Staff wellbeing in complex settings

My career has largely been values-driven. I’ve been my least happy when I’ve held positions or worked for bosses with a values misalignment. And it’s not surprising. Putting our values into action allows us to work to our strengths, which is energising and meaningful. Over time, I’ve come to recognise my two main values are making a difference and community. And I’ve been so lucky that much of my career has been about developing and participating in communities that are making a difference. These communities have been in classrooms, in staff teams, and with wider school populations and not-for-profits.

When working as an alternative school leader, I placed staff wellbeing at the core of every decision I made. I saw it as my role to co-create a strong wellbeing community for everyone to belong to. By doing so, our teachers and youth workers were then equipped to do the same for the young people in their care. I didn’t always get it right, it was a game of constant learning, experimenting, evaluating and regularly seeking feedback from my team.

My biggest lesson during this time was that wellbeing is not something you do to your team, but it is something you create together. The learning through this time led me to create this model as a way to guide the co-creation of a wellbeing community.

One of the most common questions I am asked now is how do we do this when we all have individual wellbeing needs? The answer is values.

Values

What we need is some common ground as a starting point to co-create a wellbeing community. When values are alive and applied in a community, they do just that!

You likely work for an organisation that has a list of values on a wall somewhere. For some of you, you will know these well and see them alive in your work everyday. For others, you may feel these are tokenistic words and are distant from the way you operate. Whether they are alive or not, we need to determine what the shared values are between us and colleagues. These may be the words already on the wall or they may need a review and a rewrite. The shared values are the values we agree to operate by every day in our work, with our peers and with our clients/students. Once we’re clear on these shared values (and I would recommend no more than 5 or 6) we can use these to guide the planning, development and maintenance of our wellbeing community.

Community

If you are across the wellbeing literature or if you just experienced the challenge of a lockdown during the pandemic, you will not be surprised to hear that the quality of our relationships influences the quality of our wellbeing. And our workplace relationships are no exception. This doesn’t mean that we need to work with our best friends or we will find ourselves suffering, but it does mean we benefit when we belong to a team, are connected to others, and know that others care about us and our well-being. So, how do we develop a positive community when we work in high-stress and time-poor settings like schools or residential care homes?

While practising self-care is important, it’s a little over-preached. Looking after ourselves doesn’t need to be done in isolation and doesn’t need to just be scheduled after work hours. Collective wellbeing practices have a tendency to be overlooked. Practising wellbeing together not only aids the development of relationships between us and our teammates but also provides the chance for staff to upskill in caring for each other and allows for interventions to occur at work. 

There are quite a few leaders who have scrapped meetings since the pandemic began. Recognising that staff feel time-poor and are burning out, they chose to take meetings off the table. But, in doing so, have they missed the mark?

When returning to face-to-face teaching, I followed suit and decreased the meeting times. But, what I noticed was a snowball of issues. Stressed teachers waiting to find me throughout the day to ask a question, and staff not knowing how each other was travelling. I was even finding the team informally congregating in the mornings to see each other. So, we ironically held a meeting so I could consult my team on meetings. Did they want them cancelled? Reduced? More frequent? What came out of that was that they wanted to continue meeting each morning, even just for 5 minutes. They wanted to see each other, start the day with an intentional connection activity and have the chance to ask the leadership team questions before getting started. And these meetings broke some traditional rules. They were held outside and led by different members of the team each day.

We don’t need to dedicate hours to wellbeing each week. It’s not something that is compartmentalised but is something that should be embedded in our daily interactions and ways of operating. These 5-minute meetings provided an effective wellbeing boost to start the day. They were just one of our agreed rituals and routines. We also had wellbeing dialogue prompts (guided by our values), debriefs on the tougher days, social (or competitive) staff sport, art groups and our own agreed ways of celebrating.

Regulation

My years of teaching and leading were spent in alternative schools and our students had experienced childhood trauma and significant disadvantage. This meant that we were working in a trauma affected environment- hearing stories of trauma, supporting young people facing crises or sometimes responding to an incident and co-regulating a dysregulated student. 

What we know about trauma is that being exposed to it can result in vicarious trauma. And what we know about a pandemic is that it was also a traumatic event. Add to the mix the stress of staff shortages and an education (health, youth, housing) system in crisis.

So right now, those working in schools and complex settings are not only working in trauma-affected settings, but might be doing so in their own trauma-affected state. Trauma gets stored in our bodies so talking about it only gets us so far, we need to care for our bodies, too. Our knowledge and skills of self-regulation and co-regulation are not only relevant for our young people but relevant for us, too. Take time to understand your triggers, physiological responses and strategies to regulate. For me, my strategies include a mix of boxing (a great patterned repetitive rhythmic activity), meditation, time in nature and listening to music. 

Competency

I’m going to keep this one short and target it at our executive leaders. Are you supporting your team to have the knowledge, skill development and resources to complete their work? This is crucial to their wellbeing.

We know that schools (youth settings, social work teams) are under-resourced and the system is simply not working. What admin tasks can you take off the table? Are your systems and processes simple? Scrap whatever you can and invest in your most important resource- your team. Think radically. One of my favourite things to do is simplify a process or system, so if you need some external eyes on this one, I’m here to help!

Purpose

When our values are alive, when we belong to our work community, when we feel regulated and competent, we then have the space to connect with our purpose. Right now, there might be some mess in the way. You may be working in an under-resourced or disconnected team. It is my hope that some of the strategies mentioned in the article can be applied as you work through the mess. Working with young people is meaningful and rewarding work. We’re lucky that we’ve chosen an industry that can serve and impact the lives of others- daily. And trust me, you do! 

Megan guides schools, not-for-profits, and youth work organisations to co-create their staff wellbeing community. If you would like to know more, please get in touch: megan@megancorcoran.com.au