Goodstart Early Learning

Over the past few years, Goodstart Early Learning has used The Emotional Culture Deck across their Leadership Teams, Centre Teams, and Centre Support Teams as a way to be playful about talking about emotions at work.

“If it’s ok to talk with children about emotions enabling them to label emotions, it’s important we also do it as adults”

By focusing on feelings and emotions, they have transformed teams, built safe spaces for their staff to come to work and won a National Award for safety.

The ECD provided them with the flexibility and benefits to change how they work with certain teams that required more support. For educators in lower socioeconomic areas, the key to success was to create a work environment that felt safe. Since many of these educators come from abusive relationships or have criminal partners, a safe work environment was essential for their success.

The Goodstart Early Learning team led three workshops for a lower socioeconomic Centre, mapping out the desired and undesired emotions of the team. After the workshops, the team committed to embedding a new emotional culture.

“The gold didn’t happen in the workshop itself, it’s actually what happened outside”

As a result of the workshop, the Centre's emotional culture was defined and a safe haven was created for its educators. The desired feelings were also incorporated into the team's KPIs, which created a habit of checking in on how the team was feeling during project delivery.

“This team member was very proud of her efforts as she should be as she is not a normally confident person when dealing with conflict or speaking about how she is feeling”

One of their biggest successes was reducing safety incidents in the centre thanks to more helping behaviours focused on feelings, which led to the centre being awarded a National Safety Award.