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Staff with lived experience - how do you create a culture of support? (Anonymous post 🤫)
Rose Cruickshank Staff Performance Marketing Manager at CharityJob Posted 7 months ago
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This question is from a member of our community that wishes to remain anonymous:
As a charity we have spent time encouraging staff with lived-experience to join our organisation as they have a wealth of experience that we can draw upon. This does also create challenges, however, and we have sought ways to support colleagues with a package of measures, including:Â
- Not sharing people's status - allowing them to share it;
- A buddy scheme for people to have an informal buddy as they settle into the organisation;
- A working group/committee for people with this characteristic to get together, talk about the work that we do as an organisation, and how we can support them better;
- Our Chief Executive offering everyone 1-to-1 discussions if they would like;
- Whole staff learning sessions on the area of our work every quarter;
- A Teams group for informal support amongst colleagues;
- Trigger warnings when we tackle potentially sensitive topics, allowing people to turn off cameras etc;
- Organisational training on particular areas of focus;
- Two additional 'wellbeing days' when these colleagues needs a break from our work;
- External counselling for staff who request it;
- Emergency clinical support if required.Â
There is always more that we could do, and therefore I'm interested in what others in similar organisations might do. Clearly sometimes things within our organisation will trigger people with this background, and that's something that we can't avoid but we also want to be as sensitive as we can be. Indeed, some of the support we provide (such as counselling) could then cause further trauma to resurface, which can be difficult to manage.Â
(I haven't shared details of the particular characteristic because that could identify our organisation and I would like this post to remain anonymous to protect our team.)
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