Supporting staff who are Working from Home - a HT's perspective.

Humans want to feel successful. Teachers know this more keenly than most. It is central to our experience of motivating students.

Therefore, it follows that ensuring that my team can continue to FEEL SUCCESSFUL is one of my priorities during this pandemic. Most school staff have never worked from home before, therefore it would be easy to feel lost, overwhelmed, unsatisfied.

• How can you feel like you're smashing it as a TA or teacher when you're literally miles away from the students?

• How can you feel like you're in control and able to meet the expectations of your job whilst also caring for and home-schooling your own children?

One of my staff, a TA, gave me this feedback on the 20th April (on a platform called Clear Review, which I love, and I might blog about separately one day):

And I was delighted! Because this is exactly what I want for staff, that they feel ok!

I was tweeting Dr Emma Kell (@thosethatcan) about this last night and I said I would provide some screen shots of what I thought were crystal clear, realistic and flexible expectations which are allowing staff to experience success during the madness! Running out of characters, I'm going to pop them here and briefly outline the strategy.

1. Be crystal clear from the outset.

Okay...this wasn't QUITE from the outset as I did have a portion of staff working from home a bit earlier than this, BUT on Friday 27th March I sent a 'talking powerpoint' (powerpoint slides with me chatting over them so people can hear my tone/intention etc) to all staff that was titled: Working from Home - The Rise COVID 19. In it, I reminded staff of our culture and our approach to staff wellbeing (three layers: culture, workload, wellbeing) and reassured them that this wasn't going to be discarded because of the current situation.

The key bullet points for our Working from Home approach made it clear that this was not about filling everyone's days or everyone 'justifying' their existence! Instead we needed to get results (and results = supported kids and families, not academic outcomes) for the community whilst remembering that flexibility and balance would be key.

I created this template which functioned a bit like a 'To do' list but also indicated to staff which elements had no flexibility (eg. safeguarding) down to those elements which could be arranged 100% flexibly around other commitments.

I shared this template with the SLT and they populated this for various teams within the school. So we ended up the same template with different content for:

• • TAs

    • Teachers

    • Allied Health Professionals (OT, SALT) and Behaviour Team

    • Support Team

    • Sixth Form Team

    • SLT (this transparency was important to me)

Here is one for the TAs:

2. Be realistic and flexible

I have already shown with the orange arrow how I was trying to be explicit about which jobs (many of them) could be done with a high degree of flexibility. But with AHT Matt (@positivteacha's) help, we also showed how this was realistic and not overwhelming by mapping the 'set jobs' for a week into a 8-4 calendar:

3. Celebrate and value everyone's contribution

Like most schools, we have a rota system where a minority of staff work from school over a given week and the rest are working from home. Even the deliberate use of that parallel language 'working from ________' is intended to show that I respect and value the team's contributions equally, wherever they're working. I make an effort in my whole school emails and briefings to thank and celebrate the contributions made by those working from home, and it's not difficult! Because they are doing a STELLAR job at supporting the community and we get lots of little positive shout outs and feedback from families to show it.

Ultimately, success is motivating. People who are motivated do a better job. Therefore, the whole community benefits when leaders set crystal clear, reasonable and flexible expectations. WE ALL WIN.