0:00 Michelle: From Women's Health Grampians, welcome Rose. Great to have you with us.
0:03 Rose: Thank you.
0:04 Michelle: So, Rose, again, can you maybe help for everybody listening, watching today, just give us a little bit of the context for the service and your team when you started to pick this up and why you've created the tool that you’re going to share with us today.
0:18 Rose: Yeah, absolutely. I can bring up some slides that can bring it to life a little bit as well. So tell me, Michelle, what can you see?
[On-screen text: Accomplishment Spotlight: Rose Durey, Manager Strategy and Programs]
0:31 Michelle: We can see it beautifully.
0:32 Rose: Okay, beautiful. So, I am the manager of strategy and programs at Women's Health Grampians, and I too am going to just quickly start by acknowledging that I am based in Ballarat, and this is Wadawurrung country, this always was and always will be Wadawurrung country, and I pay my respect to elders past and present. To provide a bit of that context, Michelle, we're a health promotion organisation, so we're a bit different to Winda-Mara and other organisations in that we don't do the direct service delivery. We are not at the response end of the spectrum, we're at the primary prevention end of the spectrum. So, we are funded by the Victorian government to work around the drivers of violence against women including gender equality, and we work largely at an organisational level. So we work with organisations around achieving gender equality outcomes and working towards challenging gender social norms, applying a gender lens, all of which is key in preventing violence against women at that primary prevention end. We're rural and regional, I'm based in Ballarat, we've got offices in Horsham as well. And this is a little picture of... Can you see that, Michelle, photo?
2:04 Michelle: Oh no, it hasn't moved on, Kelly, it’s still on your first slide.
2:08 Rose: Okay, here we go.
2:10 Michelle: Try again. Another one, so I can share it from my end.
2:17 Rose: Can you see that now?
2:19 Michelle: No. Let me try from my end. Kelly, I think let's go over to...
2:24 Rose: I'll stop sharing.
2:26 Michelle: That's okay. No problems mate to see the photos that go with it. There we go.
2:33 Rose: And maybe the next slide. Thanks Michelle. You can practise but it does not necessarily make perfect. This is the team.
2:34 Michelle: It's okay.
2:44 Rose: There are about 25 of us in the team. We are all women except for one man. We all work part-time. A lot of us have caring responsibilities and almost all of us work in some way around that primary prevention of violence against women. So, what that means is that we are not necessarily seeing the immediate impact of our work at all. It's a really long game that we are playing. So that's the kind of context that we are working in, health promotion and not direct service delivery, but we're working at an organisational level. If you can go to the next slide, Michelle.
[On-screen text: WHG’s wellbeing survey results
We’re going well but we can improve.
- Relatively high levels of judgemental/critical self-talk
- Relatively low levels of self-compassion]
3:36 Rose: So, like Michelle was saying earlier on, we did the survey at the start and at the end of what we are doing and what it indicated overall is quite a strong and positive organisational culture. But when we delved a bit deeper, it showed that we are going well, but we have within our staff group relatively high levels of judgmental and critical self-talk and relatively low levels of self-compassion. So, on the whole, we had quite a high performing team, but despite that work and progress and sentiment at an organisational level, we were still talking ourselves down, which was really interesting for us. And I think we quite enjoyed being able to delve into that a bit deeper. In part, I think our hunch was that in part that's due to the primary prevention work and not necessarily seeing impact of our work in real time, but also gender equality and inequality and gender norms are our bread and butter. And so, we did apply a gender lens and flesh that out a bit more. We're an organisation that are almost all women and gender is at play in where we scored more poorly. And if you go to the next slide, we looked at the evidence around this.
[On-screen text: Applying a gender lens to our results…
- Women underconfident about their performance and men were overconfident.
- Men engage in substantially more self-promotion than women.
- Women systematically provide less favourable assessments of their own past performance and potential future ability than equally performing men.
Exley, C and Kessler, J. (2019). Why don’t women self-promote as much as men? Harvard Business Review.]
5:15 Rose: the evidence around our hunch, and there's lots of data that shows this. This is just one study from Harvard Business Review that backed up our conversations. And it's that women are under-confident about their performance and men are on the whole overconfident; that men engage in substantially more self-promotion than women. And that women systematically, across the board, provide less favourable assessments of our past performance and our potential future ability than equally performing men. And we thought that's interesting for us as an organisation that is largely just women. So, what we developed is the accomplishment spotlight.
[On-screen text: Accomplishment Spotlight
- Encourage team members to take notice of achievement, contributions and milestones, however small
- Use an Accomplishment Spotlight to describe our work: “I accomplished… and the impact was…”
- Embed an Accomplishment Spotlight to Supervision, Team Meeting Agendas and Internal Communications.
- Give permission to call out negative self-talk to encourage reflections of achievement.]
6:09 Rose: So, the accomplishment was the kind of PERMA wellbeing factor that these scores fell into. And basically, it was about encouraging our team to take notice of our own achievements, but also those of other members of the team, our achievements, contributions that we might've made, and milestones however small they might be. So, celebrating those small wins and not just achievements but also effort, and to develop a language around that. So I accomplished something and the impact was this, to really kind get better at our own self-promotion in some ways and to embed that into supervision team meetings and the internal comms that we have within our organisation, as well as giving us permission and getting more used to calling out negative self-talk, and encouraging us to challenge some of those gender norms around how we talk about and showcase our own achievement. This is our tool. Super simple. It has been quite useful for us as a team that is performing really well as a way of boosting our team wellbeing. And also, for us it was quite individual. And so, this particular tool that we developed was able to shine a spotlight on both of those things. And I think it's also beneficial for teams that are doing long-term primary prevention work because sometimes it's kind of hard to find where the change is happening as well.
8:07 Michelle: That makes so much sense Rose. And I love the simplicity of the "I accomplished... And the impact was..." And how you thought about, well how do we anchor that? How do we embed that into our existing ways of working? So, it's not something we're doing on top of, another thing we’ve got to add onto the to do list to remember, but actually how do we embed it into our supervision conversations? How do we embed it into our team meeting agendas? How do we use it in our internal communications? So, I love both the simplicity and the effectiveness that this could have for a team.
8:42 Rose: Yeah, it's been a pleasure.
8:45 Michelle: Yeah, that's just amazing. And again, team in the chat if you want to share any reflections, appreciation, questions for Rose in there, please do so. Rose, I think your observations about where you are in the continuum of support that is provided to people in the sector is such an important part of that and the gender lens to that as well. Having studied lots of workplaces. And I'm always curious about the self-compassion and the criticism and judgement that people use. I would say a yes, and to that I think there's definitely a heightened piece for all those reasons that you identified with your team. And one thing we would notice is that often this is the factor, these are the factors that are pulling down accomplishment in many, many workplaces as well. And so again, for those listening, if you are wondering about this for your team and where they might score, you all have access to free licences for that survey tool if you want to use them as Catherine mentioned at the start. And one of the benefits of that tool is it would allow you to be able to accurately assess, is this a challenge in our team? And I think Rose, again, what you guys did so beautifully with that was then open up a conversation about what does this mean for us? Does this ring true for us? Why might this be happening for us? What might we be able to do with that? And so, a beautiful example of how that data then led to conversations and actions for you. And to me that's always the best use of data.
10:14 Rose: Yeah, absolutely.
10:16 Michelle: Thank you so much for sharing, Rose, again.
[End of transcript]
Updated