How to Create a Positive Work Environment

The work environment in an educational institution can range from total chaos to a school that runs smoothly like a well-oiled machine. 

How can schools turn chaos into a calm, effective learning situation?

Focus on the Teachers 

This is one area where the students benefit the most when the adults are the focus of the program.  There needs to be time set aside for teachers to learn how to improve the work environment in their school. To create positive work environment, the school system and administrators must realize that it won’t happen without planning.

Administrators need to come right out and tell their teachers that it is important for their students to get rid of the in-fighting and competitiveness between teachers and between departments.  

These sorts of behaviors leak out to the students.  Students are keen observers.  Even when a teacher thinks they are hiding their feelings, students quickly pick up on the hostility between adults.

In the first place, there needs to be in-service training that focuses on teachers’ emotional and social development.  Just because a teacher is an adult doesn’t mean that teacher instinctively knows how to handle their emotions.  Many teachers might have wonderful social skills with children, but feel timid and uncertain of their adult social skills.

Some schools who were working on creating positive work environments polled their teachers to find out what made them happy.  Teachers were urged to think carefully about this question.  Then they encouraged those teachers to lead a group activity focused on what they found brought them happiness.  It might be leading a cooking class or organizing karaoke singing at a local club.  

These kinds of activities carry over to the work environment at the school.  Teachers get to see each other in a different light.  Teachers get to realize that they are all people with different interests and different social styles.  It makes each teacher seem more human.  It’s hard to be angry with your fellow teacher when you saw them laughing and making a fool of themselves at the local karaoke night.  

Most importantly, teachers found common ground.  A teacher might not know that his fellow science teacher across the hall liked to study the stars.  Or the English teacher may end up organizing a Shakespeare festival with fellow teachers.

If administrators aren’t ready to start a school-wide program to create a positive work environment, there are ways teachers can take on the challenge themselves. Positive actions are contagious.  A teacher might start a post-it note campaign.  Whenever the teacher noticed something positive happening in a classroom, they wrote it on a post-it note and put it on the classroom door.

This not only made the teacher feel better, it also showed the students that teachers are real people with feelings.  This strategy is helpful for teachers because they are so used to their administrators judging them and noting all the things they did wrong, while no one notices the things they do right.