Michelle:
Good morning and welcome everyone. It is so lovely to have you joining us for our final in the Leading for Wellbeing Series. I'm Dr. Michelle McQuaid. We're going to formally get underway in just a few minutes here. So the good news is you are right where you need to be with time to breathe. So if you need to get the cuppa or the water, turn off the phones or the notifications on your computer so you can settle in and be fully present for this 90 minutes, we encourage you to do so.
If you're able to in the chat, let us know where you're joining us from today. Where are you located? What service are you here as part of? It's a great way for us all just to get a sense of who we're in conversation with today. So if you can find that chat, it's normally towards the bottom of your Zoom screen, and just click open the chat window and let us know where are you joining us from today, where are you physically located, what service are you a part of? It's a great way just for us to get a sense of who we're in conversation with today.
So again, we will formally open proceedings in about two to three minutes, but just as we are getting settled in, make sure you've got water, cuppa, whatever you need to be comfortable for the next 90 minutes. And do in the chat, let us know where are you joining from today, what location are you in, what service are you a part of, so we can start to get a sense of who is in the conversation with us today.
So welcome. I can see Carla, welcome, from Family Services at Uniting at the Pakenham office. Welcome Christine from Latrobe Community Health down in Morwell, Gippsland. Great to have you with us. Elena, welcome, from Wire on the Wiradjuri lands. Great to have you with us. Maria, welcome, from Agency Performance and System Support, which is part of Department Family Fairness and Housing based out at Ringwood. Great to have you here.
Alessandra, welcome, from Ring Bank City Council HRs team. Welcome to the team from Women's Health Loddon Mallee down in Bendigo. Great to have you with us. Geraldine, great to have you with us from Family Safety Victoria on Wiradjuri land today. Mary, wonderful to have you with us from [inaudible 00:02:26]. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, Mary, correct me if I'm not. [inaudible 00:02:30] Kids First Australia out at Heidelberg. Hyba, welcome from [inaudible 00:02:33] Community Connections. Great to have you here. Kristen from Brimbank City Council from the libraries. And thank you for joining us from the Elizabeth Morgan House again on Wiradjuri Country today. Kirsten, welcome from Pakenham Corrections. Great to have you here. Michelle from Relationships Australia, Victoria out at Cranburn North. Anna from Brimbank City Council in Melbourne, great to have you here. Dom from [inaudible 00:03:00] in Wiradjuri Country.
Amanda from people and culture team at Kilmore District Health, welcome. Marie, Brimbank City Council. I think gold stars for the Brimbank City Council team. It's wonderful to have so many of you here. Anj from Family Care in Shepparton. Rochelle from Australia Community Support Organisations. It's great. Keep those coming in. Let us know where you are joining us from today. It is wonderful to have you here for our fourth and final in our Leading with Wellbeing Series today. And so to get us formally started, I'm going to pass over to you now, Catherine. I'll stop those slides running and when you are ready, let's get underway.
Catherine:
Thanks so much Michelle, and thanks so much everyone for being here today. It's an absolute pleasure to be here to open this next seminar. This is the fourth and final Leading for Wellbeing seminar in the series. My name's Catherine Kent. I'm the director of the Family Violence Industry Plan and I'm here today to open up the proceedings and listening to the conversation.
I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands that I'm coming from. I'm here on the lands of the [inaudible 00:04:17] people and pay my very deep respects to elders past and present. I'd also like to extend those respects to the traditional custodians of all the lands across Australia and recognise that sovereignty across these lands has never been seeded. I'd also like to acknowledge the victim survivors who may be here joining us today. We keep forefront in our minds all those who are impacted by or who are living with violence and abuse and for whom we undertake this really important work.
Given the acknowledgement, I think it's important to recognise that there may be some really challenging moments in today's content. If you are affected and require support, please feel free to take a break or you can use the support numbers provided in the chat and you'll find the details there. We know that looking after the wellbeing of our workforces is crucial to having a strong and robust sector that delivers positive outcomes for our clients. The Health, Safety, and Wellbeing Project has been developed in collaboration with the sector and I'm really pleased it's been delivered to you all.
The project includes an online guide with links to safe and equal self-assessment tool, which you can find in the chat. I encourage you all to have a look at these. I've heard that the first three Leading for Wellbeing seminars have gone exceptionally well with you enjoying hearing from your colleagues about workforce wellbeing practises, success stories and challenges.
The seminars have covered topics ranging from psychological safety, burnout, through to cultural practises that can help like grounding exercises, having a cup of tea with a colleague who cares. And I think it's great that the seminars have drawn on the latest evidence in thinking from the likes of Brené Brown, Vikki Reynolds, and Sandra Bloom. Many of you took the time in providing feedback, which has been really appreciated as it helps us know whether we're hitting the mark. And I encourage you to please fill out the survey at the end of this seminar as well. I'm sure that the seminar today is going to be just as good, if not better, as the first three. And thank you so much for taking the time out of your day because we know how busy you are.
This seminar is all about tying it all together and addressing those topics that you've requested. The agenda today will cover team dynamics, how to influence the broader culture regarding workforce wellbeing, recognising workers and workplace lived experience. Michelle will once again make this seminar as interactive as possible and draw from the latest research and sector about caring for the health, safety, and wellbeing of our teams. She'll again, make sure that you have access to all of the resources and the tools to help us. It's my absolute pleasure to introduce once again one of Australia's leading health, safety, and wellbeing experts, Dr. Michelle McQuaid from the Wellbeing Lab. So without any more fuss, I'd like to hand over to the host today of today's seminar, Dr. Michelle McQuaid. Thank you so much.
Michelle:
Thank you so much, Catherine. No pressure there. I don't know how we top the last three of these seminar series. They have been such beautiful conversations because of the voices that you have all added, the people that have come on and been interviewed and helped us understand what is happening out there in the real world of practise when it comes to supporting the health, safety, and wellbeing of your teams, and all of your beautiful comments in the chat. Again, we encourage you today, use that chat. We want to learn from you as much as we want to share and put the science at your fingertips.
So I want to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the Kulin nation on which I'm joining you from today. And to extend my respects to their elders past and present and extend that respect to any Aboriginal people who are joining us today. We do in the participant and in the chat window have two amazing team members who can help you throughout this seminar if you have any technical questions, but also if you are needing support at any stage because of something that is shared. So if you look for the name Evie Wright or Enigo Co in that chat window, if you want to message them privately with any help you need, you're more than welcome to.
Or just put anything you need in the chat there where anyone can see and Evie and Enigo are there throughout keeping an eye on the chat trying to assist you wherever they can. Again, we encourage you to use the chat throughout. If you want to pose questions there, we are checking it and trying to come back to things either live during this conversation or otherwise, if not, after the session for you. And as Catherine mentioned, the slides and all the tools that we share today will be available for you following today's session.
So today's session is really a wrap up of everything we've learned over the last three seminars. And in particular in our last session together we asked you what was still missing, what hadn't we covered yet in this series that you were really wanting some additional support on? And the things that you overwhelmingly told us was that we wanted to talk a bit more about team dynamics and how we help support the health, safety, and wellbeing of our people as they work together in those team dynamics? Sometimes that's working beautifully and other times it's a little more challenging for us. We wanted to talk about lived experience and how do we best support the health, safety, and wellbeing of team members who have a lived experience of family violence?
We wanted to talk about how do we put this all together? How do we put all these ideas into some form of health, safety, and wellbeing strategy that we can implement with some consistency and sustainability without impairing our health, safety and wellbeing as leaders in the process? And so we're going to give you a really easy tool and show you how to put together some of the things we've been learning throughout from each other. And then lastly, how do we address recognition and reward for our people? Of course, this is one of those psychosocial emotional and social hazards that we know have been identified as one of the things as organisations and leaders we need to be mindful of with our people.
And of course, always challenging for us often in the sector given limited budgets and resources that we are working with around recognition and rewards. So we're going to finish with that. So that's what today is all about. And so with no more ado, let's just dive on in and get ourselves started. Evie, can you just confirm for me you can see the slides on the screen there? That would be fantastic.
Evie:
Perfect.
Michelle:
Thank you. Yay. And as we get going, again, we just want to provide this caution upfront for everybody that although we're going to share lots of evidence-based ideas today, of course when it comes to human behaviour, even the best research can only tell us what works for some of the people some of the time. So the invitation today is let's use the research to accelerate our understanding of what might be possible to inspire our practises as to how we might then do that practically. And then to pull it apart and figure out what works best for your organisation, for your teams in the context that you are in with the resources that you have available and for the outcomes that you want.
So we have been blessed, as I mentioned at the outset, throughout these seminars to have amazing people join us from the field. Many of these people have been participating in health, safety, and wellbeing pilots with coaches from the Wellbeing Lab team who have been supporting them. And I know we have in the participants today the wonderful Linda Rowley, who's one of those coaches, and we may also have Kirsten McKenna, who is our other coach. And as these coaches have been working with these pilot organisations for the health, safety, and wellbeing plans, they've been identifying people to come on here and help share what's working well, where they're struggling and what they're learning when it comes to caring for wellbeing for their teams.
So in our first seminar, we were blessed to have the wonderful Kelly Gannon from Windamara Aboriginal Corporation. And one of the tools that Kelly left us all with was this idea they use in their workplace of supervision contracts that guarantee their people the time and support they need for these leaders. And now in their supervision contracts they actually ask people, what kind of support do you most like to receive? How do you like feedback? How do you like to learn? How do you like coaching? All these beautiful things. And so this idea that supervision is very intentional in their organisation we know was an idea that resonated with many of you thinking about, okay, well what do we do around supervision agreements and how do we make sure from the outset that supervision is designed to be a safe and supportive place for our teams rather than something they may come into feeling a little bit fearful or feeling like that's not fully their time to get what they need from us as leaders?
We were also blessed in the first webinar to be able to have Maryanne Hendron join us from Women's Health Grampians. And Maryanne talked about how have they gone about building a culture of accountability in their workplace. And she left us with the idea that the work that they do in the sector is to recognise and to be able to express vulnerability in safe and trusting environments. And so we really talked about psychological safety and how do we make it okay to ask questions, to give and seek feedback, to suggest new ideas that might be a bit out of the box, to learn alongside each other even when that learning can be awkward and clumsy and complicated and sometimes result in failure as well?
And so Maryanne was talking with us about how do they use their values and how do they help hold themselves as leaders and then by default their teams to be accountable to those values that make it okay to speak up, to ask questions, to seek and give feedback, to be perfectly imperfect together so that they can keep looking at, well, what's working well, where are we struggling, what are we learning from all of that, and what might we do next? And along the way, we've seeded with you that safety check chat with those four questions that Maryanne and her team and other teams have been using to help build that psychological safety.
In our second seminar, we were gifted with Colleen's advice from Junction Support Services, and Colleen was talking about that very difficult challenge most of us feel when it comes to helping to care for health, safety, and wellbeing about balancing the seesaw for our people between the job demands we have to ask of them and the job resources that we can provide of them. And how do we keep this in reasonable alignment without letting those job demands overwhelm the job resources too consistently? And again, we appreciate because of the funding challenges, often the short-term nature of both funding and sometimes staff contracts, this is often one of the biggest health, safety, and wellbeing challenges you've told us that as a sector you struggle with as leaders.
And so Colleen was sharing that in their organisation to help balance those demands they actually regularly ask what would make your job easier? And not only do they ask that, but they have a little template where people can help fill out the answers to that. So instead of Colleen or her team of leaders having to have all the answers, or instead of feeling like they have none of the answers and how do they go back when people tell them what will make their job easier if they don't feel like they can fulfil any of it, what Colleen explained to us was that by having this template that staff can fill out together with their leaders to try and co-create solutions and think creatively within the resources and some of the limits and boundaries they have of what is available to them, how it feels like they're in it together solving those resource challenges.
And when they can't and if they need to simply acknowledge that actually, yeah, we do need three more people and we don't currently have funding for that, that at least that conversation has been had and is out in the open rather than people holding it inside and biting their tongues or muttering in the corridors about it, that sometimes it's simply acknowledging the limits we do work within is part of building that sense of safety and then trying to be as realistic as we can about what is and isn't possible within those limits.
We were also joined in the second session by Christie Lutz from Safe and Equal, and Christie took us through Safe and Equals self-assessment tool. And Evie put that in the chat earlier for you and we'll share it again throughout this session. And we've talked about some of that new legislation that has been drafted in Victoria, it's not yet been approved, but also Safe Work Australia's updated model code of practise around these psychosocial hazards for health, safety, and wellbeing. And the fact that the responsibility for health, safety, and wellbeing sits at that organisational and leadership level rather than at the individual level. That this is not a self-care issue, it is a collective care opportunity.
And so the beauty of the Safe and Equal self-assessment tool that Christie gave us all to be able to play with was not only did it help us assess different areas of those psychosocial hazards we may have in our workplace, but it also gave us a guide that went with it with great coaching questions that we could use as team leaders just for our own team or we could use across the whole organisation. So thinking about how are we helping to minimise the psychosocial risks for our team is a big part of health, safety, and wellbeing.
We also, in session number two, had the wonderful Lisa Robinson join us from Bethany Community Support. And Lisa talked to us about how as a leader do we build trust with our team and the need to lead with care and curiosity. And she left us with lots of beautiful, practical, small ideas we could implement, including her walking the floor each day policy just to be able to walk amongst the team, see where people are at, say hello, so that her face is familiar to them, having the open door policy so that people can come in easily and request assistance from her when they're needing it, joining different team meetings just to listen, to simply be there as an observer rather than as a contributor.
So again, she has a sense of where's the rhythm and energy, the pace, the strengths, the challenges that are unfolding in her teams. The importance of celebrating small things. That it's not always just the fixing the problems, but also the holding up the strengths and the celebrating what's working well. And having the humility as leaders to not pretend we have all the answers. I think sometimes as leaders, we feel when we get put into those roles, it's our job to figure all the answers out. And of course, what we see over and over in the research and Lisa spoke to beautifully from her lived experience was actually the more that she embraces the fact that she definitely does not have all the answers and invites her team in to help co-create them, the more effective she's learned to be as a leader, and ironically, the more her team trust her because she's not pretending to have it all figured out.
We then went to seminar three and we had our beautiful team from Yoowinna Wurnalung Healing Service, Daphne and Ivy with us. And Daphne talked about the fact that as a leader, she most importantly needs to remember that she's the support person to her team because her team are the connectors to the community. And Daphne talked beautifully about the need for cup of tea moments with her team where she can simply check in, be present with them, and as Ivy spoke to so beautifully, listen deeply. To not just fill all the silences that we have in conversation with each other, but to sit comfortably in those silences and learn to listen to what might be underneath them as well. And Daphne and Ivy of course gave us a number of other beautiful tools from seminar three.
And the good news for you is the videos for each of these seminars all exist and are available still to you online. You're welcome to share them with team members if you want as well. So anything I'm saying you missed and you're like, oh, I wanted to see that, or you're like, oh, I wanted to go back, I'm remembering that now, just know that all of this will exist well beyond today, including this video, for you to revisit as you need. So before we dive into new content, as we always do, we want to honour the wisdom of the group that we have here.
And I'm going to [inaudible 00:22:04] any of those seminars if you can share for us perhaps the insights, the aha moments, or the tools that you found most valuable to help us remember or not lose track of all the amazing things that we've learned. Or if today is your first webinar with us, welcome. We're so pleased to have you. If there's something else that you are using right now to help care for the health, safety, and wellbeing of your team that you think can be helpful for others, one of those small nudges that can make a big difference, then I'm going to ask you to put that in the chat as well.
So while you share ahas, insights, favourite tools either from the series or things that you are doing in addition to what we've been talking about in the series to support the health, safety, and wellbeing of your teams and workplace, I am going to have a sip of water and then I'm going to start to call out some of what we're seeing there. So if you can put them in the chat now, that would be amazing. And then we're going to dive on into today's content.
Okay, so let's grab up that chat screen and see what is coming up for people. So Joe is saying, one tool is to have a staff member share a reflection of their week on a Friday afternoon, could be from a client, a learning, et cetera. I love that, Joe. So simple. And what a beautiful kind of peak end to the week to just wrap it together and bring it all to the fore. Michelle's saying, bringing the into the zone of fabulousness. So Michelle, one of my favourites too. So in seminar two we shared the research of Vikki Reynolds around the zone of fabulousness and how do we stay centred in that place that is client-centred versus getting enmeshed or otherwise actually starting to distance ourselves from our clients with cynicism, given all the challenges we face?
Michelle:
... Ourselves from our clients with cynicism, given all the challenges we face. So that zone of fabulousness, am I drifting or am I in the zone in seminar two? And, there were lots of tools to help with that. Hiba saying, "Celebrating wins." I agree, Hiba, that's so important and it's so easy to miss this in the busyness of every day. And we definitely know neurologically, celebrating wins is not only good for our health, safety and wellbeing in the moment, but it helps build confidence and self-efficacy as we go forward. So it builds our resilience resources, so never feel like this is not worth fitting in. Celebrate the wins as often as you can. Anna saying, "Resilience plans for staff," beautiful Anna. And again, in seminar two, we shared some of the research of Sandra Bloom around safety plans. And so, I love the resilience plans, and how do we use these as tools to talk to each other and normalise that resilience or safety are skills that we build, not just something we have or we don't?
Vicky's saying, "Friday shout-outs to the team to celebrate the week's achievements." Again, I love that piece of gratitude. In my experience, gratitude, one of the most underutilised resources we have for health, safety and wellbeing can have a massive impact. Costs us nothing financially, just a little bit of time and intention like Vicky's team are using there. Sozic, I hope I'm pronouncing that right. My apologies if I'm not is also saying, "The safety plans for staff self-reflective, even if not shared." So, I love that. Again, if your team doesn't feel up for sharing the plan, encouraging them at least to have done that exercise. Julie saying from Brimbank Council, "The tip about a conversation starter with the team's been helpful, what would make your job easier to [inaudible 00:25:46] conversations and lead to celebrating small wins? Amazing. Again, we are wide to be creatures of progress.
It's how we evolve over our lives. So I think the more we can help people see and have that sense of self-determination and autonomy that okay, yes, the context we're in is incredibly challenging and has many limitations around it. And where are the things that we can keep making a difference on, so that we don't slip to that learned helplessness? We don't slip out of that zone of fabulousness. Hibar saying, "Listen to your body." And I love, Daphne and Ivy I think had so many beautiful things about listening to our bodies. My other one that Daphne gave us that stayed with me, well two of them is putting my feet into the ground, so connecting with country each morning. And in fact, I have bare feet now as I'm teaching, so I'm connected to country, but also I love to up a tree moment as a leader, that sometimes if I'm noticing I'm being triggered or my agenda's coming too much to the fore as I'm talking to team.
How, as a leader, do I take myself up the tree just to own what's mine and separate from where I need to be in this moment for a team member? So Hibar again, "I love Daphne and Ivy, I think gave us so many beautiful somatic tips in seminar three." And Ross saying, "We have a new team following a restructure, so weekly meetings will include the morning tea and the catch up." And again, I think that cup of tea moment, more of them, or cup of coffee, or cup of smoothie, cup of water, whatever you like. So, thank you so much for sharing some of those insights. Feel free to keep adding and we always say, please feel free to steal with pride or adopt with pride, any of these ideas that practically can work in your team. We're going to help you before the end of the day, do a little mapping exercise where you can put some of these ideas together.
With that said though, well let's dive into today's content, and particularly one of the ones that you wanted us to talk about more was how do we support the health, safety and wellbeing, as we navigate team dynamics with each other? So to help us dive into this topic a little bit, we are very blessed today and I'm going to stop that share on the screen, so that we can add Elena's Beautiful face up here please, Evie. So Elena Ashley's joining us from WIRE, the Women's Information and Referral Exchange. Elena manages the operations there at WIRE and has done that for about two and a half years. And in that role, she oversees IT, finance, facilities, governance, HR, you can guess she's a fairly busy lady. And, Elena has more than 20 years in not-for-profit experience. So, you are used to working in this context for a while. So Elena, welcome. It's so great to have you with us.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:24:04]
Elena Ashley:
Thank you for having me, Michelle and thank you, everyone.
Michelle:
Oh, it's great to have you here. And Elena, when we chatted during the week, you were saying, "You've been to all of the seminar series and seen all those beautiful voices we were sharing before, and so felt like you wanted to be able to pay forward what everybody else had given you, and come and share today." So, thank you so much. And I think just to help everyone understand a little bit of WIREs context, you've had a lot of change the last little while. So can you help us understand from a team perspective, what are some of the dynamics that you've been navigating?
Elena Ashley:
Absolutely. And look, first I would actually like to say the last seminar, which was about cultural safety, I found particularly useful for thinking about some practical ways of being more welcoming to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to [inaudible 00:29:23]. So that was particularly useful, lots of other useful ones, but that was a particular one that I wanted to shout out at the moment. So yes, over the last 12 months, WIRE has been through a lot of change and we introduced a new strategy. We brought on a new CEO to introduce that strategy. She brought in a restructure, and that process made lots of changes, and it was based on some deep listening that Jade, the CEO, introduced, and also the time and energy, things that had happened, team dynamics if you like, across the organisation. I'll take you back just a little bit.
WIRE has been around for 40 years, and its core product or core service was, or is the information service. And, we all know about COVID and how that's been. And so, the information service is a group of service delivery people who act as a real team together. And right through that COVID experience, kept working. They were essential workers, so they had to be in the office, kept operating, whereas the rest of the organisation and we have projects, we have finance, we have all the other operations kinds of things, they're all separate and we're specialists. So, we have this one team. So, I'm trying to describe the team dynamics of the organisation at the moment. So we have this one team, where they work really closely, collaboratively, supportive of each other, and then everybody else. And it's a real, almost like a hub and spoke arrangement. And so, in trying to work through the organisation because that's been effective in the past, but now we want to bring everybody much more collaboratively together, it's really important to move the way that is.
So having this one strong collaborative group, and then all of these other individuals, one of the things about the individuals is, and everybody is an expert in their own area, they were hired for their autonomy and specific skillset, lots of strong personalities, lots of independence and so on, but also maybe not so much good at collaborating with other people within their teams or being involved. And so with COVID, as we all know, everybody was off doing their own things, so it was hard to try and connect people together and draw on the interdependencies of the organisation. And, collaboration is really important as part of the new strategy for WIRE. So, the restructure that the CEO brought in was very much focused around some of these key things that we wanted to do. So breaking down those silos that we had, building communication across the organisation, building on those strengths that we had, particularly with the independence, and the autonomy and the ability to just go do things. Can-do attitude, absolutely essential.
But also, we're listening to what's happening with the precarious nature in our sector of employment. So we created some ongoing employment roles, also some career plans and career opportunities for people. So rather than just having workers and managers actually creating some steps, and opportunities to test out and learn new skills and what have you. So, that was all involved in the restructure that we set up. About half of the new roles that we had in the restructure were filled internally by existing staff, which was fantastic. And the other half came externally, and we made a really concerted effort to make sure that that can-do attitude was focused on in employing people, as well as ability to communicate, and talk to other people, and work and collaborate with other people as well. So these sort of, some of the huge big changes and that's all happened in the last six months really, that restructure has now come into to fall.
Michelle:
So that's a lot. It's a lot for anybody to navigate. And I think most of us as leaders, at some stage, have been through restructures. So, we understand also the uncertainty, and the anxiety that can bring and how it shifts team dynamics, everything that was established kind of gets thrown up in the air, and then they've got to come down and take a new shape. So, very much sort of in that forming stage that we often think, or that developmental stage of a team. So as you're bringing those new teams together, I think two questions. One, how are you thinking about the different strengths? You mentioned how do we build on the strengths of people and align them to the right teams? So, sort of mixing them up a bit differently from how they were before.
And then, how are you giving people the confidence to work to those strengths and understand those strengths in each other, so that there's some respect and appreciation in these new teams about, well, why are we now together, versus I liked my old team, and I wanted to work with that person and not be over here? How have you been navigating all of that?
Elena Ashley:
Yeah, great. Look, great questions. Absolutely preserving the strengths of those teams, but also introducing a whole bunch of other cross-functional teams as well, or communications. One of the things I didn't mention was we just had the restructure, and then our landlord sold our property, so we had to move. And, we had basically two months to completely move. We'd been in the premises for 12 years, so I'm sure everyone here will appreciate having to move house effectively with many, many boxes and what have you, really, really quickly over Christmas. Of course.
Michelle:
Of course. Why not? Make it as complicated as possible.
Elena Ashley:
Exactly, exactly. So, we had to do that too. And, this probably is a good example of how we did it. We immediately set up, when we found out that this happened, we set up a working group across group, or across a team working group. So, we had representatives from each of the teams involved in that relocation. So we worked out and thought about what actually each of the teams needed, got the team representatives to feed that back, taught to their teams and so on. And then listen very carefully, very deeply, lots of corridor discussions over coffee or whatever, around what was required, what was not going to be required, how could we do this, how could we do this differently and so on. So there was that all happening, as well as when we found the location, we had open days or open sessions for everyone to come along.
We had the floor plan there, texters, and highlighters, and opportunities to write where people would like to be, what they thought this area could be used for and so on. So, created as many opportunities as possible for people to consult. So we had formal ways for consulting, but we also had informal ways as well. And email, conversations in the corridor while packing boxes, or unpacking boxes or what have you, as well as just sitting down and moving chairs around and just trialling different things. And making it not as fixed as possible, giving the opportunity for everybody to actually say what they thought, what they were interested in. I think that-
Michelle:
I think, Elena, there's so many important things you're touching in there for us to think about as tools, wherever our team dynamics are, whether we're going through restructures, we're moving buildings or we're more in the business as usual kind of stage. And what I'm hearing that, correct me if I'm wrong, is that first that really thinking about different people's strengths, and the alignment of those strengths to business needs in terms of the roles people are playing in different teams, versus just, we've got this job, we've always done it this way, so this is how we'll keep doing it. The conversations, formal and informal conversations, I think we've heard pretty much in every single one of these seminars that importance of being in conversation, that so much change and trust is built in the conversations. And I'm hearing that accessibility from the packing boxes, to the conversations in the hall, to the... It didn't just have to look one way.
And the other piece I'm hearing is that, openness in that invitation to experiment, it's not all fixed as it's, this is the plan for the new building, it's always going to be this way. This is how all these new teams are going to work together, it's always going to... But that willingness to say, "Well, we don't quite know, we're going to start this way." "We'll see how it's working, we'll keep getting feedback and we can adapt." And the last bit, I think that's always, it's a bit we often miss in teaming, that it's that, a shared project. I think the gift perhaps unexpectedly wasn't necessarily the one you wanted or the move, was it gave these new teams a shared project both within their team and across the organisation for everybody to work on.
And so, sometimes circumstances gift us that and other times we might need to create something. But I do think there's lots of research that supports that need for meaningful shared projects that get us outside of our silos, and help us build those collaboration and cooperation strengths. If that's not been our natural way of working. Am I sort of hearing those tools? Anything you would add to that or want to correct for me?
Elena Ashley:
Oh no, look, you're absolutely right and it did force us to transform, I think rather than dwelling on the how do we feel about this restructure, suddenly we've got to relocate, and then operate with them. And we had some intentional, and I would call this intentional efforts with the floor plan, it's open plan to mix the groups up, make them much closer, so the groups operate around within their groups, but they're also within an easy talking distance to each other now. And, that really breaks down the silos as well and makes people... It makes the opportunities available for everybody to talk with each other, so.
Michelle:
I love that you're touching on that for us about, how are we using our physical environment to support the team dynamics we want to encourage? And again, I think back to your organisational structure choices, how are we using organisational structure to think about how we shape our dynamics? I'm mindful of time and I know there's so much more there I want to ask you, and I'm sure other people do as well. Elena will be in the chat, so if you've got more questions for her, keep them going there. Elena, thank you so much for sharing with us and for the beautiful work you and the team at WIRE are doing in the world, we're so grateful.
So, how else can we build on these team dynamics? Elena just gave us a lot of very practical ideas, all of which we could point to different pieces of research to support. One of the pieces in particular, she spoke to around thinking about who went into what roles and how did they build on the strengths of their team? Is this language of strengths? And I know as a sector, one of the beautiful things about us is that typically, more than the last decade or so has been spent trying to think about building on the strengths of our clients. One of the challenges though, is because our brain is naturally wired with a negativity bias that makes us very good at pointing out, at finding the problems, and pointing them out and feeling that evolutionary survival pull to want to fix them, we're not always as good at thinking about the strengths in our team.
So one of the things I loved about Elena, and WIRE and the approach that they've taken, is that they were very intentional in thinking about the strengths of their people as they went about this change. And, why might that matter for health, safety and wellbeing? So more than 20 years of research consistently shows us that when people understand what their strengths are, they can name easily at least their top five strengths, then they're more likely to report feeling confident at work and feeling less anxious and stressed, which kind of makes sense. If I know what my strengths are and I feel able to draw on them in my jobs, I perhaps have more self-efficacy, feel more able to tackle the challenges coming at me. They are up to six times more engaged. Some studies suggest they are more likely to experience higher levels of meaning and satisfaction in their work, because they feel like they're having a chance to contribute what they do best each day, and they are generally happier and have higher levels of energy.
So not only is being strength focused good for us as organisations and teams, but it also has a very practical and real impact on each person's feelings of health, safety and wellbeing. So I'm curious in the chat, if you can pop for us, what are your top strengths? Maybe it's one thing you can name easily, maybe it's two, three, four or five. If you can get five, gold stars. You can use whatever language you want to name them on the screen, I'm sharing with you the language of the VIA. They'll use inaction survey. These strengths tend to reflect our character strengths, the how we like to work, but they're certainly not the only way we can think about our strengths. Our strengths could be our talents, our strengths could be our experiences, our strengths could be the resources and networks that we get to bring to our roles.
So just for a moment in the chat, because I think it's hard for us to spot and appreciate the strengths in others if we don't know the strengths in ourselves. So you can think about this as a little wellbeing, check in for yourself in this moment and with no judgement , whatever you can get is okay.. Can you just pop into the chat for us what your top strengths are? And again, one strength, two strengths, three strengths, however many you feel able to name. So Amy saying, "Fairness, creativity, honest teamwork and forgiveness." Kristen, "Honesty and humility." Danielle saying, oh sorry, Daniel's saying, "I've done the VIA, my top three from VIA were creativity and honesty and judgement ." Awesome, Daniel. Again, doesn't have to be this language. If you've got other language that you think about your strengths through that lens, whatever you've got is fine. Let's just check in.
This is really important as leaders, if we can't name our own top strengths, it's very difficult for us to spot the strengths in our teams. And if we can't spot the strengths in our teams, it's hard then to support some of those wellbeing outcomes we saw from the research. Mary saying, "She's done the VIA too, hope, honesty, fairness." Sally saying, "Love of learning, I can see their teamwork, forgiveness, humour." Belinda, "Teamwork, commitment, courage." Nevinka, "Curiosity, transparency, hopeful, value driven." I love that language, Nevinka. Joe saying, "Curiosity, honesty, leadership, humour, spirituality." Suzake saying, "Perseverance, love of learning, honesty." Ross, "Kindness, gratitude, honesty, perspective." I can see Dawn is saying, "Inclusion of others' ideas, listening intently to others." Beautiful, Dawn, thank you so much. Sue is saying, "She's done the VIA too, "Humour, love of beauty, teamwork." Keep them coming in there. It's beautiful to see your strengths.
And if nothing else from today's seminar, if all we do is just remind you that you have these strengths to draw on as a leader, then we will have done a good thing today. Because hopefully, you can then also think about how can I take those strengths back into the rest of my day, maybe the rest of my week, maybe into the month ahead or even the year ahead? The hard thing is if we are not thinking about our strengths as leaders, it's very difficult to think about our team's strengths. The other hard thing is that as a leader, because you are highly contagious, your strengths tend to skew your team, unless you are intentional about it. We tend as leaders to often hire in the image of ourselves, number one. So we tend to resonate, connect more with people that have similar strengths to us.
So being mindful of our strengths also helps us to be mindful of how we are diversifying the strengths around us in our team. And, there are no good or bad strengths. We want all of the strengths ideally in our teams, whatever way we're thinking about those strengths. And the other thing that makes it hard for us as a leaders, even if we're not doing the hiring or we're super mindful about how our bias might impact hiring, the thing is that your team starts to understand what you value and appreciate most as a leader. And because you are responsible for their reward and recognition, they will start to lean more towards the strengths that you value and appreciate. So there's a really important piece here for your own wellbeing, as a leader to know what your strengths are, as a leader to know strengths generally and have some language for it, so you can spot it in your team members and align to task, and to make sure you're thinking about how that is impacting the diversity and the appreciation that you're showing your team so you're not just skewing it to the strengths that you value most, which tend to be the ones that you have often developed.
The reason that these strengths are so important for us to all understand and the reason they have the wellbeing impact that we saw in the research, is that our strengths tend to represent the way our brains are wired to perform at their best. So we think of these as your neurological superpowers, they are the patterns of thinking, and feeling and behaving that you and your team have practised so often, that over time they've built up neurological pathways in our brain, that mean reaching for these strengths tend to make us quicker, more effective, more energised whenever we have a chance to do them at work, because our heads don't have to...
Michelle:
Whenever we have a chance to do them at work because our heads don't have to work so hard to pull them off, and generally, we have a level of mastery in these areas that make us quicker, more effective, and we feel more satisfied after we've done them.
So just be aware the importance of understanding strengths and having a language for it, it's kind of like seeing inside your brain and your team members' brains, to understand, "Ah, when this brain performs at its best, it tends to be because it's engaging in these kind of patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving." So, strengths can give us a really easy language and understanding for that.
The good news is, there are lots of strength assessment tools now freely and for very low cost available. The VIA, the Values In Action one, we popped in the chat is a free, 10-minute survey. Again, it tends to be around character strengths and the how we like to work, but also, the Gallup Organisation have StrengthsFinder. It tends to be more around the talents, the what we like to do in our jobs. That is a paid one, but it's quite cost-effective.
There are other tools. If you've got favourite strength tools you like to use, feel free to add them into the chat, or you may just create some general language in your organisation. Some of you were putting beautiful, sort of, general words in there. Rochelle was saying things like, "Ethical, authentic," yeah? "Knowledge and wisdom, calm."
So, you may build your own language in your team, as to "How do we think about strengths? How do we value strengths? How do we align our strengths to tasks?"
So, all sorts of ways that you can do it, but having some language and encouraging you and your team members to know what their top three to five strengths are, is a really good place to start.
And then to think about that team dynamic. Well then how do these strengths interact with each other? So, I'm curious. Let's do a quick poll here. I'll put this up on screen, so you can answer this anonymously. We're not monitoring anybody's results, but it'll give us a little sense here as to how we're doing with strengths.
So when it comes at the moment to planning team members' strengths to the tasks that you're asking them to do, what approach are you taking? Do you explicitly map it out? Everybody understands, yes, Rochelle has curiosity, ethical, authentic, and this is how we're mapping it to her tasks? Is it a bit more implicit? We have a hunch, we have a general knowledge, but we don't map it out or write it out, so everybody knows? We don't do it yet. We leave people to figure it out themselves or we do something else?
And no judgement here. Yeah? There's not a right or wrong answer here. There's only the answer that serves your team and workplace best, at this moment in time. So, wherever you are is absolutely fine.
I wrote a whole book, about a decade ago, on strengths-mapping in teams. And right now, we don't explicitly map in my team. It's one of the things that we will do in the coming months. We used to. It's a habit we've dropped away from. It's definitely something I want to get back to, but right now, it's probably more implicit. When I talk to team members, I'll often introduce them or get them to introduce themselves with their strengths for each other, but it's not on a map that everybody in our team can see. We do have it on our team board. People can go and look it up, but it's not easy to see. So, I would definitely be in the second category, where I can see a lot of you are as well.
I'll give that one more minute and take a sip of water, while you keep putting those numbers in there. So, again, no judgement . Wherever you are is completely okay.
Okay. So, we end that poll and let's share those results on screen. So, 57% of you, like me, it's a bit more implicit. Yep? We're thinking about what are our team's strengths and how do we put them to task, but we're not necessarily writing that down everywhere our team would know that those are the choices we've made.
I know in my team, I talked to individuals about it, but would Evie know what Linda's strengths are, for example, off the top of her head? Probably not, because I haven't made it easy for her to access.
23% of you don't match strengths to tasks. You let people figure it out for themselves. Again, that's not a problem. The one thing I would say is, it's helpful for people to at least know what their strengths are, so then they can do that self-matching.
13% of you explicitly map. I think if you can do this and that feels like the right fit in your team, it's generally the best way not to leave strengths-mapping to chance. And there's definitely research that shows that if your team explicitly know this, you are much more likely to be getting better team results, both in terms of performance, engagement, and job satisfaction.
And then, some of you, 7%, have got another approach. And if you want to put in chat, well, what else do you do? Maybe it's none of these options. That's completely okay. If you've got a different way you approach this, and you're happy to share it in chat, we would all love to learn from whatever is working for you.
So, why might it be worth explicitly mapping? Why might I go back after today and go, "You know what? Over the next month, I'm probably going to try to get back to that explicit place."?
So, Gallup researcher found that over tens of thousands of teams in all sorts of settings, that when people are able to use their strengths each day, because they know what their strengths are and their jobs are aligned to it, and their leaders and teams are supporting, encouraging, and giving feedback on strengths, then those teams see much lower turnover, they see higher productivity, and they see better results for their clients.
And, so, we think about, ultimately, our aim to be client-focused and provide the best support we can. For the clients that rely on what you do every day, this probably makes it worth the time and energy to think about, again, if it's right in your team, just how are we making sure we know what each other's strengths are? Yeah? Again, doesn't have to be explicitly mapped. Lots of different ways that you could do that, based on what's right for you.
The other thing that Peter Drucker, who's one of the world's leading researchers on leadership. Peter passed away a few years ago, but decades of work in all sorts of organisations, looking at who are the most successful leaders? And what Peter pointed out is that the main task for us as leaders is to try to create this alignment of our people's strengths, that it's so strong, it makes our systems' weaknesses irrelevant.
So, again, strengths, think about them as the neurological superpower. How do we tap into how our teams' brains work at their best, to not have the language and be mapping that to tasks where we can or helping our people map it to their own tasks, as some of you are doing, potentially leaves untapped resources and opportunities for us to create that alignment of strength.
One way that you can do that if you are using a tool like VIA, is we do this free little map exercise, so we can sort of see across our team members where they are.
But whether you are using VIA, a different tool, your own language, you can probably think creatively from this kind of exercise. What are ways we might visually put up somewhere? Our team's virtual, we do this on a Trello board, I mentioned, is there for them to see each other's strengths, but I haven't mapped it more recently into some of their different teams, which we'll do after today.
But what would work for your team? How can you make strengths more visible and easy to understand among team members, so that they can naturally start to think about, "Oh, Evie's got this beautiful strength of kindness. Maybe when we think about planning our next team activity together, if Evie'd like to be a part of that, we could really use her strength to think about how we do that, in a way that's going to really support everybody's well-being on that day and be a little kind gift to them from our organisation," for example.
The last thing that knowing strengths can be helpful for is to understand where strengths might collide. And our strengths do, particularly these how we like to work, that can tend to be more values-aligned for us. So, some of my top strengths often are creativity, zest, curiosity, and gratitude. And about a decade and a bit ago, when I first started doing this work, I was working with a leader that I found really difficult. We seemed to clash a lot. I didn't seem to be adding the value she wanted in her team. I found her, honestly, a bit boring and annoying. I didn't look forward to our team meetings together. It was not going well. And that negativity bias, as we all tend to do, was very focused on all the things I didn't enjoy about working with her.
And I was getting myself into quite a fix. It was early days of me understanding the strengths work. I was leaking a lot of energy. There was low trust, no psychological safety. It was definitely impacting my anxiety and stress levels. And more as a state of I didn't know what else to do, I decided that may be helpful for me to show up and start looking for her strengths. "What was she good at and enjoyed doing? Where did she light up in team meetings? What might give me clues about who she was at her best?"
And when I started looking for the best in her, instead of just the worst in her, I was able to notice that she had strengths, like prudence. Prudence is all about setting the plan and sticking to it, minimising the risk, fairness, honesty, judgement . She was very good at weighing up choices carefully and then making a very considered decision.
You can imagine with my zest, that didn't go so well. I like decisions to be made quickly. You can imagine her prudence of setting the plan and sticking with it, my creativity was often feeling thwarted when I offered up new ideas. She didn't seem to value them or like them. It was more like a distraction or an interruption. But for me, if I don't have creative outlets, it's really hard for me to enjoy my work, and it definitely impacts my levels of well-being, for example.
So, it became clear to me, once I started looking for the best in this leader, that we had some collisions that were going on, not because she was a bad person or I was a bad person, but just because we had some different things that were important to us, and we were bringing these different strengths to the work, and that was making the working together more complex and not as joyful as I think either of us wanted it to be at that time.
So the thing to know is that when our strengths collide, it definitely makes our team dynamics more exhausting and draining, we've seen in the research. And that, when we start to think about what are the strengths we're each bringing, it allows us to begin to build a bridge of empathy and respect, to be able to navigate those relationships.
So when I was able to see her strengths, instead of just all of her, what I viewed as her weaknesses or the things that were frustrating me about her, I was able to see that she probably wasn't intentionally thwarting all my great ideas, and she probably wasn't intentionally trying to be as boring and plodding along as possible to my zestiness, but she just had a different way of doing things and, actually, the project we were working on needed both of the strengths that we were bringing to it.
So, I was able to sit down in a conversation with her then and say, "Look, I can see my creativity and zest, at times, is difficult on this project. And I understand and I value that you are amazing at setting the plans, sticking to the deadlines, the budgets, and that we've got a lot to get done in a short period of time. But for me to be of value on this project for you, I have to have some ways where I can see a way to shorten that deadline or save some money or make that impact better, without undermining those first two things, that I can offer up those ideas. And even if you don't take them, that at least the idea is appreciated or my willingness to take the risk and offer the idea is valued."
And, so, she was then able to start taking a different approach, and I took a different approach, where we could respect what each other brought. It didn't mean we became best friends. The moment I had a chance to move on to a different leader that was a better fit for my strengths, I absolutely took that chance. But it meant that while we were working together, instead of draining each other's well-being and adding to each other's stress, we had this bridge of empathy and respect between our strengths, to value what we did differently and to value how those different things could bring a better outcome to the project that we were working on at the time.
So this language of strengths is not only important for how we give people and our teams a chance to do more of what they do best, work with their neurological superpowers, so we can deliver better outcomes for clients, it's also super helpful for team dynamics when it's not going so well, to build that psychologically safe space of respect and compassion, to know, "Hey, we're each trying to bring the best of what we can do here, but sometimes our strengths collide and how can we talk about this?"
The other way our strengths will sometimes collide is we can overplay any of these strengths. So, there were definitely times she was overplaying her prudence and squashing all new ideas. And there were definitely times I was overplaying my creativity and offering ideas at the wrong time.
And, so, the other thing it helped was for us to have some of this language with each other, to just be able to say, "Hey, are we overplaying prudence right here? Is there any space for creativity?" Or for her to tell me, "Hey, I think we've got too much creativity in the mix right now. Can we dial that down a little bit, and can we get your curiosity going as to why we need to stick to the plan that we have?"
And, so, this language of strengths and being able to give each other in-the-moment feedback for dialling up or dialling down our strengths was another way that really helped us just navigate the team dynamics, when those team dynamics weren't always easy with each other.
So, again, we've popped some tools for you in the chat, including this, strengths collision, strengths empathy bridge. There's also a little eBook there, with lots of different strength activities, with more language around those VIA character strengths if you want them. There's a little strength-spotting sheet that you can use if you're not using the VIA strengths, to be able to help in your team. And if you want more, reach out and let us know. There's no shortage of lots of free resources we can give you in this space to help navigate team dynamics.
So, with that in mind, I just want to leave you with this thought that, "People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel," from the wonderful Maya Angelou.
We all share this same deep need to be respected, valued, and appreciated at heart. When you look for somebody's strengths, when you value somebody's strengths, when you give people strength-based feedback, you give them that gift of health, safety, and well-being, individually and collectively, in the ways they're working together.
And again, we know many of you already are strengths-focused, so hopefully, today is a little nudge or an amplification of the work that you're already doing. And if not, or if it hasn't been so much lately because it's been in crisis mode since COVID and global pandemics, then maybe today is the reminder, like I'm going to take away as well, to get back to some of those places and not let that negativity deficit bias hijack us too much. We're not saying get rid of it entirely, but ideally, the research suggests we want to be 80% focused on strengths and 20% focused on addressing deficits. And, so, maybe think about when it comes to your team dynamics, the conversations, the way you're approaching work, where is that balance for you today?
And, so, with that in mind, we're going to think about team dynamics and how we influence culture, particularly through the lens of lived experience. And to help us do that, we have another very special guest joining us. So, Geraldine Bilston is currently working as a Senior Project Officer at Family Safety Victoria, where she's worked on several projects, including a number on lived experience. Geraldine was Deputy Chair of the Victim Survivor Advisory Council from 2020 to 2022. She completed her graduate certificate in Family Violence in 2021, and is currently undertaking a Master of Policy and Politics. And Geraldine's a board member of Kara Family Violence Service and is passionate about seeing the use of lived experience in the family violence reforms progress.
So, Geraldine, welcome. It's so great to have you with us.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:48:04]
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I have been having a few tech issues, so I have my fingers crossed that we will stay-
Michelle:
No problem.
Geraldine Bilston:
... stay connected.
Michelle:
As you know, we always have plan A, B, and C, so we're we're just going to be here perfectly imperfect together with our technology, and we'll see how it-
Geraldine Bilston:
How it goes.
Michelle:
[inaudible 01:05:41].
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah, great.
Michelle:
So, Geraldine, the research that Safe and Equal did show that there are workers who are reluctant to reveal their own lived experience of family violence to their colleagues and supervisors because of their concerns about stigma or the fear of being judged.
You've always been very upfront about your own lived experience, and so, maybe it's helpful to help us understand what you think it means for the health, safety, and well-being of staff members who feel they can't disclose that at work. How does that impact people, potentially?
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah, thank you. It's a great question. And I guess, firstly, I want to acknowledge that there can be really valid, personal, real reasons why people don't want to disclose their lived experience in their workplaces. And I think it's really important that part of these conversations we acknowledge that and acknowledge that people should feel respected and have agency on making that decision whether they do want to disclose or not.
I also want to say, we have an entire sector that has been built on a lived experiences of women. And in particular, in Victoria, we know that the Refuge movement was built by women, many of whom had their own experiences of violence, abuse, and oppression. And many of those women also identified as victim survivors.
And I think what we've seen is an evolution of our workforce and a professionalisation of our workforce. That has been a really important development, in terms of how we are recognised and remunerated for the important skills that we bring to this work.
Unfortunately, I think what has happened as part of that evolution and really, I guess, an unintended consequence of that has been that those really rich, important lived experiences that can inform and motivate our work have become a little squashed or silenced or separated from what we bring to the space.
I think that there is still a concern amongst professionals in the space that disclosing their own lived experience could affect their own credibility or authority, as professionals in the work. And I think, from a well-being perspective, that that can be quite detrimental for people. I think, as a sector, we're really delivering messages about family violence not being a private problem, about our judgement being with perpetrators, and not victim survivors, and that type of thing. And I think that there's a real opportunity for us to think about how alive those messages are, not just in our practise with clients, but how we operate with each other.
I think for me, personally, I want to take this moment today to acknowledge that, yes, I've come into the space with a very outward story to tell, but lots of people are occupying the space with their own lived experience. And there is nothing extraordinary about me being in this space, as a professional with lived experience.
And when we really look at the rates of violence against women, when we look at the highly gendered nature of our workforce, and when we look at this emerging evidence that suggests that many people have their own personal reasons and experiences that are bringing them to this work, then we realise how painfully ordinary it is for a professional to exist in this work and have their own lived experience.
And, so, I think, as leaders and colleagues in this space, we can look around at our colleagues and know, whether disclosed or not, that there is lived experience existing amongst us.
Michelle:
Yeah. And, of course, Geraldine, that absolutely impacts the health, safety, and well-being we may feel, as we go about the work that we're doing every day. And, so, we know that there can be that very felt tension between the need of a worker with lived experience and then the realities of what the workplace can and should offer, to be able to support that lived experience, and that this is not a simple thing to be able-
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah.
Michelle:
... to navigate. So, to what degree do you think that's a byproduct of us focusing on lived experience properly for the first time and learning to try to take it to where it means in all of its terms, versus just the everyday reality of, "Practically, I have a job to do. There will be times it triggers me, and I just have to get on and do that." How, as leaders, do we navigate that space for our people?
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah, I think it's a great question, and I think we are seeing this progress of this conversation around embedding and valuing lived experience in our work, but practically, we're seeing that unfold with a real focus on survivor advocacy or consumer lens lived experience engagement. And up to this point, there hasn't been a lot of thinking or developments, in terms of what it means for our own workforce.
And in that way, I think that, while we understand that the personal is political, we're still grappling with and understanding what it means when we think about the fact that the personal can also be professional.
I think, in terms of coming to the work with lived experience, I think, as individuals, it's really important that we come, and we take time to have some critical reflection on what our own responsibilities are in this work. "So what can I do to prepare myself to be ready for this work? What actions do I take to ensure I'm safe for my colleagues, as well as my clients? And what accountability am I taking for those type of responsibilities?"
I think it's imperative that, as workers and professionals, we come to the space, and we're really strong in centering and serving our clients, and that comes first. As well as that, I do think that there's an opportunity ... Sorry.
Michelle:
That's okay.
Geraldine Bilston:
Hold on. I'll just try the lights. Sorry.
Michelle:
You've lost the light.
Geraldine Bilston:
Yes. One second.
Michelle:
Go to the light, Geraldine. Go to the light. Geraldine's in an office building. She hasn't moved enough.
Geraldine Bilston:
So, sorry-
Michelle:
You're back-
Geraldine Bilston:
Always something-
Michelle:
That's okay. So, we were talking about the individual responsibility and ...
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah-
Michelle:
... digital responsibility and.
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah. I think there's also a responsibility for us as institutions and organisations and leaders to think about what can we offer to support people who have lived experience and are doing this work. I think we need to be upfront and honest and direct about the parameters of what we can offer, as well as the reason for us coming together that while undertaking this type of professional work in this space has proven to be healing for some people that we also have work to do. And that type of healing exists as a byproduct of what we're doing and that we centre and serve our clients, and we're not actually coming here specifically looking for our own healing. Yeah.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:12:04]
Michelle:
I think that's so important and can be a hard balance too, right? That sounds easy when we say it, it sounds logical, it's like, "Yes, of course as an individual, my healing is my personal responsibility." That's not what I primarily come to work for. And if I'm taking up a job role to support clients in this space, then I need to make sure that I can deliver on that responsibility to use those resources. And as an organisation, we need to be aware that we have people, to your point, whether they've disclosed or not, it's highly likely in every one of our teams, that we have people with lived experience.
And we need to explain that yes, this is a professional workplace, and so there are some limits here to what we can do to support individual healing, but we also have some responsibilities as an organisation to not be putting you unnecessarily at risk. If we think back to those psychosocial risks, right? Traumatic events and materials are one of those risks. And so then practically in the complexity of that, Geraldine, any advice for, as a leader, we've done all of that, we've said all of that, but the reality is today I've got a staff member who's telling me, "I can't go out again to that client that is triggering for me and I don't feel safe and okay." What do I in that moment, where do I go?
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah, and I think that those are uncomfortable conversations, but as leaders, we are occupying spaces that can be uncomfortable and having conversations that aren't always comfortable. I think what's really important is to understand that being safe at work and being uncomfortable at work is two different things. And while it is really important that people do feel safe at work around all those things that we talked about earlier in terms of people feeling psychologically safe at work, we do also have jobs to deliver on. And if people aren't meeting the needs of those roles, then we need to have uncomfortable conversations about that. And yeah, I think that understanding that difference between discomfort and safety is really important.
Michelle:
Takes me back to Vikki Reynolds' work that we talked a bit about in seminar two around safe enough, that advocating that in the work that we do, it's being safe enough, not perfectly safe. And I think in the complexity of those moments, acknowledging where somebody may be today, but then also talking to what is the plan to go forward because there is a role to deliver on their clients that are relying on this resource to get the job done. How are we going to navigate both those needs and honour what different people require? Just I think acknowledging the complexity of that, it's hard, right?
Geraldine Bilston:
Yeah.
Michelle:
Yeah. Fantastic. Geraldine, thank you so much for joining us today. We're so grateful for your time and again in the chat, if you've got other questions for Geraldine, we're all hanging out there, so feel free to post in there. We can't get them to them today. We will come back to you on those. Thank you so much, Geraldine.
Geraldine Bilston:
Thanks for having me.
Michelle:
You're welcome. I'm mindful of time. We're going to wrap up with two last quick skills as promised. How do we put all of this together given all the busyness that we are undertaking? The good news is we have found that you can often integrate most of this into your existing ways of working by looking at four different places that you can embed any of these tools or practises. The first is in your role modelling. At me, at the individual level, how are you leading your team? Remember as leaders, we're highly contagious. The second is in the rituals, some of the social ways our teams connect. The third is in the routines. Some of those more formal ways our teams already have of working together, like team meetings, like many of you popped them up earlier when we were talking about different tools, and the others are in the rules, in the policies and procedures that your workplace formally has.
Some of those pieces that Elena was speaking to us, like the physical work environment, like the organisational structure and the like. And if we have a look at, well, could we put this on a page? I'm all about things on a page so I can have them up in front of me where it's easy for me to remember all those things I'm trying to prioritise. And we like to think about this as a bit of a dynamic health, safety and wellbeing map. And again, we're going to share a blank version of this in the chat for you so that you can go away and play with this if you would like for yourself. You could do this individually as a leader for your team. You could do it across your organisation, whatever works. In the middle we always say what are your wellbeing priorities?
Here I've gone very broad because we've been talking across the series about caring for the health, safety and wellbeing of our teams. If we think about role modelling, how will we show up as leaders? Of course, we had beautiful input from our speakers throughout that we were recapping at the beginning of today. Colleen I think was talking about that leading with curiosity and care. No, sorry, it was Lisa was talking about leading with curiosity and care. We can role model curiosity by leading with questions. Lisa role modelled care by being available, walking the floor, being in meetings, having that open door policy and then also gratitude. She role modelled gratitude by celebrating the successes and things like that in her team. How are we role modelling? What are the things that you want to prioritise as a leader about how you are going to lead in ways that will help support the health, safety and wellbeing of your team?
If we come onto routine, so thinking about the formal ways your team already works. Again, we had Kelly talk about the reflective practises of her team and they were meeting fortnightly. We had Lisa talk about the job ... Sorry, we had Colleen talk about the job resource template that we shared earlier about the what support do you need and then how might we co-create a solution to that. We had Ivy speak about shadow mentoring whenever they had new hires on board and she was talking about taking the cake out as they were doing client visits so that they could all have something to be able to talk about and connect around, for example. These routines can be embedded into the ways that you already work. Your team will have a whole lot of routines with a rhythm to them that are helping you connect to do the work.
When you sit down and think about some of those routines, it's easy often to add a health, safety and wellbeing flavour or direct tactic or tool into them that will give them that extra oomph, that extra nudge to go, "Yes, we know health, safety and wellbeing is a sustainable part of our culture." Often we find with leaders after these kind of conversations, even just mapping what you already have as formal routines, thinking about how do those support health, safety and wellbeing? Is there anything we might add to the flavour of those or a specific tactical tool that'll give them that extra wellbeing amplification? Team meetings are often a great one to look at ways to insert these things in.
Your team probably also already has a whole lot of informal social connection type rituals, yeah? We talked with Daphne about that cup of tea moment of sort of daily looking around the team, "Who's ready for a cup of tea today and a bit of a chat?" Again, Lisa spoke to her walking the floor ritual each morning and to have team celebrations as needed. Daphne and Ivy also spoke about quarterly, having a team day and getting the team to choose a different activity. They were going out on the water on the boat, which Daphne told us she was a bit nervous about because she doesn't like water. You'll have existing rituals. You may want to think about are there any other additional health, safety and wellbeing rituals that might fit into our team without overburdening our team? The rituals are that more informal, just time to connect and be with each other. Again, I think a lot of our speakers over the series have talked about that importance of just space to connect as human beings and not just formally in our roles with each other. And then lastly, what are the formal rules?
So these may be policies, procedures. You've got the safe and equal self-assessment tool and you might remember Christie was encouraging us not necessarily to do that as an annual thing, but maybe pick a different psychosocial hazard each month and kind of assess, how am I doing in this area? Or you might make it twice a year, we do the whole thing or once a year we do the whole thing. We talked about the supervision contracts that Kelly shared with us. And so annually they review those supervision contracts I think with their team. You can see here fairly simple on a map, on a page. I think of this as dynamic. I tend to try and update it about once every quarter, once every six months. What's the role modelling I'm prioritising as a leader? What routines do we have currently in our business formally for how we work, how am I hooking health, safety and wellbeing into them?
What are rituals that we have, those informal social opportunities to connect with people and what are our formal rules and assessments that I could use? This is just one example based on things we've had throughout the series. Again, there's a blank template of this map for you so that you could take this away and maybe over a cup of tea or your next team meeting or that start to map this in and think about it as an ongoing piece to keep sustaining the health, safety and wellbeing of your team. Just remember that a thriving culture is a learning culture. The last piece we want to come into is around recognition and reward, which was one of these other areas and we appreciate how challenging again, this is. Often when we don't have the budgets we'd love to have to be able to pay our people as much as they are worth.
And when we often have short-term funding, that can mean we can't provide the security for our people the way we would want them to be. I wish I had easy solutions to those two things. I don't unfortunately. And I think that's part of the advocacy work we all need to keep doing in the sector, in our communities, wherever we can. What I can offer you, and without sounding trite at all, is what is from the research we find the most underutilised form of recognition and reward. When we measure this with workers around Australia, they tell us that this is underutilised too often for them. It costs you nothing. You can do it today. It's just a matter of making it a regular and respectful practise in your team. And that is gratitude and appreciation. And again, many of our speakers spoke to this. You were putting it in the chat earlier about the shout outs for teams on Fridays and the like.
So just know again, the deep need we all share is that feeling of being valued and appreciated. The high performing teams, the research shows shared nearly six times more positive feedback than average teams. In my experience of gratitude as a leader, whenever I think I've done enough of it, there's probably a little bit more that I need to do. It's rare as leaders that we hit the mark of expressing enough appreciation for our team. You can ask them and get feedback on it. You can definitely have too much of a good thing like we all do. The trick here is keeping our appreciation authentic and meaningful. Otherwise it doesn't do any good. It can actually do more harm. When we're practising gratitude, the way we keep it authentic and meaningful is to think about, well, what specifically did someone do that was helpful?
Rather than just saying, "Hey, thanks for that great job, I really appreciate it." We want to say, "Hey Evie, thank you so much for everything you've done on these last four seminars for holding this technical smooth space that everybody has felt welcomed in and supported in the chat because of all you do behind the scenes." How did it contribute to our shared goals? "Evie, it meant that I was able to teach without worrying about the technical platform our speakers could share without feeling that the lights were all going to go off and it would be a disaster and we wouldn't cope with it because you prepared us all also beautifully beforehand. It made a space for everybody to be able to share and learn." And why did it make a difference for you personally?
"Evie, as you know, I have lived experience in this space. So this has been a series very close to my own heart to get to do and to know that you and I together perhaps have helped leaders across the sector be able to make a difference for their teams who do this important work every day is something I will be proud of until the very end of my life. Thank you for helping make that possible for me." When we express gratitude, be specific about what they did, be specific about how it contributed to the shared or organisational goal and if you can, make it personally meaningful, the last tip on gratitude is get to know how your team value appreciation. Are you comfortable, as I did for Evie, sharing it in front of everybody here? I know Evie will be slightly uncomfortable about that, but I also know she'll give me permission today to get away with it.
If I did that regularly to Evie, I'm sure she'd have a word to me to go, "Can you knock that off? I'd much prefer my gratitude one-on-one when we chat and catch up privately." But every now and then I can probably get away with a bit of public gratitude for her, for example. Know how your team like gratitude expressed and honour that, don't embarrass people or make them uncomfortable unnecessarily. Some people like it to be written, some people like it to be talked in a one-on-one conversation. Other people are happy for it to be shared in team or public settings. Just know, again, most powerful underutilised reward and recognition tool that you have and maybe just take a moment now to think about somebody in your team you could express a bit of gratitude for today. What have they done lately that was really helpful?
How did it contribute to the team goals? Why has it made a personal difference for you? And one challenge I would like to leave you in is after today actually going and expressing that gratitude to someone. One of the things I did when I first came across this research was I ran a little gratitude challenge in our team and we made it a challenge each day. If we could find someone to genuinely, authentically thank to go out in the world and do it, we didn't share who we were doing it with or what was happening. We just in our team meetings each week kept checking in. "How have you gone with that gratitude challenge?" What we found after about three weeks was this tidal wave of gratitude started coming back into the team from all sorts of places we weren't expecting it and not even necessarily the people that we'd been thinking that they were just reciprocating.
But suddenly the energy, the wellbeing, the feelings of safety that uplifted this team because we had created a climate of more gratitude and appreciation around us was better than anything I could have paid people for. Again, fair pay matters, we're not saying it doesn't. We can't always impact how much we can pay our people, but we can absolutely impact the environment of gratitude and appreciation in which everybody is working in. With that said, we're going to wrap up for today. As always, we want to remind you that you have the PERMAH Wellbeing Survey Tool to measure workplace wellbeing, to measure gratitude, to measure strengths, engagement, things like that in your team, and of course the Safe and Equal Self-Assessment Tool. We've put those in the chat links for you if you are missing them. We have a very exciting kind of encore that will be coming on the 13th of July to this series.
All of those organisations whose logos you can see on the screen who have been participating in the health, safety and wellbeing pilots with our coaches are Linda and Kirsten, are going to come and share a tool with you that they have created based on what they learned. If you are a leader who's always looking for more small tools that you can try with your team, join us on Thursday the 13th of July. It's at 9:30 AM. It will not be me talking. I'll welcome everyone, but it will be them sharing what have we been doing, what's working, how are we applying this? There is a link in the chat if you want to sign up for this session. Again, we will email it out after today for you as well. But we hope that you can join us for this encore of the sector showcase so you can hear from more people in the field.
What are they doing with all of this? And our coaches, Linda and Kirsten, will be there as well. As always, we really value your feedback. Your feedback throughout has helped us learn and grow. We take all of it, what's working, where we're not, what you want us to learn to keep going forward. Although this series is wrapping up, it definitely helps us understand for future training what works, how do you want that done. In the chat, there is a link there now for the survey. We will send it out with all the materials after today. If you can take a few minutes to fill it out, we would be most grateful. As always, all feedback is welcome. It is how we learn and grow as well. And then lastly, we just want to do a few thanks. Although you see me at the front, it takes a whole team to make this possible.
So Evie, we have thanked. Our wonderful team at DIFFA Susan Greig, Inigo Koh, Mary Lee, thank you for all the comms, all the enrollment forms, all the preparing speakers, all the work for budgeting and format to be able to make this possible. We are so grateful for the chance to have played in this with you and I know everybody and if you want to share some love for the DIFFA team in the chat, please do so. This would not have existed without hours and hours and hours of preparation and hope and fighting for the budget and the opportunity to be able to do this for you. If you want more of this kind of training, they are the people to tell whether it's us or anybody else doing it. We're fine with that. We want what's best for you. But do let them know, please, they've worked incredibly hard.
There is also an amazing team that has been guiding all the topics and thinking about what's right for all of you. Christie Lutz, Gulan Ustanol, Alice Hon, Ange O'Brien, Trisha Curry, Claire Tennant, thank you also for all your amazing guidance, your heart, your thoughtfulness around what it is that would have most impact for leaders. Linda and Kirsten, our coaches, thank you for helping find our amazing speakers throughout who have just given so generously of their time, so bravely of their hopes, so wisely of their lived experience for us all to learn from.
And most importantly, thank you to you, we know how busy you are, that you have made time to be here, to learn about how to care for the health, wealth ... For the health, safety and wellbeing. You'd think I'd have it tattooed on my head by now. Health, safety and wellbeing of your teams is just, it's the best commitment we ever see from leaders. So we are not only grateful for the work that you do for clients. We are grateful for you specifically and the work that you do for your teams and the investment that you are making in helping your teams be able to care for their wellbeing. It is not an easy job. We know that. It is often an unappreciated job. We know that .
We see you, we value you, we appreciate you. Thank you for being part of this learning and again, we will share all the resources out after today to help you. If you need more, you can always go to TheWellbeingLab.com, lots and lots of free things there also to support you or reach out to us directly with a question. Always happy to assist. I'm mindful of time. On that note, if you want to turn on your cameras, we'll unmute everybody. If you want to say a fun farewell as you go, you're more than welcome to. Have a wonderful day and thank you so much for being here. Thanks everyone. Take care. Have a great day. Thank you. Bye everybody. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Take care. Thank you so much. Bye everybody. Thank you.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:34:02]
Updated