burnout depending on their work location. Our hope, in continuing this research across a variety of library employee demographics, is to get a more nuanced picture of what shapes healthy workplaces and how to shift away from counterproductive practices to shape our profession into one welcoming and supportive of all workers. 

Maggie is the Agriculture & Natural Resources Librarian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and is currently serving an interim assignment as the Assistant Head of the UT Libraries Health, Wellness, and Professional Programs Department. She is actively involved with the United States Agricultural Information Network and the Agriculture Network Information Collaborative. Her research focuses on the emotional and service labor that goes into the profession of librarianship and seeks to provide context to the lived realities of library workers.

Rachel is the Health Sciences Librarian for Sacramento State University. Her professional experience includes work in academic pharmacy, hospital, and public libraries. Rachel is an ALA Spectrum Scholar (2010-2011) and a MLA Rising Star (2017-2018). Her research interests are broad ranging, with a focus on finding evidence based ways to improve the working lives of library employees. Rachel enjoys spending time with her two large dogs and playing video and board games.

Kelli Kauffroath is a Library Associate Professor at the University of Vermont serving as library liaison to the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, the Osher Center for Integrative Health, and, currently, interim director of the Dana Health Sciences Library. Kelli’s expertise includes research and information literacy pedagogy with an emphasis on interprofessional education. Kelli is passionate about supporting students and faculty in their pursuit of knowledge and evidence-based decision-making to inform their scholarly pursuits and practice. In her free time, Kelli is happiest puttering around the house, spending time outdoors, and hanging out with friends and family.

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