Communicating the Well-Being of Employees in US and UK Top Universities during and after Covid-19

Abstract

The impact of Covid-19 on Western societies has definitely and consistently affected the education field. During the early waves, school-age children and university students alike were forced to stay home, and lessons were delivered online. The academic and administrative staff were also thus heavily affected in their daily routines, teaching activities and methods and communicative styles. This reflective piece explores the measures put into place by a small sample of large, world-renowned universities in the US and the UK, to boost the well-being of their employees. In particular, the sections of these Universities’ websites dedicated to these issues are analysed, concentrating on staff resources and on mental well-being, to check whether focus on the latter emerges in the discourse and, if so, in what ways. The method is based on domain-specific languages, Critical Discourse Studies, Critical Genre Analysis and sentiment analysis. The results suggest that attention was being paid to psychological well-being even before the pandemic, it then increased during the emergency and was maintained in the aftermath. The communication of the Covid-19 support measures emerges as carefully constructed linguistically, especially in lexical terms, as it intersects discourses pertaining to health / well-being, labour law and education, with an eye to the affective and emotional aspects. The study may hopefully contribute to reporting the discursive representations of the pandemic from the perspective of specialised discourse within the professional setting of the academia.