In our first mission statement in 2010, one of the key factors of projected success that we mentioned was the happiness of the staff: the idea being that if staff are happy, all else follows. It goes without saying that this is easier to say than it is to achieve. Working towards wellbeing in the workplace is a continuous process that requires effort from everyone from management to teachers and outwards to students. I would like to give here an overview of how we have approached work wellbeing in Kievi as it consists of several interconnected levels.
The first step towards creating a good level of work wellbeing is ensuring that there is a good flow of information. This begins with all new employees, whom we try to give a welcoming, clear and thorough orientation to their new place of work. We spend time with new teachers to give them information on all the key practical details and arrange a mentor for them to help in the first months. Over a period of almost ten years, we have also developed our Best Practice Guide which contains hopefully all the information any teacher would need on a multitude of issues including our most common processes, and vitally who to ask if you don’t know something. Of course, this is also an ongoing project that needs regular updating. Flow of information is also important in daily life , and we have organized our Microsoft Teams over the years, to do our best to compartmentalize information so that it is as easy as possible to find. We also produce a Weekly Post for staff to keep up with the latest developments.
Another key part of work wellbeing is the feeling that all staff have a voice. To facilitate this, teachers elect their own language team leaders every three years, who then form our ‘johtoryhmä’. This group meets once a month to discuss any items they would like to, in addition to items brought by management. Thus, if teachers do not wish to come direct to management, they can raise their issues with their team leader who will then represent them in the monthly meetings.
Every November we arrange group work wellbeing discussions. These meetings are voluntary, and staff can choose a time to join in a group discussion from a number of time options. The aim of the discussions is to listen to teachers and find out how they are doing: what is going well, what are the current challenges and what can be done. Once the meetings are over, we present an overview in our next staff meeting and, if necessary, draw up a plan of action to address the challenges mentioned.
In our last evaluation by the university-wide work wellbeing survey in 2023 our numbers, though still good, had slightly fallen. As a result of this we held a workshop to see what we could do together to improve things. Out of this, we created a work wellbeing strategy that encompassed concrete steps to encourage community spirit (for example, weekly coffee events, a photo wall of staff, team presentations), help in dealing with diverse learners, and plans for the move when we moved all our staff to Agora. A further element was the creation of work wellbeing group who, based on the ideas given by teachers in the workshop, created our own set of ground rules for wellbeing. You can see these ground rules below. In it, we express our values as a community and how we would like everyone to behave at work.
As you can see, we have done a lot of work to promote happiness at work, but we cannot be complacent. At the end of the day, we all agreed that everyone has to take responsibility for their own and each others’ wellbeing. Only by actively working together on our community can we best maintain our wellbeing.
