Librarians are often expected to fulfill many roles. Not only is their work at a library just that—work, they go through each day working to meet the needs of many different groups of people with many different information needs. Even beyond information needs, many librarians are also expected to create programming, work to build community within their service area, uphold democratic values, and maintain a safe environment for both staff and patrons. For this reason, it is incredibly important to keep mental health at top of mind when working in a library.

Adding to this phenomenon, is the increasing number of patrons are experiencing mental health crises in and around libraries, leading to increased aggression from patrons towards or around library staff (Sanchez, 2024). This aggression can particularly impact under-represented staff members, who may not receive support from other staff or management when racist comments are made towards them. Ethnically and racially diverse staff members specifically often face additional challenges within the workplace. Racism is not only something done towards patrons, but it can also be done towards staff members, either by patrons, the general public, or even other library staff. But, not only is having a diverse staff beneficial for the patrons of the library, it is also helpful for other staff members. A diverse staff allows for more opportunities for each staff member to feel included, be given creative freedom, develop agency over projects, and have career advancement opportunities. 

Additionally, multilingual staff members are greatly impacted by a lack of diversity in the workplace. It is often assumed that just because someone is multilingual that they automatically possess cultural competency skills, which is not necessarily the case. "It is also worth remembering that language proficiency does not always come with cultural competency or the lived experiences shared by members of other communities who speak that language" (Henninger, 2020, "Towards action," para. 4). Cultural competency and bias training are important experiences for all staff members to have, even if they demonstrate some skills typically associated with these things. The trainings should not be reserved for specific staff members, instead being integrated into the organizational culture as a whole.

Going back to Ettarh, she also describes a phenomenon known as "job creep," which is something to note for multilingual library staff in particular. She describes how "what employees originally did voluntarily is no longer considered “extra” but instead is simply viewed as in-role job performance, which leads to more and more responsibilities and less time in which to accomplish them" (Ettarh, 2018, "Job creep," para. 1). Depending on how jobs are structured within a particular library, some may have multilingual duties as part of their job description, while others simply perform multilingual tasks in addition to what is on their job description. Depending on the library, some of these staff are given additional compensation for their multilingual skills, often expecting them to use the additional languages on a regular basis, while others are not paid for this knowledge. The idea of job creep is particularly common among those who are not paid for their multilingual abilities. This can lead to managers seeing monolingual employees fulfilling their job duties as not performing well enough, or when a multilingual employee stops using the language, it can be seen as reduced engagement or not performing duties as assigned. An additional difficulty library staff may face is coworkers who send all non-dominant language-speaking patrons or dominant language-speaking patrons with stronger accents to the multilingual employee. This creates additional stress on the multilingual employee, and can cause patrons to not feel welcomed by particular staff members. Henninger describes this well, saying "library staff should avoid tokenism and ensure that asking people who know a language to use it in the course of their work does not become a burden for them" (2020, "Towards action," para. 4).

Oftentimes, as suggested by Henninger, multilingualism in libraries still sees "language barriers as individual problems to be solved rather than considering the systemic and contextual changes necessary to reduce those barriers and improve access" (2020, "Neoliberalism," para. 4). This can be addressed by providing diversity training to all staff and creating expectations around multilingual services for staff to follow. Language should not be left as an afterthought in library services or among library staff, instead being used as a tool to better support library staff and the services they provide.