Dialogue toolbox

Crucial to the success of any team, is how well each team member can perform, which largely depends on the wellbeing of the team members. High work pressure is a known risk factor in higher education, that can cause work stress and eventually health problems. Also developments in the private life of colleagues can lead to increased workload, potentially leading to problems with maintaining a healthy work-life balance, causing stress.

Addressing such issues in dialogues within the team, has shown to be a successful intervention for improving wellbeing and reducing workload (e.g. Bronkhorst, 2018; Maccow & Nijenkamp, 2023), for various reasons. As the team works towards a shared purpose, these dialogues contribute to improved insights into how all team members can contribute. This could result in increased support for each other, or perhaps downscaling the ambitions to match better with the available capacity within the team.

A good starting point for addressing wellbeing in your team, would be to invite all team members to reflect upon their own, individual wellbeing balance. You can do so by using the enclosed worksheet, based on the Job Demands-Resources model (Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner & Schaufeli, 2001). Check out the ‘explanation JDR model’ tab, to learn more about this model.

How to use the JDR worksheet?

1. Individual reflection. All team members take some time to individually reflect on their stressors and energy sources, using the questions in the worksheet. If necessary, the team can decide to only focus on work related factors, or to zoom in on a specific topic, such as stressors and energy sources from the collaboration within the team, or from certain tasks (e.g. teaching, coordination tasks, writing policy, administrative tasks, etc.).
2. Dialogue. Once each team member is finished, start a dialogue about what everyone has filled in. It can be helpful to first be clear about the goal of the dialogue. The first step could be to just listen and learn about how team members are experiencing work at the moment, this can greatly contribute to the relationships and empathy within the team. As a team you can also decide to use the dialogue to establish the most important bottle necks and to collaboratively look for solutions. But typically that would result in a much longer dialogue, and it would be important to decide about a specific focus to make the dialogue more effective. Consider involving a team coach to facilitate this exercise.
3. Repetition is key. The balance between stressors and energy sources is dynamic. Consider making it a habit to repeat this exercise every now and then within your team, to be able to play into developments when necessary.

Download the JDR modal here

To better understand work pressure, BUas uses the Job Demands - Resources model (Schaufeli & Taris, 2013). The premise is that job characteristics can be classified as stressors or as energy sources, which can lead to stress reactions (such as work pressure, burnout) or to well-being (such as engagement, productivity). This in turn leads to positive or negative outcomes for the individual or the organisation. It is important to note that the model does not name specific positive or negative work characteristics, because in theory any work characteristic can be a potential source of work stress or energy, and this can be different for each individual. For example, in a situation where the professional feels confident, and has adequate knowledge and skills and feels supported by their team and manager, the factor ‘autonomy’ can be considered an energy sources. But for the same person, autonomy might sometimes also be a stressor, if they are asked to show autonomy in a situation that they do not feel comfortable with, e.g. because of insufficient expertise, or lack of support from the team. In other words, it depends on the context and the individual which factors can be classified as stressors or energy sources. Additionally, not only work related factors play a role, but also factors from the private life can lead to stress reactions or wellbeing, and can therefore be classified as either stressors or energy sources.

References

Schaufeli, W & Taris, T (2013) The Job Demands-Resources Model: A critical review, Gedrag & Organisatie, volume 26, June 2013, nr. 2, pp. 182-204 Retrieved from:

In order to get the conversation started about a wellbeing theme, it can be helpful to start the session with a short survey about this topic.

• Choose a maximum of 8 statements about a wellbeing topic that is relevant to the team at this moment. Examples of topics are work/life balance, team communication, hybrid working, workplace safety, work pressure, self-organising capacity of the team, etc. Below you can download a list of example statements.
• Make sure that each team member can respond to the statements on a 1-5 or 1-7 scale. Try using Mentimeter or similar online tool for easy data collection and presentation.
• The survey does not serve any scientific purposes, it is just meant to quickly gather some initial information and to allow each team member the opportunity to provide input.
• Plan plenty of time for your meeting. Depending on the size of the team, it can easily take 2 to 3 hours to have a proper dialogue. At the start of the meeting, present the results of the survey in such a way that it shows the range of scores (so the lowest and highest score on each statement). Check out below Mentimeter screenshot for an example.
• A good opening question would be to ask to the team what stands out to them, when looking at the results. Try focussing on the range of answers, not the averages. For example, if the questions were about work pressure, and some people in the team indicate that their work pressure is fine or low, but others indicate it is too high, that would be something to further explore. What makes it that the experiences of work pressure are so diverse within the team?
• Make sure it is a dialogue in which team members actively listen to one another. It should not be a discussion. Everyone’s experience is equally as important, so make sure everyone gets sufficient ‘air time’ to share their story.
• If specific bottlenecks are addressed in the dialogue within the circle of influence of the team, the team can decide to look for solutions themselves. Try to encourage team members to think of solutions to their own bottlenecks, as typically people feel more ownership to solutions they came up with themselves.

In this screenshot, automatically generated by Mentimeter, you can see the average score on each statement. And the ‘wave’ with each statement shows the range of scores. In this example, you can see that on the first statement, some people scored a 2, some scored around a 3 and 4, and some people scored a 6 or 7.

Download the example statements here