This is the first post in a series called Teaming Tales. Each post will feature an area of teamwork that often veers into dysfunction, using a fictionalised fable to explore the issues, followed by strategies to help move forward.
Catherine is five years into her teaching career, and is flourishing into an excellent teacher. She creates a thriving classroom culture. She has taught A-Level and GCSE, with great outcomes. Her subject knowledge is excellent and is growing every year. She loves working with children.
It’s September, and she has just moved to a new school after relocating across the country. She didn’t want to leave her last school: it was warm, considered staff workload carefully, and had a real community feel.
But here she is, at her new school’s INSET day, feeling optimistic. The school has been on a journey and is now considered ‘outstanding’, whatever that means, while also having the top outcomes in the county among state comprehensives.
The morning has gone well, and now she is in department time, with colleagues who seem to love teaching her subject just as much as she does. ‘We have a lot of systems and processes’, says Sarah, the Head of Department. ‘It helps us with clarity and means we have a robust approach to data tracking, managing behaviour, and making sure we are on the same wavelength.’
Catherine is a little taken aback by the sheer number of processes she has to follow, especially ones which seem to have little connection to teaching brilliant lessons. But, the school is doing really well, and she trusts the ethos that clarity over processes saves workload and increases consistency.
But the red flags don’t stop on the INSET day. After her first day of teaching, Catherine recorded her positive and negative behaviour points on the electronic system, before realising there was a separate spreadsheet for assembly nominations. No big deal. Except, when she talks to her department over breaktime coffee, no one seems to bother with the spreadsheet except for a handful of teachers. ‘It’s just one of those things we’ve always had, but not everyone uses it’, they explain.
A few days later, she has to apply the behaviour policy and sanction a student for persistent disruption in her lesson. The procedure is to enter the sanction on the electronic system, but also to contact the Head of Year and Tutor. Seems like a duplication, but if they take action, then sure, why not. ‘Don’t forget to add the detention to the sanction spreadsheet,’ Alex tells her. Okay, no problem. Days later, it’s not clear if the student has actually attended a detention. Someone jokingly remarks that the teachers and students play ‘detention roulette’. Sigh.
Homework is set on one platform. But teaching resources are on another. Registers are on another. SEN profiles are on a completely different one, which SLT admit was a bad choice, but they’ve paid for it now so the decision stands.
On week four, she marks her first assessments. Catherine loves marking, despite the bad rep that it gets among teachers. After she finishes the pile, she enters the marks onto the school’s centralised reporting system. It’s a bit fiddly. Three days later, she Head of Department asks her where the marks are. ‘Oh, no, SLT and the data manager use that data. I like to have our own internal spreadsheets too, so we can track in a more customised way. You need to enter it again on the spreadsheet please.’ Splendid. Another 15 minutes.
As a form tutor, she has to regularly fill in data and notes about her students, and chase up if they have done reading tasks from another online system (there are at least 4 she is using across school), with another login and ways of filling in data.
The staff keep saying things like ‘it’s a lot of systems, but it just works for us’, and even more incendiary to her mood: ‘we’ve always done it that way’. But it’s not just the number of systems, duplications and logins, that is putting pressure on Catherine’s time and sanity. It’s the inconsistency. From behaviour, to access arrangements, to reward systems, everyone seems to be doing something different. And some systems require staff time but never seem to lead to any further action or improvements. The staff buy in for systems is low because the follow up is poor. The student behaviour is worse than at her last school, with the children realising that follow up is often inconsistent. Staff who own systems argue they are being used well and are vital to the way the school runs. Staff who do not buy in to them pretend to use systems but do their own thing.
Catherine loves many aspects of the school. The department’s teaching curriculum really aligns with her own ethos of what the children should learn, and how. The atmosphere across school is warm and friendly. Parents are more engaged here than at her last school.
But, one half term in, she ‘s wondering if it’s worth it. Niggly, inconsistent processes. Ineffective systems. Extra workload for marking and data input. Staff talking about clarity when there is anything but.
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Clear systems, processes, or mental models (ways of doing things) are vital to organisations and teams. When we have clarity over how to do things, we feel empowered to get on with our work, and we begin to observe the efficiencies of having consistent ways of working. We can compare progress and activities with our colleagues, knowing that we are doing the same things.
When systems and processes are followed by all, we can effectively evaluate how they are working. If everyone follows the behaviour policy, then we can meaningfully explore classroom culture, sanctions and rewards data, and understand our student voice properly. If it’s applied inconsistently, how can we compare, review, or improve?
We know from a huge wealth of research that role clarity is vital for teams, too; we build systems that define what different members of the team do, so that we can improve understanding, reduce overlaps, and maximise efficiency. One study found that role clarity within systems had a bigger impact on team performance than many other teaming factors. Many studies have found that teams which operate with slick, understood systems can operate efficiently without the need to overtly communicate at every turn, and thus improving efficiency.
Systems are not meant to be straitjackets that limit people’s creativity or autonomy. They are a solid foundation for shared understanding and consistency; they can, in fact, allow more creativity, because when a team decides that their current system isn’t working for them, they can compare their shared experiences to come up with new or original methods, and then refer, or even return to the default afterwards if needs be.
I recently read a case study of Pal’s Sudden Service, a fast-food chain in Tennessee, USA. They are known to have the highest speeds and highest accuracy when it comes to fulfilling customer orders. And, remarkably, an extremely low, perhaps the lowest, staff turnover in the fast-food sector. Before a new hire starts, they must complete 120 hours of training on every system and scenario. New managers must complete 400 hours of training, and then spend 10% of their ongoing time training others. The staff know all systems back to front, so they have clarity, predictability, and safety, and that leads to the high outcomes with the food orders. Staff like working there because they know what to expect, how to do their work well, and like the fact that they get lots of training on the job.
Systems should have a clear purpose, be easy to follow, add clarity, reduce workload, improve effectiveness, and be evaluated regularly, for consistency and impact. Otherwise, what’s the point?
It makes me think about how many schools do a lot of things, and, indeed, teams within the schools; here are some key questions:
- How well do we induct new staff with whole-school systems?
- How do we onboard staff into their different teams, and help them understand the nuances of team-based systems?
- How often do teams review their systems, one by one, to ask: how is this going? What could be better? Are staff using this consistently? If we started from scratch, would we still use this system?
- Do we involve staff in our review of systems and really try to understand their perspectives so that our systems serve them and the children well?
- What evidence do we use to evaluate systems? Testimony, surveys, data, consistency, etc.
- How do we present our systems to staff? How can we use simple tools such as handbooks or similar to help staff access and use our systems consistently? Do we communicate them well enough?
- Further to this, do we communicate the purpose of our systems? All systems should have a purpose – a good reason for existing. Let’s not fall into the ‘it’s just the way we’ve always done things’ trap.
- Do our systems save or add to workload? Where they add, is it justifiable – i.e., they add so much value to our work that the juice is worth the squeeze.
Catherine’s school
If Catherine is going flourish at this school, they need to take a back-to-basics approach with their systems. Firstly, Catherine’s job would be easier if she had a reduced number of electronic systems. There is no perfect system that does everything proficiently. But sometimes you have to make compromises, and I would be tempted to reduce the number of systems that Catherine uses, to reduce her workload and the amount of time she spends flicking between different interfaces and two-factor authentications. It’s not necessarily the number of processes that teachers need to follow that should change, but the number of different places she has to go (a huge number of mouse clicks!) in order to fulfil systems, some of which aren’t even being checked, followed up on, or used purposefully.
Secondly, this is one of those ‘we’ve always done it like that’ schools. This is never the right way to run a school, unless we’ve always done it like this because everything is perfect and everything serves everyone wonderfully. Which is unusual. The school need to take an honest approach to reviewing their systems, asking some of the questions I listed above. They need to consult staff, with an open mind and humility that things might need to change. Transparency over what they are reviewing and why, followed by agreed upon systems with consistent buy in, will really transform the way staff do, and feel about, their work. Teams should review their systems together as a group and agree which things are changed, added, or removed.
And, on a different level, they need to find out whether it is the ineffective systems which mean that staff aren’t all following them, or if there are other factors that impact the way staff follow directives. Are there cultural reasons that staff don’t support these systems? Do they trust leaders in their school? Does the lack of buy in reach beyond just processes and systems?
A lot of soul searching needs to go on, here, to ensure that it is not merely systems that are evaluated but the way leaders run the school. This sounds dramatic, but a school where systems are barely followed is full of dysfunction, even if it seems to be doing well in some areas.
The outcome will be purposeful systems that staff understand the purpose of, all engage with, and that will reduce their workload and improve effectiveness and efficiency. The kind of systems that allow teachers to flourish and students to learn.
Thank you for reading the first post of Teaming Fables. I can’t wait to write the next one! If you’d like to find out more about systems, mental models, role clarity, or a whole host of other teaming research, check out The Power of Teams:
Sam
Sam Crome 