Today we’re going to discuss how to foster an empowering work environment in your lab/research group. Over the last year, the “great resignation” has highlighted the importance of work environments on employee satisfaction, commitment, and turnover. People are done tolerating jobs (and people) that make them unhappy – and that includes higher education. We (the university/academy) can and need to do better.
As a graduate student supervisor, you play a major role in creating the work environment and culture for your graduate students and research personnel/team. How intentional have you been in creating that work environment? What supports and structures have you put in place to empower your team? Where do you even start?
Well, let’s start with Kanter’s (1993) theory of structural empowerment. Structural empowerment is all about providing people (usually employees but in this case graduate students) with access to the support, resources, information, and opportunities to learn and grow that they need to have in order to be able to actually do their work. There is a ton of research evidence showing that structural empowerment has positive impacts on employee and organizational outcomes. In addition, support has been identified as a key determinant of graduate student satisfaction.
It is also the case that when people don’t have access to these key empowerment structures it can make it really challenging – and frustrating – to accomplish their work. It’s pretty obvious that not having the information, resources, support, and opportunities you need to get the job done makes life difficult!
So when it comes to empowering your graduate students, how exactly do you do that?
Support
This might be both the easiest and most challenging source of empowerment to provide to your students because it doesn’t cost you money but it can cost you time, which is one of your most precious and scarce resources. However, you do not need to be/should not be the only source of support for your graduate students. Support can come from peers, committee members, and the university as well.
Resources
Providing graduate students with resources is all about making sure that they have what they need to successfully complete their degree. This could be financial support, time, access to equipment and/or software or access to space, among other things. This is one reason why getting research grants is so important – it gives you resources to share with your students.
Information
This is such an important aspect of empowerment for graduate students. It obviously includes access to the university library and research articles or databases, but there is also a whole heck of a lot of information (intellectual capital) in that brain of yours that you can share with your students ranging from content expertise, research methods, who’s who, and how to get things done as a researcher.
Opportunities to learn and grow
Each one of your students is going to be unique in terms of their strengths and learning needs. Discussing learning goals each semester can help you identify opportunities of value and interest to each of your students. For example, you may have a fresh master’s student who has never written a conference abstract and a more experienced grad student with lots of experience doing this – why not pair them together? The less experienced student will benefit from the mentorship and experience of the more experienced student and the more experienced student will have an opportunity to mentor and teach. (Of course, you should still provide some guidance and feedback to both students).
Other examples of providing opportunities include sharing information about key conferences and encouraging/requiring students to submit abstracts, providing opportunities to contribute to research projects, presentations, and projects that you are working on, providing hands-on training that advance your students’ skills and knowledge relevant to your field, and introducing your students to people within your professional network, to name a few.
Conclusion
So there you have it – you now know what structural empowerment is and have some ideas about how you can provide it for your graduate students 🙂
Until next week!
Emily Read, PhD, RN 