Keeping well, teaching well: supporting staff wellbeing

As an education development team, our initial responses to supporting staff in the pandemic were inevitably and completely focused on supporting staff in the pivot to online and blended learning. However,as time went on and there were nosigns of 'normality' returning our 'read' of staff needs and requirements began to change. We saw staff wellbeing emerge as a need that was increasingly important to address. Staff were speaking to us openly about feeling and experiencing symptoms of stress, working increasing hours to keep up with their workload, having less time to focus on family, and the difficulties of keeping themselves well in an effort to 'keep up'. They were telling us that many of the work challenges they were experiencing during the pandemic were contributing to stress, discomfort, and exhaustion. What they described were signs of the 'exhaustion funnel', a concept developed by Asberg that isexplored by Williams and Penman (2011, p.212)and shown below in Figure 1.