Wellbeing Mini-Course Report by Connect: North Korea

Written by Kelsey Lechner, Education Co-Lead at Connect: North Korea

Context

Connect: North Korea (CNK) is a UK-based charity with employees of mixed backgrounds, including British, North Korean, South Korean, and American. Prior to this course, CNK had a preexisting Policy and Procedures document outlining:

1. Background
2. Responsibilities
3. Relationship with other policies
4. Schemes and benefits
5. Procedures and mechanisms
6. Further information
7. Useful resources

This document was reviewed, updated, and AI-translated into Korean in the spring by the staff Wellbeing Subcommittee, which had just been formed earlier in the year. The committee (of which I am the current chair) found that while, for example, some of the schemes and benefits were being utilised, there was not uniform understanding of the benefits. Furthermore, many of the procedures and mechanisms related to preventing burnout, such as group debriefings, were not regularly being implemented. Employee burnout, especially among the staff with the most lived experience, has also been a high concern.

CNK joined the mini-course with this momentum to explore ideas among peers about how to efficiently improve all staff wellbeing.

Progress throughout the Course

Over the three sessions, the course was very helpful in giving us ideas from fellow participants and facilitators about how to approach wellbeing at CNK. After the first session, we decided to implement a bilingual all-staff anonymous survey about employee wellbeing. 

Questions included:

1. My current wellbeing at work is the level I want it to be
2. My current understanding of mental health and wellbeing within the workplace is where I want it to be
3. The current benefits and activities offered by CNK support my wellbeing and mental health within the workplace
4. What challenges impact your wellbeing at work? 
5. What optional CNK wellbeing initiatives have you used?
6. Do you have any feedback on current benefits or suggestions for new benefits?
7. Do you have any suggestions for new activities?

The survey received responses from nearly all staff members, and results were shared in an all-staff meeting prior to the second course session. (The survey also served to get staff thinking about their ideas and opinions prior to the meeting.) The meeting was simultaneously used to make the BeWell presentation about staff wellbeing provided by Refugee Action, as part of participants’ ‘homework’.

This meeting ended up being incredibly beneficial for CNK. We realised that there was a large diversity in employees’ understanding of wellbeing and awareness of benefits and policies, as well as an array of wellbeing challenges. The meeting importantly served as a space for discussion, and a diverse number of voices were heard, including many by North Korean colleagues. This meeting led to an uptick in benefits being utilised as well as identifying the need for further wellbeing discussions, namely those around how to efficiently set boundaries with clients and colleagues.

Exploration of Boundaries

While any CNK staff member can feel pressured to always say ‘yes’ to clients, we find our North Korean colleagues in particular face extra pressure to do so, at the risk of their own physical and mental health. It is particularly difficult for them to refuse clients because, unlike non-North Korean staff, they usually live within the communities they serve and fear their reputations may be at stake if they cannot handle all client issues well. There are also privacy concerns, such as clients having employees’ personal phone numbers. Furthermore, due to the nature of work and office space availability, it is the North Korean colleagues who are also most likely to work in the office while other employees tend to work remotely, and the office space lacks a physical separation between clients and staff (ex. a client waiting room or staff lounge). Therefore, setting physical boundaries are also often the most difficult for colleagues with the most lived experience relevant to our work.

As a result of the meeting mentioned in the previous section, ongoing discussions have been taking place among various staff members related to shifting from a walk-in service to appointments-only system and how to practically implement such a system (such as, what to do if a client calls an employee’s personal phone after hours for an appointment). Upon consultation with a refugee trauma expert, we are also exploring how to engage more in reflective practice for client-facing staff.

These discussions led to a subsequent survey of North Korean staff members’ opinions toward taking breaks between clients and engaging in journaling as reflective practice (which was suggested to us by a refugee trauma expert). As a result, we found that most desired breaks of at least 10-15 minutes between clients, but the idea of journaling was unpopular for multiple reasons, such as because it may be seen as an extra task on top of an already busy workload or potentially lead to privacy concerns. We are still exploring these ideas and have thought of other ways to engage in reflective practice while also conducting a risk assessment of not doing reflective journaling. While we are still exploring, one outcome has already been determined: We have meetings on Monday morning with most staff in attendance to chat about weekends and go over plans for the week; we have decided to structure this more to allow for time to discuss difficult cases from previous weeks together.

We have also implemented one more survey for client-facing staff, in which we gathered six small case studies in which a staff member found it difficult to set boundaries with a client or other staff member.

Next Steps

Although the mini-course has ended, our momentum in improving staff wellbeing is still strong. We are still exploring and will test different methods for reflective practice and are investigating future training related to boundary-setting, ideally led by facilitators with lived experience who are members of the communities they serve. We are also in the process of negotiating a move to a new office space that will hopefully allow for physical boundaries to be more easily set.