Staff wellbeing

[MinnieLatte]

I’m a headteacher and need some suggestions to support well-being of the staff please. It’s been a bloody hard year and I’ve done my best to support staff with minimising workload, we’ve not had staff meetings if we didn’t need to, I haven’t dropped in to online lessons & we allocated a training day to well-being, I.e. stay in your Pjs at home & do what you like day.

I know it’s hard having the children back and we’ve got lots to catch up on, lots to plan & I still have to lead the school forward. They’re starting to flounder.

I don’t want to do enforced fun type activities, for them such as staff yoga or group bonding, I think they’d hate it. I don’t want to do shout outs for individuals as they’d think that was false, things like dropping chocolate anonymously to a teachers classroom once a week just seems a bit naff. I’d always prefer to try to minimise workload & let people just go home & relax as they would choose.

They all had a bottle of wine from me in July & Christmas, this went down well! They like cakes & chocolate in the staff room!

If you are a stressed out teacher what could your boss do to try & make you smile? Thanks

[mummywithtwokidsplusdog]

Genuine, individual thanks rather than generic insincere thanks to all repeated all the time.
Gatekeeper of emails - collate so one per day from slt.
No emails before 8am/after 430pm .... people can put delay on if need to work then.
‘Golden week’ where no homework/marking/parents evenings etc
‘Secret friend’ .... staff can opt in to be a secret friend and you distribute at random .... really cheers people up.
Be supportive and have your staffs backs in good times and bad.
No ‘favorites’.... hate it when the loud staff members are seen as more marvelous than the ones that just get on with their job quietly and effectively x
Good luck- being a head teacher is a difficult and thankless task just now, more than ever!