Four ways to promote your election team’s well-being

1. Free up your team’s bandwidth. API’s Emily Ristow says there’s never a bad time to reassess your workload, but her Stop Doing exercise can serve as a short-term way to free up resources and ensure your election coverage capabilities are sustainable. Take this assessment to see what your team might be able to pause or delegate during this busy time — and you might find it’s something you don’t need to resume after November.
2. Talk about how to cover unexpected situations before they happen. The need to make decisions on the fly, especially in unprecedented scenarios, can significantly add to a reporter or editor’s mental load. While making snap judgments is part of the job, keep your team from second-guessing themselves by having strategic conversations ahead of time so everyone is on the same page in the face of the unexpected events with this series of Critical Conversations on Elections.
3. Boost digital security to protect against online attacks. Negative online attention or targeted digital threats can quickly become overwhelming, especially when combined with misinformation campaigns or politicians villainizing the media. Encourage your team to complete a digital safety checkup on their online presence by using this checklist from the International Women’s Media Foundation, and be prepared to support them if they do experience online violence.
4. Check in frequently. The mental health and well-being of your team should be an ongoing conversation, not something that’s only addressed during a crisis. Find ways to check in with your team on their workloads and well-being during and after the election cycle — consider using daily prompts, finding ways to foster psychological safety or make resources readily available. And don’t forget to model healthy behavior, as well.

WHAT OTHERS ARE DOING

We are seeing examples of news leaders stepping up to face this challenge. As the field’s numbers show high burnout among local journalists, some media organizations are:

• Hiring in-house therapists dedicated to serving journalists, professionals with a deeper understanding of the job. This is the case at the San Francisco Chronicle.
• Offering employee assistance plans across emerging local news collaboratives, helping smaller newsrooms gain support for their employees. This is the case with the Oklahoma Media Center.
• Piloting four-day work weeks, leading to “transformative results in their mental health, work-life balance, and productivity.” This is the case with Prism.
• Launching new services and resources for employees, such as Wellthy, which provides experienced care professionals and coaching to employees.
• Not only describing values like ‘self and community care,’ but putting them into practice. The Appeal lists this value and acts on it, using a 32-hour workweek and a no-DMs policy on Fridays, as well as company-wide closures, meeting-free weeks, regular 1:1s and providing an equitable and transparent compensation model.