Team Development for Support Staff

Support staff in research institutes occupy a unique position. They are essential to everything that happens — nothing runs without them — and they are rarely the focus of development investment. Training budgets, team days and leadership attention tend to flow toward the scientific staff. Support teams are expected to keep things running, often across departments, and often without the recognition or the forums to address how they work together.

Periods of change make this more acute. New reporting lines, new colleagues, new expectations, and the daily pressure of keeping everything functioning while it is still being rebuilt. For many support staff, the instinct is to put their heads down and get through it. The problem is that this creates isolation, duplication of effort, and small frustrations that compound over time.

There is also a dynamic rarely spoken about openly: the relationship between support staff and scientific staff. In many institutes there is an implicit hierarchy where administrative and technical work is valued differently from scientific work. This affects how people show up in meetings, whether they feel confident sharing ideas, and how willing they are to flag problems early. When support staff do not feel psychologically safe, issues stay hidden until they become crises.

This is a dedicated team development session, designed for the specific dynamics of a support or operational team.

We begin with low-stakes, high-energy exercises that build trust quickly. They are designed to be fun, inclusive and gradually more challenging. By the midpoint, participants are doing things they would not have been comfortable doing at the start — which is exactly the point.

• Psychological safety in practice — the lived experience of contributing without fear of judgement
• Communication across roles — how misunderstandings develop between people in different functions, and what happens when people stop asking questions because they feel they should already know the answer
• Giving and receiving feedback — saying difficult things with care, and hearing difficult things without shutting down
• Making decisions together — how teams get stuck in consensus loops or defer to the loudest voice, and how to build a culture where everyone's input is genuinely sought
• One concrete behavioural commitment — every participant commits to one specific, observable thing they will do differently from the following week

• A shared language for how the team wants to work together, built from their own experience in the session rather than imposed from outside
• A felt experience of psychological safety — a physical memory of what it is like to be in a team where people genuinely support each other
• One specific behavioural commitment that their colleagues know about and can hold them to
• More trust between team members — the exercises create connection quickly, and the effects carry forward into daily work
• Permission to raise issues early — once a team has shared an experience like this, the threshold for speaking up about small problems drops significantly

Support staff rarely get a training day that is theirs. The dynamics they need to work on — trust, communication, role clarity, psychological safety — are best addressed in a group where people share similar pressures and speak the same operational language. Mixing them into the scientist programme would dilute both experiences.

This session also sends a clear signal from leadership: your development matters, your team matters, and we are investing in how you work together. That signal alone changes something.

We have delivered team development trainings for operational and support teams at organisations like Novo Nordisk, Novonesis and Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies — environments where the dynamics between scientific, technical and support staff mirror what research institutes experience every day.