Looking after your team

Whilst we hope these resources prove useful to you, the University web pages on staff health and wellbeing provide a much wider range of additional support and guidance to signpost team members to. There is also a specific page for managers, covering how to raise concerns and navigate conversations about staff wellbeing, Occupational Health referrals and how to create a Wellbeing Action Plan.

It is also important to encourage your team members to consider where more personalised professional support could be helpful to them, whether that be through our Employee Assistance Programme provider Health Assured, the NHS, or other means.

All of the above resources are not only there for you to signpost your team members towards, but also for you to access yourself. As a line manager, supporting the wellbeing of your team members can place additional strain on your own health, so please do seek help and support when you need to.

Staying informed

The resources below provide a good overview of some key aspects of work-related stress and burnout, as well as how to spot key warning signs and the causes that might be behind them. Exploring the resources available through these platforms can also help you to feel more confident in signposting team members to useful materials as well.

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Health Assured podcast on work-related stress

This podcast features a professional counsellor providing a comprehensive overview of work-related stress, including:

• Signs of work-related stress and overwhelm
• Asking for support and creating opportunities for that
• Setting boundaries and saying ‘no’
• Identifying what is within your control
• Identifying what helps
• Guidance on how to approach being signed off

Duration: 35 minutes

Health Assured podcast on work-related stress

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Health Assured webinar on burnout

This short recorded webinar provides a good introduction to the topic of burnout, including:

• What it is
• Common signs and symptoms of burnout
• How to tackle burnout yourself
• How to support others

Duration: 10 minutes

Health Assured webinar on burnout

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What you can do

These materials cover some of the methods at your disposal to support colleagues who are experiencing overwhelm and/or anxiety at work. They should not be viewed as a replacement for professional support, but instead focus on your responsibilities and remit as a line manager. 

Whilst not all of these strategies will be relevant to your team or their current context, see if you can identify one or two that can help you to support your team.

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Encourage staff to speak up

If team members feel like they have a voice and their voice will be heard, that can increase their sense of psychological safety at work and make them feel more comfortable to share the challenges that they are experiencing, enabling you to work with them to reduce the causes of stress, anxiety and overwhelm that they may be experiencing.

Some ways you can encourage team members to speak up include:

• Challenging your biases to acknowledge and engage with different points of view.
• Avoiding assumptions and instead asking questions to learn more about how team members think and feel.
• Making sure no one feels wrong by reassuring team members that there are no bad questions and all suggestions will be valued.
• Proactively seeking feedback from a variety of sources.
• Creating different types of opportunities for team members to share how they feel.

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Manage team workload

It is important to get a clearer understanding of team members’ workloads and where key stressors and pinch points are occurring.

Some ways to help you do this include:

• Ask your team to document their workload over two weeks, including their priorities as they see them on each day, what they hope to get done, and anything unexpected that pops up or gets in the way of accomplishing those goals throughout the day.
• Ask team members to identify when urgent pieces of work fall to them, why they think this happens and what the consequences are for them in managing their workload.
• Compare how your sense of team members’ priorities aligns with theirs. Are you and your team members on the same page as to their priority goals and who/what they should respond to urgently? Realign and ensure you communicate priorities clearly.
• Ask team members to share where they see inefficiencies in processes or tasks. Create space for team members to input to suggest alternative approaches and contribute to continuous improvement.
• Give guidance on how to triage incoming requests and support team members with how to communicate priorities and manage expectations with stakeholders.
• Ask about workload when assigning tasks and be clear about deadlines and the urgency of tasks, while ensuring team members retain the agency to manage their own workload.
• Advocate for your team by sharing the reality of workload pressures with your own manager or senior stakeholders.
• Lead by example, ensuring that you take breaks, schedule annual leave and don’t regularly work beyond your contracted hours. Otherwise, you can be creating invisible expectations that your team should be doing the same.

Not all of those approaches will feel appropriate to your team, but consider how you can understand what it is that is putting a strain on your team members and how you can alleviate that pressure.

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Preventing meeting fatigue

Consider the extent to which meetings, particularly those held virtually, are necessary, and how far you could implement alternative forms of communication to reduce workload and screen time.

Some key questions to consider when evaluating the necessity of a meeting are:

• Is the meeting actually required? What is the purpose of the meeting and could that purpose be achieved more effectively by any other means?
• How long should this meeting take? Are we sticking to an arbitrary 30 minutes or hour-long time slot when we could achieve the purpose of the meeting in less time?
• Who needs to be in the meeting? It is important to encourage diversity of thought and hear a range of perspectives, but only invite people who need to contribute or participate in some way. Do we need everyone to attend this meeting?
• How can you change the format to create variety and promote engagement? How could a standard video conference meeting be done in a different way? What format works best for attendees and how do you know that?

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Harnessing the benefits of social support networks

Fostering meaningful social connections and interactions between team members will help to strengthen the support network that your team can draw on to navigate feelings of stress and overwhelm.

Creating meaningful relationships can increase psychological safety at work, so here are some things you can do to lay the foundations to foster those meaningful connections:

• Be mindful of social anxiety and neurodiversity. Make sure that you’re not pushing people to socialise, or to do so in a particular way, without recognising that it may be very stressful on some of your team members. Go slow and give people space to talk about how comfortable they are in group settings. Maybe it's a focus on building individual relationships through a shared project rather than someone showing up to a big team event.
• Practise and encourage curiosity across the team, which can include even just asking about what others are working on. It's important for leaders to share, listen and learn, and to create space for team members to hear about what each other are up to. Through curiosity people identify common interests and experiences that can strengthen relationships.
• Make use of social channels on platforms such as Slack to promote wider conversation beyond just work, such as starting a ‘question of the week’ thread that gives team members the chance to opt-in to low stakes conversations where they can learn a little bit more about each other.
• Give people time to make friends. It isn't just about team-building exercises where we're just getting to know as many people as possible. It's allowing friendships, even just one, to flourish over time, creating micro-moments for people to interact and learn about each other.
• Explore opportunities for team building that don’t place the emphasis on the social side, such as team volunteering opportunities.

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Prioritising and modelling self-care

Here are a few tips that you can embed in your work to prioritise your own wellbeing, which will in turn model healthier working practices for your team:

• Check-in with yourself and find light-touch ways to share how you are feeling with the team in a professional way. Communicating a little bit about the ups and downs of your day and how you are taking proactive steps to respond to those feelings can encourage team members to feel comfortable sharing with you in the same way.
• Embed self-care habits into your working day (eg going for a lunchtime walk) and talk about these with the team, encouraging them to share what works for them.
• Address rest deficits when you feel the signs of burnout showing up. You can do this by taking physical rest to catch up on sleep, but also considering where you might benefit from mental rest to switch off, sensory rest to unplug, or creative rest to read a book or go and enjoy nature as a way of engaging different parts of your brain.

When your team members see you prioritising rest and your own wellbeing, you are sending a signal that it’s important for them to do so too.