How to improve staff wellbeing and achieve the best for your school and pupils

How can we improve staff wellbeing to achieve the best for schools and pupils?  Here are my eight top tips, created in association with three inspirational school leaders.

1) Focus on your own wellbeing before anything else

This is a ‘must’! Look after your own wellbeing and everyone around you benefits.

It’s important to lead by example and practise what you preach if you are to truly enhance staff wellbeing, and as a result, the outcomes for your pupils.

Start by booking some thinking and reflection time each week and to focus on what you need to do for you, as well as those you lead. The quality of your thinking underpins your success - so make time for it.

2) Put a focus on what is going well

If you are like many leaders, teachers and staff I know, you probably end each day thinking about what you haven’t done and the things that have gone wrong.

Yet what about the many things you have done and your successes? We are either our own biggest cheerleader or critic.

So how can you flip this?

In her book ‘Positivity’, Barbara Frederickson a US psychologist revealed that we need a 3:1 positive to negative ratio to be emotionally well. Create a trigger – for example a phone alarm or post-it note on your steering wheel – to make sure when you ask yourself at the end of each day, “What did I do well?” or “What were my three biggest achievements.”

Repeat until it becomes your habit and share this with colleagues to help them too.

3) Make praise part of every day

Recognition improves engagement and performance. Schools are often great at shout-outs and staff messages. Yet they miss out on ‘in the moment’ praise. It is hard because so many staff are spread across classrooms, yet when done well, the impact can be better than a pay rise!

Set a goal to catch people doing things right and share this with other leaders. This means being in the present and spotting all those brilliant things that happen each day. Imagine the impact if you and other leaders all caught three people every day!

This is one of the fastest ways to build staff wellbeing into the school culture – people copy and it is contagious.

4) Measure staff wellbeing

If you want to make a difference to staff wellbeing, you must first understand where you are now and what needs to change.

Track staff data and run an evidence-based anonymous staff survey to provide scores, benchmarks and feedback. You can see how well you are doing in building a workplace environment where your staff can do their best work.

Share strengths and focus on recommended actions.