In my previous blog, I argued that we may be starting the conversation about staff wellbeing in the wrong place.
The problem is not that school leaders do not care about their staff. In my experience, most care a great deal. The difficulty is that our understanding of wellbeing can sometimes be too narrow and, when that happens, the solutions we reach for can become equally limited.
This is where the idea of ‘Wellbeing Wednesday’ needs to be discussed.
I do not mean the term literally – ‘Wellbeing Wednesday’ is used to symbolise all the well intentioned, but often tokenistic wellbeing activities initiated in schools. It could be a cake in the staff room, a yoga session, a breakfast, an early finish, a staff raffle, a mindfulness session or a thank-you card.
These things can matter.
I have described them elsewhere as signals of care. They communicate that leaders have noticed people, appreciate them and want to do something positive for them. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
But signals of care are not the same as ‘strategic care’.
Strategic care goes further. It asks leaders to examine and, where necessary, redesign the conditions of work itself: workload, professional trust, autonomy, communication, relationships, the emotional demands of the role and the extent to which people can see purpose in what they are being asked to do.
This distinction sits at the heart of what I mean by Workplace Fulfilment.
When wellbeing is reduced largely to acts of care, those acts can begin to feel tokenistic. Over time, that can contribute to a more adversarial and increasingly weaponised understanding of wellbeing. Exactly the opposite of what school leaders are trying to achieve.
Workplace Fulfilment starts from a different position. It sees care not simply as something leaders do for staff, but as something that should be reflected in the way work is designed.
Signals of care can support wellbeing.
Strategic care however, creates the conditions for a culture of wellbeing.
That is a much more demanding proposition.
It is also, I think, a much more useful one.
When care begins to feel tokenistic
A member of staff who is exhausted by an unnecessary process may not experience a wellbeing breakfast as care.
They may experience it as leadership avoidance of the deeper issues.
A teacher who is drowning in workload may not see a yoga session as support.
They may see it as evidence that the organisation still does not understand the problem.
A thank-you card may genuinely matter. But it cannot compensate indefinitely for work that feels purposeless, unnecessary or professionally mistrustful.
None of this means that the act of care was insincere. Leaders can offer these things with entirely genuine intentions and still find that staff respond negatively.
Indeed, this is one of the things I increasingly hear from school leaders. In a lot of cases, they are trying to do something thoughtful and are surprised by the strength of the pushback.
A leader organises a breakfast and someone asks why the money was not spent elsewhere.
A staff wellbeing activity is arranged and somebody says they would rather have the time back.
An attempt to recognise workload is met with a list of further demands.
Leaders can understandably find this frustrating.
We are trying to do something positive. Why is nothing ever enough?
But there is another way of reading that response.
Perhaps the act itself is not the problem.
Perhaps the problem is what the act has come to represent.
If staff believe that visible gestures of care repeatedly sit alongside systems that continue to make work unnecessarily difficult, then those gestures can begin to feel tokenistic even when they were never intended that way.
And once that happens, the wellbeing conversation starts to change.
When wellbeing becomes weaponised
I use the term weaponised wellbeing cautiously.
I do not mean that staff deliberately manipulate wellbeing in order to avoid reasonable professional expectations. Nor do I mean that leaders cynically use wellbeing activities to distract staff from poor working conditions.
Both can happen, of course, but neither is the point I am trying to make. What interests me is what happens when wellbeing itself becomes contested.
Leaders say:
“We are trying to support staff.”
Staff respond:
“But you are not changing the things that are actually causing the problem.”
Leaders then become frustrated because their attempts at care are dismissed.
Staff become more cynical because they believe they are being offered gestures instead of change.
Gradually, wellbeing becomes less of a shared aspiration and more of a language through which dissatisfaction with work is expressed and at that point, almost anything can potentially become framed as a wellbeing issue.
- Meetings are too long.
- Deadlines are unreasonable.
- Emails are excessive.
- There is too much monitoring.
- There is not enough flexibility.
- There is insufficient autonomy.
- The work is too stressful.
- There are too many expectations.
Some of these concerns may be entirely legitimate.
Others may not be.
The problem is that once wellbeing becomes the language used to describe every difficulty at work, it becomes much harder to distinguish between two very different things:
- Work that has been made unnecessarily difficult by the organisation
and
- Work that is difficult because meaningful professional work is sometimes difficult.
That is a distinction that matters – more in education than anywhere else.
Work can be hard without being harmful
This is where I think purpose becomes particularly important. This is especially the case when the work in schools when the labour the job requires is simultaneously physically demanding, intellectually challenging and emotionally draining.
One of the difficulties with the conventional wellbeing debate is that it can lead us towards an implicit assumption that better wellbeing requires work to become progressively easier.
However, I do not think that can be right.
Working in schools is always going to be hard work. Supporting children and families experiencing considerable difficulty is hard work. There is emotional labour embedded within education that no sensible organisational redesign can completely remove.
A teacher comforting a distressed child is undertaking emotional labour.
A safeguarding lead listening to an upsetting disclosure is undertaking emotional labour.
A headteacher supporting a bereaved family, managing conflict between adults or making a decision they know will disappoint good people is undertaking emotional labour.
These things are difficult because the work matters.
And that distinction is important.
Some of the most professionally fulfilling periods of my own career have also been among the most demanding. I suspect many people working in education would say the same. There are times when we work extraordinarily hard, go home exhausted and still know that the effort was worthwhile.
Conversely, there are comparatively simple tasks that can leave us feeling disproportionately irritated because we cannot understand why we are doing them.
The difference is often purpose.
Hard work does not automatically undermine wellbeing.
Purposeless work often does.
This is why I think the conversation needs to move beyond a simple concern with reducing workload and towards a much more considered examination of the relationship between workload and purpose.
The quantity of work clearly matters. There comes a point at which excessive workload is simply unsustainable, however meaningful the work may be.
But workload is not only about quantity. It is also about what fills the time.
There is a significant difference between spending two hours doing something difficult that you believe will make an important difference to a child and spending two hours completing a process that nobody appears to use.
The clock records the same amount of work.
The person doing it is unlikely to experience those two hours in the same way.
Purpose changes our relationship with effort.
When people can see why something matters, when they understand how their contribution connects to a worthwhile outcome and when they believe their effort is having some meaningful effect, demanding work can still be fulfilling.
When that connection disappears, even relatively modest demands can begin to feel burdensome.
This is where Workplace Fulfilment begins to offer a different way of thinking about staff wellbeing.
The aim is not to create schools in which work is effortless.
It is to create schools in which, as far as reasonably possible, people’s effort is directed towards work that matters.
From workload reduction to purposeful work
That changes the leadership question.
Instead of asking only:
How can we reduce workload?
we also need to ask:
What is this person’s time for?
That may sound obvious, but I am increasingly convinced that it is not a question we ask often enough.
Consequently, it is not simply about asking people to do less or to find ways of making work easy – because in schools, these things are impossible.
It is about ensuring that the work they do is aligned as closely as possible with the core purpose of their role and for leaders to ensure that pointless, purposeless work is eradicated. In later blogs I will describe how leaders can ‘prune purposeless work’.
So – to ensure that all work is purposeful, leaders should be asking the right questions…
- What is the purpose of this meeting?
- Why are we collecting this information?
- What will happen differently because this document has been completed?
- Who will use this data?
- Why does this person need to be involved?
- Does the benefit of this activity justify the professional time being invested in it?
These are workload questions.
But they are also purpose questions.
And, increasingly, I think they are wellbeing questions too.
Strategic care requires leaders to redesign work
This is where strategic care becomes considerably more challenging than the – potentially tokenistic – wellbeing initiatives.
It is relatively straightforward to add an act of care.
It is harder to examine the organisation honestly and acknowledge that some of the work we ask people to do may no longer justify the time it consumes.
Like me, I am sure that you have noticed that schools accumulate work very easily.
- A process is introduced because there was once a problem.
- A spreadsheet is created because somebody once needed some information.
- A meeting is added because communication needed to improve.
- A new initiative arrives and is layered on top of what already exists.
Individually, each decision may have been reasonable at the time.
Collectively, they can produce a working environment in which people spend increasing amounts of time servicing the organisation rather than fulfilling the purpose of their role. There is an old saying that goes, “People are smart, organisations are dumb”. In my view this reflects the reality in many schools – they can be organisations where intelligent people carry out unintelligent activities that serve no useful purpose.
Strategic care therefore requires leaders to do something more difficult than demonstrating that they care.
It requires them to make decisions about work.
- What should remain?
- What can be simplified?
- What needs to be redesigned?
- And what should we stop doing altogether?
That does not mean staff have no responsibility in this conversation.
Workplace Fulfilment cannot become another route through which every difficult aspect of professional life is removed.
People working in schools have chosen a profession that carries significant responsibilities. There will be busy periods. There will be difficult conversations. There will be occasions when we need to work beyond what is convenient because somebody needs us.
Purpose does not remove professional responsibility.
It helps us to understand why the responsibility is worth carrying.
That creates a much healthier basis for a conversation between leaders and staff.
I hasten to add, the purposeful nature of working in education does not mean that school leaders can indiscriminately run staff into the ground – all for the sake of ‘the vocation of education’. Leaders have a responsibility to ensure, as far as possible, that people are not burdened with unnecessary work and that the emotional demands inherent in education are recognised and properly supported.
Conversely, school staff have a responsibility to engage fully with work that is necessary, purposeful and reasonably expected within their professional role – it is work that won’t be easy, but the outcomes are worthwhile (and often personally fulfilling.
That is the basis of what I call ‘workplace fulfilment’ and it feels to me like a much more mature conversation than simply asking whether a particular demand is good or bad for somebody’s wellbeing.
From acts of care to a culture of wellbeing
None of this means I want school leaders to stop doing the small things.
- Have the breakfast.
- Bring in the cake.
- Write the thank-you card.
- Notice when somebody has had a difficult week.
- Let people leave early when circumstances allow it.
Those actions matter precisely because human beings need to know that other people notice and value them.
They are signals of care and at the heart of a culture of wellbeing.
But we need to be clear about what they can and cannot achieve.
When signals of care sit alongside work that is unnecessarily bureaucratic, poorly designed or disconnected from purpose, they can eventually come to feel tokenistic.
Tokenism breeds cynicism.
And cynicism creates fertile ground for weaponised wellbeing.
The alternative is not fewer acts of care.
It is strategic care alongside them.
Strategic care asks leaders to think carefully about how work is designed, what people are being asked to do, why they are being asked to do it and whether the time and emotional energy required are justified by the purpose being served.
That, for me, is where Workplace Fulfilment becomes a more useful ambition.
It changes the conversation from:
“What are you going to do for my wellbeing?”
to something much more collaborative:
“How do we create a workplace in which people can do demanding and worthwhile work, understand why their effort matters, feel valued and supported while doing it, and sustain that contribution over time?”
That is not a promise to make work easy.
It is a commitment to make work, as far as possible, worth doing.
And perhaps that is the foundation on which a genuine culture of wellbeing can be built.
The issue was never really Wellbeing Wednesday.
The issue is whether what happens for the rest of the week gives the acts of care on a Wednesday any credibility.
I am currently developing these ideas through my forthcoming book on Workplace Fulfilment and through my work with schools and trusts through Laviss Education Consultancy.
