Teamwork

I work in a private nursery. We are experiencing some problems within a team of 7, some working opposite shifts to each other. The staff seem to be working against each other rather than together. We have tried small team building activities with little input and NO teamwork! We have tried to arrange team meeting but due to some staffs 'commitments' these have not been followed through! All member of the team work hard and take very good care of the children and if they could pull all there qualities together this would be an excellent team! Any ideas, activities or tips would be greatly appreciated on pulling this lot together.

Thankyou

[Ruthierhyme]

Hi a warm welcome to the site and sorry to read of the problems. Have you got to the core of things and maybe looked past professional to personal differences.

Avoiding team meetings may be an indication of how uncomfortable they feel in each other's company or fearful of being put in a position where they might unintentionally or feel forced to express what the problems are.

Does one shift or individual staff member feel less valued than others or the other shift - would external training opportunities help boost confidence/self esteem.

Have incidents occured to aggrevate & cause additional conflict - proud achievements created by one shift being claimed or altered by the other? Have days off, holidays, working hours, responsibilities, pay scales, means of managerial communications caused disillusionment. Is ethnicity, prejudice, discrimination - age, training, jealousy perhaps, language differences an issue.

Where the shifts don't meet you do have a division, could this be causing a problem? would having a changing rota help everyone expereince working with other colleagues and maybe break some of the tension, do you have any mention of dispute resolution procedures & confidential meetings in a policy?

Hth a little xx

[Heidi]

Originally Posted by zumbaflower

I work in a private nursery. We are experiencing some problems within a team of 7, some working opposite shifts to each other. The staff seem to be working against each other rather than together. We have tried small team building activities with little input and NO teamwork! We have tried to arrange team meeting but due to some staffs 'commitments' these have not been followed through! All member of the team work hard and take very good care of the children and if they could pull all there qualities together this would be an excellent team! Any ideas, activities or tips would be greatly appreciated on pulling this lot together.

Thankyou

I notice that you state that all members of the team work hard and take very good care of the children, so it appears that they may feel if they are doing their job well and the children are happy, what's the problem?

They've forgotten that sharing information/passing over/transitional periods (as they change shifts over) is very important.

Do you have a book (anything - note, exercise etc) that staff could date and put comments/share information that the afternnon/later shift staff could read? such as '...Johnny went to bed very late/got up at 4am...' 'Emily may be constipated, as she hasn't emptied her bowel for over 2 days..' 'Gary is a little upset today as he broke his favourite Batman mug at breakfast time..' .

Information that is given to key persons at the start of sessions is best placed where everyone can see it. I find passing this around verbally doesn't always get to everyone, sometimes forgotten - especially as different shifts start. You can't possibly remember everything all of the time with lots happening with children, and we find this is invaluable and we all work the same 'shift' - but most parents have something they wish to share as they drop their children off. Sharing information will hopefully help them working with members of staff they don't see. I hope this helps or gives you 'food for thought'.