How to work with triggering content

Much of the content that we work with is informed by trauma. This can affect anyone in a project team but is most likely to impact the colleagues who are closest to it.

Many of us take responsibility for this impact onto ourselves to make sure the job gets done. We do this with good intentions, but it can hurt our wellbeing and job performance. It can also lead to burnout and poor employee retention.

We work in an ethically-focused organisation. It’s important that we treat our colleagues with the same respect we treat our service users. This meant that we had to find a better way to support our design and research colleagues.

What we wanted to achieve

We started by defining what we wanted to achieve with this project. We found that by meeting the user’s needs, we could also help the organisation:

• improve team morale and retention
• reduce burnout in colleagues
• reduce staff sickness
• improve the effectiveness of colleagues

This project is primarily to support roles that work with triggering content. We also wanted to do something to support colleagues who:

• support these roles
• work directly with young people and families

What we did

As we defined the problem, we realised that this wasn’t about us. This affected designers and researchers across the sector. We decided to open this up to other organisations because we wanted to:

• learn from each other’s experiences
• gather a wider range of perspectives and experience

We set up a roundtable on working with triggering content. 35 people attended from 10 organisations across the sector.

We started by getting to know each other and setting expectations for the session. We made it clear that participants comfort was important. If participants preferred keep cameras off and not take part, that was fine.

We created 3 breakout rooms, looking at how we can:

• manage our own emotions
• support our colleagues
• share resources with colleagues

The first part of the workshop focused on sharing what we’d already done, so that we could all learn from each other. We moved from there to ideating some solutions to the challenges each of our breakout rooms faced. We started by exploring the worst possible ideas we could come up with.

Triggering content can be a difficult topic to talk about. It has high expectations and people worry about saying the wrong thing. We decided to come up with the worst possible ideas that we could. This allowed us to remove some of the tension and it then gave us ideas on what we could do to make it better.

What this means for the future

That was an eye-opening and really fruitful discussion. I think there will be a lot of ripples outwards. — Roundtable participant

In the short term, we’ll:

• share appropriate support resources
• use wellbeing surveys to see how people feel
• set up groups and activities for colleagues
• support wellbeing conversations across the lab

In the medium term, we’ll:

• look at what options we have available and how we can improve on them
• better understand what colleagues really need from surveys and ideate these

In the long term, well look at:

• catch up with how things are going across the sector over time
• exchange ideas on what is and is not working

Working with organisations from across the sector really helped to give valuable insight into how to approach this. It opened discussions that helped us to focus on what exists and works (as well as things that do not). This will help us to create resources and help for colleagues within Barnardo’s, and to share outside with those who attended.