More tips from Adam Boxer
Video transcript
got it right tip to adam what we going for oh blast um here we go to lower workload and build a better team ethic make culture explicit make culture express okay tell me more about this um so culture is uh amorphous and difficult to define um but it’s about kind of i guess a shared set of values and uh and understanding about the way that you work together um and there are what what happens a lot is the first the most common thing that happens is that is that teams don’t have a culture you have teams of people who like work together but there’s no like the culture is like people have banter together but there’s no culture of like really supporting each other or really being alert to other people’s needs um or or going specifically out your way to lower other people’s workloads stuff like that that’s the most common thing that happens um but there’s there’s other things that can happen that where you do have that kind of shared understanding then someone new for example joins the team and it’s not like you know and sometimes things happen in schools where you’re like oh this is working well and you don’t see all of the work that’s gone in to make that happen to start with um i’m not doing a very good job of defining this so i’ll give you some examples yeah one example is about around accountability yeah so people miss deadlines or people make a mistake or whatever um so we have this thing in my school called the accountability line there’s this thing called the accountability ladder which is basically a ladder of ways to respond to something going wrong and at the bottom is stuff like it’s not my fault or it’s someone else’s fault or i didn’t know about it or there’s one lovely phrase which is wait and hope so it’s you know you’ve missed the deadline or whatever you just wait and hope that nobody knows yourself and all of those things are considered being below the accountability line right being above the accountability line is saying i’m sorry that shouldn’t have happened this is what i’m going to do to sort it next time and we our department doubled in size this year and a bunch of times earlier on in the year i um i said you know i said to people look i’m going to be above the accountability line here i’m sorry this happened blah blah and people were just like this to me and uh i didn’t realize but like i’ve never adequately explained what the accountability line was so i got the ladder we looked at the picture together in the department meeting i explained what it was i explained why it’s important i explained that you know humans make mistakes and that’s fine but ignoring your mistake is is a conscious and deliberate thing um and it’s crucial that the we apologize we do that properly and i modeled that um you know i apologize regularly for stuff i’ve not done um this week literally for the on friday i do a morning duty on a friday for the first time this year i missed it i just completely i clean forgot about it and nobody noticed nobody knew i went to the deputy head yesterday and i said i said i said tom i missed my duty on friday um i don’t want to wait and hope um i just want to tell you that i miss the duty fortunately nothing happens i know of no fights or anything um but yeah and i’ve set a reminder in my outlook for every friday so it doesn’t happen again yeah and i would happily tell say that i said that to anyone like missing a duty is is a safeguarding issue it’s not a small thing yeah it it’s a big concern right and but i could have just ignored it and and waited and hoped and nobody ever would have confronted me about it um but it was a mistake i owned it and and i would happily tell anyone that i made that mistake um and and um in the interest of being above the accountability line but like if you don’t have that conversation you don’t make it clear people will miss deadlines and you won’t know about it yeah whereas as a department you know individuals here and there do miss a deadline but i always know about it i’m always told it’s no and it’s normally flagged in advance um and again like you know nobody’s in trouble yeah it’s just a case of okay how has this happened and what do we do next um you know there are other things as well so so um all of our communications via teams we don’t email in our department everything is via teams if someone puts a message in the wrong channel yeah so if there’s a message that needs to go to year eight teachers and they put it in the general channel yeah that’s not how teams should be used and it’s annoying for others because if they see a message in the general channel they assume they need to read it and then they read it and it doesn’t actually apply to them so if someone puts a message in the wrong channel i will comment there and then i won’t do it behind you know quietly have a quiet word i’ll comment there and then i’ll say i say this should be reserved for the year eight channel please delete it and put it there and again like and people will do that you know because it’s important that everybody sees that this culture it doesn’t arrive by accident it’s done on purpose we have you know we we have uh whenever we have departmental action we make this thing called a trello card for it it’s just it’s like an action and it says exactly what they need to do and underneath their space to comment and there are some things where we’ll ask for a comment so for example if we’re doing teaching learning we might put a video of a teacher and i’ll say please put your comment with your feedback in in the area underneath a lot of actions don’t need a comment and recently a teacher put a comment under the action about what they’ve done or whatever and i wrote back and i said thank you that’s really interesting just so that you know you you didn’t need to write a comment for this one now i could have just ignored it because people would say oh well you’re embarrassing that person or whatever but think about everybody else if one person writes a comment then the next person writes a comment then the next person writes a comment and the next person writes a comment before we know we wasted six people’s time with something they didn’t need to do so that stuff like you just need to get it out you need to be explicit you need to explain why right so that what i just said to you about that comment i then took to the department meeting and i said that’s why i said it because it’s about thinking about everyone and like obviously you know that comment was brilliant yeah it was really really interesting you know in a sense i’m glad they wrote it because i got to read what they were saying but at the same time i didn’t want anybody else to think that they had to do that yeah which is why i asked you know which is why i said that explicitly um you know we had a good case recently we don’t you know i i posted as well one of my colleagues who doesn’t have any leadership responsibility last week on a tuesday where it was they got four emails that day that’s it four emails and as opposed to normally where you get dozens of emails with things that you don’t need to see et cetera et cetera um and again if someone anytime i get an email that i don’t need to read that is that is made it’s made clear that that email shouldn’t have been sent to me yeah and now that’ll either be by me directly or if it’s something that keeps happening it’ll be through line management because and it sounds like a dick move right people like oh how can you be so rude and i’m like look you know it’s about workloads right and if it takes me 45 seconds to read your stupid email and realize that that i didn’t actually need to read it that’s 45 seconds i could have been helping my students yeah i don’t have that time to waste and if i’m getting 50 of these a day it’s it’s highly problematic um but again you make specific conscious actions to make sure that doesn’t happen otherwise it just will we had one of my um one of my colleagues wanted to take a couple of kids out of a lesson to do um some kind of enrichment thing and he emailed the teachers who are outside the department p-teacher and an re teacher and said is okay if it you know if i take them out of this lesson and he’d copied me in and i immediately messaged him and i said i said i said it’s not okay um we need to do it in a science lesson and it was it was a time thing so it was they were supposed to do a certain time i said i said we we can’t be taking students out of other people’s lessons um and and i was very clear about the reason for that i wasn’t rude i wasn’t you know i was blunt but i wasn’t rude i said in many schools there is a you know people are taking kids out of lessons the whole time for this trip for that trip for the other trip for this p thing for that whatever yeah and and before and before you know it you know and then you’ve got kids turning up who you thought weren’t turning up and people like oh well why didn’t you read the email that you got that sent four weeks ago with the name of 17 kids who have all moved class since then it’s absolutely chaos and pandemonium it’s not acceptable it’s annoying it’s frustrating and it ruins the flow and the kind of natural harmony of what needs to happen in a good efficient and professional school so i said all of this and i said look the reason why you don’t have students coming out of your lessons which is annoying to you is because we don’t do stuff like that yeah and if we allow things like that to happen then it starts here and it moves to somewhere else and then someone else is doing and someone else is doing it before before you know it we’ve got that chaos which you know from your previous school uh and and and it just doesn’t help anybody and it ends up being annoying and frustrating you’re getting dozens of emails that you know all of that is is conscious and deliberate and explicit and if you don’t make it explicit if you’re not clear about those reasons and it’s not like that teacher was like oh adam you’re being so rude to me telling me i can’t do something yeah we just rearranged it for the next day it’s not a big deal and they were like oh yeah that makes sense you know when you explain to people that the most important things that you do in a school um in terms of deadlines and and making sure things work but the things that affect other people as well yeah yeah so setting cover making sure your cover is proper and people like oh don’t worry it’ll be done like no yeah this affects somebody else it needs to be moved to the top of your list immediately yeah and and again you’re explicit about stuff like that and you’re really clear and then you show accountability if you fail to meet that mark um it’s it just makes the team better it makes everybody more efficient it means nobody has this nonsense workloads and things that they have to do that don’t make any sense that don’t apply to them it’s just it’s just better all around and sometimes yeah you do have to be blunt with people and a bit unbritish um but like you know and again what you would hope is that someone would say to you you know you build a culture where someone would say as i think the way you said that to me wasn’t polite and i say i say i’m sorry okay i apologize um i know that sometimes i’m in a bit of a rush i know sometimes i can speak um bluntly into kurt i’m sorry please let me explain my reason again is that okay it’s a completely different conversation yeah and it’s just uh it’s just the culture the environment the ethic the way that everybody pitches in much better i like it so the message i’m getting here and regardless of whether people agree or not with the kind of policies that embody this culture the key to getting this culture is make it really explicit be really consistent about it and would it be the case do you think because obviously you get these kind of whole school cultures but can you influence it at a departmental level do you think regardless of what’s going on whole school yeah like i said you know our department only uses teams right there’s no other department in the school right our department uses trello as an organization lab nobody else uses trello yeah we have specific ways of working the other departments don’t have you know folder curation yeah so this is this relates to the same thing you know we have in our folders you go in it says key stage 3 year 7 you’ve got six folders one for each unit that we teach you open the folder there is one file there that’s it and that’s the booklet for that unit normally you open it up it’s got lesson one and then it’s got six word documents it’s got four powerpoints with different initials blah blah blah and people like what’s wrong with that like i just it’s just where i want to put my stuff and i’m like it’s it’s wrong because it means that if i want to know what i’m supposed to do today i have to look through eight documents in order to figure that out and what that means is that what you’ve done affects somebody else so what we have is we have one file and that’s it there’s another folder there called archive or other and you can dump your crap there all you like but if people put stuff in the wrong place or if people rename documents and put their like initial at the end of it or whatever i’ll delete it i’ll delete it i will delete it it’s made very clear they get one chance and the first grant is i send them a message i say just think you know there’s this document there please could you move it yeah and then the next time i delete it and i’ll explain again i’ll explain why and i said please can you move it the reason we do this is because it means that somebody logging in goes into the folder and isn’t sure which one to use and spends valuable time trying to figure that out um and then if it happens again i just delete it and i’ll send them a message afterwards and i say just you know there was this document there and you know like i said last time it means that other people will get confused and it will take their time so i’ve deleted it now and if they want they can email it support and they’ll be able to recover that document but but if there’s no con if there’s no consequence people are gonna keep doing it um and so i think we have every year the beginning of the year we have a couple of teachers um who are new to the department and you know make a mistake once or twice and again they get a very polite explanation uh and then it doesn’t happen again and it doesn’t happen again and it means that people don’t waste their time uh and the same applies for people editing documents yeah we’re blessed now with uh onedrive and share drive that means like you can look at version history right so if someone’s messed up all the margins in the document yeah you open the version of history you see who it was you just go and have a quiet conversation with that person you say look if you’re not 100 sure about how they’re formatting and stuff just ask me and i’ll help yeah but but look and i said and i’ve taken them and i say look you see how everything’s cut off now and it’s moved to the wrong page and blah blah i’m now going to have to go and edit that back so that when we print it next year it’s it all works and it all makes sense okay that that’s why i don’t want you to do it okay um and and again you’re just making it clear you’re being explicit you’re giving people a chance you know you’re telling them um and then and then people don’t make that mistake again it’s it’s that interest at this time because there’s a real danger that you can listen to this and think oh god he’s being petty about this it’s such like small things and when you think about reducing workload you immediately think of the big things right you think of your marking policy and all that yeah but what i’m getting from you is that these small things these are the real killers in terms of workload because these are the things that that take 30 seconds of your time here a minute and a half of your time here they frustrate you they stress you they build up they prevent you getting focused and cracking on with what you want to do so eradicating these is possibly just as important as dealing with the kind of big hitters would that be fair oh 100 if you’re a frontline teacher and you’ve got six lessons in a day and you’ve got a kid coming back in break for help with this and you’ve got kids coming in lunch for detention and then after school you’ve got to call a couple of parents and then you’ve got to do some marking of you know an assessment that you did today or whatever if you get 30 emails on top of that yeah yeah like when are you going to find the time to do that right so so either you’re going to burn yourself out into the evening doing it or you’re gonna end up ignoring them uh and there might be something important in there for you so if you’re not if you don’t sweat these details you know we like our staff surveys are always off the charts right like every you know i’m not i’m not just saying this we’re doing a big anonymous survey as part of the academy chain every single year it’s not even run by us it’s run by an external polling agency and like our staff are happy everyone is happy we work hard but we know that our workload is like sort of really important uh and all of those mini things they they really do add up um and you know like we just we’ve had like like i’ve had really big internal debates about like even the way that we enter data because we’ve got like a central spreadsheet that we need to put data into but also the mis the management information system and i’m like i’m like stressing out because i’m asking people to put data into two places they need to put it into our spreadsheet so they can calculate the grades or whatever and then put it into the mis as well it’s a sims arbor bromcon whatever it is that you use and i’m trying to figure out a way so that we can do it so that it doesn’t involve that double entry how long does it take a teacher to do that five minutes seven minutes yeah but that’s seven minutes they could be planning an explanation or that or you know that seven minutes they could be going home earlier to see their family yeah yeah so so why would i take that away from them if i can protect it makes sense make sense.
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