Carson Tate's Blog, page 3

Team Building for High-Performance Organizations

Employee Engagement Strategies

In the age of remote and hybrid work, intentional employee engagement is more important now than ever before. In pre-pandemic times, team building was difficult enough – but since the start of 2020, it has become even more challenging to create a connected, healthy team, whether you’re working in person or remotely.

Effective leaders will employ team-building activities at work intentionally because research has shown that engaged and connected teams lead to greater productivity and business success. But what makes effective team building and how can you implement it into your organization or team?

Defining Employee Engagement

First, we need to understand what employee engagement is and how team building increases engagement. “Employee engagement refers to how invested people are in both their everyday work and the success of the business as a whole.” Engaged employees will have a positive emotional connection with and a sense of purpose in their jobs.

To ensure employees are engaged, leaders need to engage in team-building activities at work. The purpose of team building is to provide your employees with the skills, training, and resources your people need so they can flourish and work in harmony. You can do team building through one-time events and activities, but long-term, effective team building should also be supported by the culture and daily processes of your team.

Team Building Activities

To get the ball rolling on team building, you can start by planning a singular event or activity. A few great, intentional team-building activities are:

Plan and host a social event for your employees. Socializing at a holiday party, summer barbeque, or casual dinner party is a great way for employees to begin to get to know you and each other as whole people, outside of work. In this kind of setting, people are more apt to open up and show their personalities.Do some team-building exercises. A team-building activity can be a great way to highlight team members’ strengths, ask team-building questions,  or practice building new skills together. However, not all team-building activities are created equal! Be wary of activities that are based on competition because competitive exercises inevitably produce losers as well as winners, and may lead your team members to work against one another. Here’s a link to some fun and effective team-building exercises.Unite your team with a shared vision or goal. Set up a time to meet and dream together, and then spend time casting the vision for where the team is going and what the organizational goals are. Make it fun! Provide visuals, give team affirmations and bring high energy to the meeting. When your people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves and united as a team, they will be more effective and more engaged with one another.

Cultivating a Team-Building Culture

Once you kick off your employee engagement with a team-building activity or two, you should begin implementing effective team building throughout the culture of your organization. Here are three strategies you can implement:

Make trust in your employees a core value of the team. The key to building trust is in empowering employees to have autonomy. Instead of micromanaging how your employees work, allow them to self-manage projects, and work to allow for greater flexibility in how, where, and when your employees work. If your team knows you believe in their capability to do their work, and do it well, they will be more engaged and happier overall at work.Increase employee recognition efforts. Make it a priority to regularly provide encouragement, give shout-outs, and recognize the efforts of your team members. This is especially important for remote workers, who may feel disconnected or like their work efforts go unseen. Celebrate all of the victories and progress – big or small. It’s also helpful to encourage and develop avenues for peer-to-peer recognition as well. As a leader, you may not see or be able to call out every team member’s successes every day. But, with peer-to-peer recognition in place, team members will build rapport and community amongst themselves and more people will get positive call-outs, which will boost morale and engagement.Provide opportunities for growth and development. According to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report,  Millennials and Gen-Z put a lot of importance on their opportunity to grow, learn, and develop at work. You can start creating opportunities for growth by really getting to know each employee’s strengths, talents, and aspirations and then matching them with roles and projects that will complement those things. Encouraging and providing resources for employees to continue learning and growing–through attending seminars, webinars, taking courses, or encouraging employees to earn certifications or a graduate degree–are ways you can increase employee engagement. Employees that are learning at your company and growing their skillsets will ultimately feel more purposeful, useful, and valued, and are more likely to stay at the company for longer.

Effective leaders can boost their business success by cultivating a connected and engaged team. While these ideas are a good start, it can still be difficult to implement team building into your organizational culture–especially in today’s rapidly changing work environments!

If you want to learn more or need some help with team building to boost your organization’s performance, check out the Team Building training that we offer! Our team-building coaching and training can help you create a more connected, high-performing, and engaged team. We can also help magnify the effectiveness of your leaders and managers as they learn how to better engage employees in the office or remotely.

 

 

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How to Organize Emails – Email Management Tips

Inbox Time Saver – Email Automation

You probably spend too much time in your email inbox. So many people have cluttered inboxes, are spending hours of their day answering emails, and have a sense of dread when they think about opening their inbox. I want you to know that it does not have to be this way!

Your email is actually a super powerful tool. In this past post, I even describe it as your personal assistant. But too many of us get lost in our emails and end up wishing we could just get rid of email altogether. It is time to gain back control of your inbox, time, and productivity. Your email is a tool to help you get your work done; it should not be the work itself.

Are you ready to get ahold of your inbox? Great. Read on for 9 email organization techniques that have transformed my own email management skills, drawn partially from an article on Lifehack.

1) Set Limits On Your Email Usage

It is not enough to simply say you’ll “check your email less.” The reality is, you need some clear goals and limits. Start with a firm boundary for how many times a day you will process your emails. I recommend processing emails once a day. Then, on top of that once-a-day limit, you also need a time limit so your once-a-day check doesn’t take up hours of your time. Set a 30-60 minute (or less!) limit. Reply to as many as possible within those limits, and then simply pick up tomorrow where you left off.

2) Use Folder and Labels

Organization is KEY to maximizing productivity and reducing the amount of time you spend in your inbox. You can use folders and sub-folders to organize emails by similar content, category, project, or importance. Label emails with colors or other markers to clue you into possible importance or priority. You could label emails from your supervisor with one color, high-priority clients with another, and emails you are cc’d on with another. This will help you visually determine importance when you go into your inbox!

3) Realize You DON’T Need to Respond to Every Email

I know, that sounds crazy. But, really, you don’t need to respond to everything. You need to prioritize your time, and that means only responding to emails if they are pushing your goals forward, are from important people in your life or work, and are relevant to what you do and want. Everything else is secondary and can either be responded to at a later time (if you get extra time) or not at all.

4) Utilize Template Replies

Do you find yourself responding to the same kinds of emails or requests over and over again? If so, it might be worth creating a template that can be copy-pasted and sent with little to no modification for those emails that seem to come up time and time again. This will help reduce the time you spend answering emails!

5) Follow the 1-Minute Rule

In general, if you get an email that can be responded to in less than 1 minute and is relevant to you (see point 3)–just do it. Respond right away and then archive it. Even if it is not at the top of the list of importance, responding to these emails quickly is worth it to free up the mental space and energy you’d use later thinking about them and remembering to respond.

6) Unsubscribe from Everything

I get it, most of us have over-subscribed to emails, updates, newsletters, and deals over the years. But truth be told, most of those emails get left unread or immediately deleted. It is time to go through and commit to unsubscribing from everything that is no longer serving you.

7) Only Open Your Email When You Truly Have Time For It

Do you check your emails when you don’t really have time to read and respond to them? A lot of us are guilty of this! We check emails in line for coffee, in the elevator, between steps while cooking dinner. But when we do this, we often have to reread the email later. This is a waste of precious time! To become more efficient and spend less time processing emails, only check your inbox when you REALLY have the time to sit down, read, and engage.

8) Use our Email Agility Circle

In a past post, I shared my 4-part email agility circle. It has been designed to make you more efficient at email management. The 4 parts are: Read, Decide, Act, and Contain. Understanding these steps can help cut down the time you spend on email.

9) Turn Off New Email Notifications

Finally, to stick to your email checking boundaries, you need to turn off your “new email” notifications. Doing this will keep emails out of sight, and thus, out of mind until you are ready to check your inbox. Remember, you are in control of your email, not the other way around.

If you read these tips and still feel like you need help leveraging your email management skills to increase productivity and effectiveness at work, I offer an Email Management Training Course that can help you (or your whole team) increase your email management. I’d love to work with you!

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What are the Benefits of Executive Coaching?

Coaching Can Help You Achieve Personal and Professional Goals

Executive coaching has become a common service in the modern corporate world. With fast-moving and unexpected changes becoming the norm for our global society, having a neutral third party come in and guide an organization towards optimal performance from the top down is an excellent strategy for maintaining positive growth.

And that’s the reality of executive coaching – the guidance executive coaches dole out to the C-suite leadership trickles down to the rest of the workforce. Having a culture focused on continual skill-building and internal work – which are two achievements of executive coaching – helps promise continued success as a business.

Let’s learn more about executive coaching and how it can improve your organization.

What is Executive Coaching?

Executive coaching is professional training that typically lasts between 7 and 12 months. It focuses on improving crucial skills for business leaders that will lead to a happier, healthier working environment. These skills are taught in a safe and trustworthy environment as created by the coach and can include teaching company leaders to:

Better understand themselvesUnderstand how they’re perceived by othersImprove their understanding of the people around themChallenge their own assumptions

Executive coaches will also help leaders identify goals and how to reasonably achieve them, such as with S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting, and a variety of other valuable assets.

Executive Coaching Benefits for Leaders

While executive coaching is tailored to the needs of its clients, there are some common benefits that leaders may experience.

Increased Levels of Motivation

When a third party comes in to objectively review your company and starts making suggestions to help leadership styles and organizations get back on track, it can cause an energizing boost in morale.

This is because as leaders are able to realign themselves with their business’s goals and ultimate purpose, that alignment instigates a feeling of shared purpose which is a powerful motivator for both leaders and their teams. Furthermore, as leaders set and meet their goals with the help of their executive coach, those results can inspire them to continue working on themselves and their business.

Improved Goal-Setting

It’s easy to come up with short-term and long-term goals for your business and yourself. However, executive coaches teach their clients how to set S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S.M.A.R.T. goals are:

SpecificMeasurableAchievableRelevantTime-bound

This combination of specific details and adaptable plans helps ground goals. So instead of pursuing a lofty ideal with no identifiable progress or plan to get there, S.M.A.R.T. goals provide a map for leaders to achieve results.

When a leader implements S.M.A.R.T. goals, the business can share in a unified purpose that will achieve its desired results. And results, as we’ve already discussed are powerful motivators for the continued positive progress of a business.

Personal Growth

One of the largest components of an executive coach’s work involves the internal world of a leader and how it affects their business. That means executive coaches will provide guidance on how leadership can improve their:

Emotional intelligenceSelf-regulationSelf-awarenessEmpathySocial Skills

All of these traits work in concordance with each other, and when they’re improved upon they lead to a better understanding of a leader’s self and the people around them.

When leaders are in tune with how they’re perceived and they’re perceiving people compassionately, they’re simply better at leading. The working environment becomes more positive, people become happier, and long-term success is easier to achieve. You’re better able to evaluate peoples’ individual strengths and weaknesses, making it easier to set them up for success with the right role, and in the right team.

Additionally, knowing oneself leads to better confidence. When you know your triggers and how you’ll react to most situations, you gain better control over life – including implementing a work-life balance, being more organized, and having excellent time management and communication skills.

Executive Coaching Benefits for Companies

In most of the above benefits for leaders, I mention how they will lead to improvement within the larger company. I want to address some ways in which executive coaching strengthens a company from the bottom, up.

Resilience to Sudden Change

We all know that in the last few years, things have become increasingly unpredictable. Environmental changes, sudden war, global pandemic…you name it. Executive coaches can be brought on to help coach companies through the ramifications of these events, as well as more internal challenges such as:

Large expansionsChanges in capitalPrivate equity venturesPower transfersSuccessions

And other dramatic transitions, including migrating to remote work. Executive coaches are experts in the skills that make these changes easier and up to 48% of organizations have hired an executive coach to help them.

Pointing Out Areas That Need Improvement

As an objective third-party, executive coaches will see your business in a different light than you’re able to. They offer a fresh perspective, so they’re better able to point out blind spots that leadership would not have thought to analyze further. For example, it can be difficult for leaders to accurately gauge their employees’ happiness and efficiency – especially among remote teams.

Executive coaches can suss out the issue that’s negatively affecting your business, that you can’t seem to identify. They’ll then provide solutions for how to improve the situation with by facilitating employee surveys, one-on-one managerial meetings, company-wide conversations, and more. They’ll also help leadership accurately evaluate these results.

Creating a Better, More Diverse Company Culture

By now, we’ve all heard about the Great Resignation.

The 2021 Bureau of Labor report statistics alone show that the overall turnover rate in corporate America is 57.3%. With employee retention being a huge issue for businesses, improving the company culture is the first step toward rectifying the issue.

Executives are noted as having the biggest impact on the workplace environment, so when they begin to improve upon themselves they directly improve the workplace.

Furthermore, diversity in the workplace is a big aspect of improving employee retention. When workers feel like they’re in a diverse, safe environment with equal opportunity for all, they’ll feel happier and more secure in their work.

Where to Find an Executive Coach

The benefits of executive coaching include helping you reach both your personal and professional goals, and improving your interpersonal skills. Working Simply’s executive coaching helps leadership recognize their organizational impact and develop the authentic, agile leadership required to succeed in the new world of work.

Learn more about our executive coaching program.

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Rise Above – Prioritize Employee Empowerment in the Workplace

Employees provide more value, are happier, and are more committed to their organization when they feel empowered. To build a culture that promotes employee and organizational success you need the tools and resources that allow employees to manage the tasks in front of them and drive their careers forward. How do you empower your employees and ensure they are primed for success? Here’s how.

➔   Offer authority and ownership

◆    Delegate tasks to your employees that empower them to capitalize on passion and potential. Give them autonomy to challenge them to step up their game. These unique opportunities for employees offer them the chance to step outside of their normal routine (and maybe their comfort zone) and focus on a new task. When employees can work on their own terms, their successes feel even more impactful and drive engagement.

◆    When you delegate tasks it displays a level of trust and respect. According to research, “respect — or the lack thereof — was the single strongest predictor of how employees as a whole rated the corporate culture.” A culture of respect impacts employee ownership and empowerment. To do this successfully you must delegate problems and not tasks. This allows your team members to truly feel like they have autonomy and the freedom to explore the problem in the most effective way.

➔   Communication

◆    Excellent communication needs to flow both ways – from you to the team and from the team to you – for the team to be fully empowered. Here are three ways you can promote this:

Allow your team to know you. When you are consistent and transparent, your team will develop security and a sense of trust in the fact that they know what to expect. No one likes to be surprised and the more consistency you demonstrate, the more your team will feel comfortable in the work they do.Accept ideas. Openness to new ideas not only benefits you and your stakeholders but also instills a sense of trust within your team. When your team knows that their opinions and perspective are valued and taken seriously, they are more likely to seek out ways to improve the overall function of their job or the team as a whole.Ask powerful questions. In both group and one-on-one settings, take advantage of opportunities to ask meaningful and impactful questions. These questions should not only concern specific projects, but also workplace preferences and personal life. Research revealed that employers that seem out of touch or uncaring about the lives of employees created a “moral injury that could drive workers away.”

➔   Make goals, guidelines, and best practices clear

◆    Expectations must be clear and widely known in order to build and maintain team morale. Here is how you can do this well:

Team members are more engaged when they know the big picture goals and ideas, and when they have a general sense of where things are headed.Communicate and document changes promptly and through known channels. According to New America, employers should allow 30-45 days of advance notice before any changes to work models. Employees should know when they expect to hear from you and through what medium you will be reaching out.Prioritize clarity and thoroughness in training and onboarding. Starting team members off on the right foot is one of the most important components of cultivating sustained engagement.Depending on your industry, frequent training may be a critical component of ensuring that best practices are being kept. Training should be a dynamic and ongoing process as opposed to something that happens once. Zeynap Ton, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, suggests that cross training and up-skilling workers is key to employee empowerment and reduced turnover rates.

➔   Treat your team members like people

◆    There are few things as demoralizing to employees as when they feel that they are not seen and heard on a professional and a personal level. Ensure that you maintain a people-first mentality in all of the ways you interact with your team. Everyone must feel they are “treated fairly, made to feel welcome, and included in key decisions” (MITSloan).

◆    Because everyone has their own unique personalities and ways that they prefer to receive information, it is your job to identify how to speak the “language” of each of your team members. Here are examples:

Display empathyEngage in small talkListen (and not just when you want to)Understand their valuesDon’t be afraid to lighten up

➔   Culture of accountability

◆    Establish a culture of accountability to eliminate  challenging situations. Clear expectations and accountability provide a sense of security and certainty that promotes team satisfaction. Equity also plays a role in accountability. Work settings where managers have “favorites” or promote based on preference rather than qualifications create toxic cultures and drastically undermine empowerment.

➔   Pursue purpose

◆    Find opportunities to rally your team around a shared vision or purpose to ensure they feel like the work they do matters. Employers should “define the purpose of the organization and make sure everyone is clear why and how their work matters” (Brigid Schulte). This sense of collaboration and collective purpose also promotes a commitment to organizational goals. Align your team’s purpose with the strategic vision of the company. When this is done effectively, productivity and morale skyrocket.

You can enable your employees to learn, grow, and develop personally, and professionally when you prioritize empowerment.

For additional tools and strategies on how to partner with your employees to co-create an engaged and passionate workforce click here to download the Employee Engagement guide.

If you are ready to enhance employee engagement and to build a more connected, deeply invested workforce, start now! Click here to schedule a time to talk.

Can we help your team with our Employee Engagement services? Learn more at https://www.workingsimply.com/employee-engagement/

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How Goal Setting Improves Job Performance

Connection Between Motivation and Goals

What motivates you to get work done? Perhaps you’d say it’s rewards, compensation, or simply a good personal work ethic. These are all factors that can play into your productivity and job performance! But another major motivator for many people that I want to talk about today is goal-setting.

Goal-Setting Theory of Motivation

In the 1960s, researcher Edwin Locke proposed the goal-setting theory of motivation. A simple definition of this theory states that goals indicate and give direction to employees about what needs to be done and how much effort to put into it. This clear direction, in turn,  helps employees be more productive and motivated overall. However, not every goal is created equal. Especially when an employer sets goals for employees, they need to set goals that are:

Specific and clear; ambiguous goals create confusion and frustrationRealistic and challenging; achieving a challenging goal releases those feel-good chemicals in our brains and makes us more likely to perform well on the next goal, but if a goal is too challenging that we can’t meet it, then we will get discouraged and perform worse next timeFeedback should be given during and after an employee meets a goal; this leads to greater feelings of satisfaction on the job and can help identify your employees’ strengthsHow to Set Performance Goals

When we set goals, what we are essentially doing is evaluating where we are now and where we want to be. The process of goal-setting should involve creating a strategy to get there, and there are all kinds of goals we can set to help us get to where we want to be. At work, a common type of goal is a performance goal. Performance goals are short-term objectives set for achieving specific results in your current position. Performance goals might be set to make improvements, take action, or increase efficiency, productivity, or effectiveness. Sometimes, an employer sets performance goals for employees, and sometimes employees create their own performance goals to achieve management’s desired results, and sometimes employees and employers work together to set goals.

Here’s a tip! If you are an employee at a company and you set your own performance goals (and then met them!) be sure to let your manager or team leader know–that shows great initiative and dedication and may lead to a promotion or raise or greater leadership opportunities in the future.

How to Set SMART Goals

So, we know that goal setting is important for work performance, but how do we do it in an effective way? It’s great to name a goal, but I know that so many of us have set personal goals to “exercise more” or “lose weight” or “have less screen time” or any number of worthy goals….and then we just never seem to be able to follow through on them. That’s why we need a good strategy when we set goals!  One way we can set realistic, achievable goals is by using the SMART goal-setting technique.

SpecificMeasurableAttainableRelevantTime-Bound

You can use this method for both  personal and workplace goals. Let’s walk through an example of what a SMART goal might be. An example of a SMART-goal statement might look like this: Our goal is to [quantifiable objective] by [timeframe or deadline]. [Key players or teams] will accomplish this goal by [what steps you’ll take to achieve the goal]. Accomplishing this goal will [result or benefit].

First, to make a goal specific you need to answer the questions:

What needs to be accomplished?Who is responsible for this?What steps need to be taken to achieve this?

Making a goal measurable answers the questions:

How much?How many?For how long?How will we know the goal is accomplished?

An attainable goal answers the questions:

Is this goal something we can actually achieve with our given talents, resources, time, and knowledge?

A relevant goal answers the questions:

Why are we setting this goal?Why is this goal important?How does this goal fit into the overall mission and vision of our organization or department?

A time-bound goal answers the questions:

When will we start working on this goal?When will we stop working on this goal?When is it necessary to achieve the results of this goal?

Goal setting is so important for our work performance. Even if the responsibilities at your job feel impossible to accomplish, by breaking them down into smaller, achievable goals, you can create a plan for accomplishing whatever needs to be done!

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed at work, or you aren’t sure how to boost your team’s productivity, check out the resources on my website. I offer coaching for teams looking to boost their productivity and I’d love to hear from you!

What goals do you have in your personal life or at work right now? Share them with us down below.

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How to Avoid Burnout At Work: Signs and Symptoms of Burnout

By now, we’ve all become familiar with the Great Resignation. Employees are leaving their jobs and switching careers at an unprecedented rate. But did you know that 40% of these employees have reported burnout as their number one reason for quitting?

Burnout is a very real condition affecting millions of people around the country and around the world. But what is it, exactly?

Occupational burnout is defined as a response to prolonged exposure to emotional, physical, and interpersonal stressors. Burnout shows up as chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. It is more than just feeling “stressed out” and it has a very real impact on your physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

According to the World Health Organization’s definition of occupational burnout mentioned above, there are 3 major dimensions of burnout.

Feelings of Exhaustion or Energy Depletion: You may be experiencing this dimension of burnout if you have been struggling with more feelings of depression or anxiety than usual, having difficulty sleeping (insomnia) or sleeping too much, experiencing fatigue, or have been withdrawing from relationships and passions that usually bring you energy.Increased Mental Distance From Your Job: This dimension of burnout may look like increased feelings of dissociation, numbness, dreaming about leaving or feeling trapped in your job,  dreading going to work, or being increasingly frustrated and cynical towards your job and team members.Reduced Professional Efficacy: If you are feeling burnt out, your performance at work may take a hit because you no longer feel like your work matters or is worth doing. You may start underperforming or missing deadlines, lack the energy to complete tasks, feel unappreciated, or feel that things will never get better.

While it’s important to know the symptoms and be able to recognize them, it is just as important to know the causes of burnout, how to prevent it, and how to recover from it. Job burnout doesn’t happen all at once; it is a gradual, chronic process.

If you think you might be burnt out, know that you are not alone, nor are you a failure or a bad employee. In fact, according to Limeade’s research, the employees most likely to burn out are the employees most connected, most engaged, and most invested in their work.

The most common causes of burnout are:Overload — workload and timePressureRole conflict and ambiguityLack of: support from managers, feedback, fairness and equity, participation in decision makingValues disconnectA “broken” psychological contract between an employer and employee

Everyone wants to feel appreciated, valued, and cared for at work. You want to know your work matters and have the ability to maintain and pursue personal well-being, even at work. One of the most important ways to ensure employees don’t get burnt out is by cultivating a healthy manager-employee relationship.

For Managers: Preventing Burn Out

Managers, you are such an important member of your team and you have such an important role to play in creating a work culture that proactively works against employee burnout (and your own sense of burnout too!). You will not always be able to completely prevent burnout, but if you focus on improving four key areas you can greatly mitigate the risk.

Allow for recovery time if an employee expresses feelings of stress or burnout: Recovery time may include things such as ensuring employees are not working more than contracted hours, taking vacation time, granting sick leave or PTO, or allowing employees to leave early on days where they have worked late earlier in the week.Encourage well-being through healthy  boundaries: Remind your employees that they should have a healthy personal life, and that work is not the only part of their life they should be focusing on. Set guidelines for communication among team members outside of work hours, re-evaluate the structure and necessity of regular meetings and encourage employees to operate within their own job roles and responsibilities.Lead in stress management and reduction: It’s important for employees to be able to express frustration, stress, and support their own mental health. As a leader, you could implement regular check-ins with your team members, and prioritize making employees feel valued by utilizing their gifts, giving encouragement, and allowing employees to have more input in their work and processes.Cultivate community: Community is one of the most important ways to reduce the risk of burnout. You can encourage employees to regularly connect with friends and family outside of work, and within the workplace, you can foster community by reminding employees about company values and making space to really get to know each other or have fun together.For Employees: Recovering from Burn Out

If you are already at the point of burnout, know that there is hope for recovery. Sometimes it may take drastic action or professional help, but the strategies below can also help you to begin to recover and feel ready to continue on with your work. To do this, you will have to Refresh Your Resources. When you’re in burnout, it feels like you have nothing to give and that all of your mental, emotional, physical, and psychological resources have been depleted. When you recover from burnout, you need to rebuild those resources. The ideas below can help you start to do that!

Take a long look at your current responsibilities at work and at home. Are there tasks you can drop or say “no” to? In this time of recovery, don’t try to take on extra work or projects that are not essential to your job.REST. Your body needs rest. Establish new patterns that allow you to sleep well and sleep enough, take a vacation, and prioritize your physical well-being.Focus on building good relationships with your community outside of work. Sometimes when we reach burnout, we may realize we have neglected our family or friend relationships because we were using all of our resources to do a good job at work. Take time to rekindle relationships that bring you life and can support you.Finally, you need to reestablish meaning and purpose in life. Maybe it’s a career or role change. Maybe it’s picking up a hobby or volunteer opportunity that gets you excited. Maybe it means evaluating your values and adjusting your life to be more in line with them. Whatever it is, establishing a new purpose in life will go a long way in helping you recover from burnout.

Burnout is neither a sign of personal failure nor an anomaly. Burnout can happen to anyone, and if you are struggling with this, you are not alone. As both employees and managers, we can work together to create a new future of work that will allow for greater well-being for all workers.

If you’re ready to make changes for you or your team, but aren’t sure where to start, we can help! We have tools such as assessments, coaching, aids, and resources to help you evaluate your work culture and learn how to practically implement strategies to increase your employee engagement and satisfaction. Our “Own it. Love it. Make it Work” guide is perfect for employers who want their employees to understand their own skills, dreams, and value. It’s a great tool for reestablishing purpose and meaning at work.

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Spring Cleaning – Leadership Tips to Reset Your Team

Springtime is almost here! As nature takes its cue and brings about new growth out of the cold of winter, you can take the opportunity to perform some regular maintenance to help your team blossom this year.

You may be familiar with the idea of spring cleaning. It’s when you pull everything out of the closets, move the furniture around, pull up the rugs, and clear out the dust and cobwebs from the places that remain hidden for most of the rest of the year. It’s also a chance to take stock, reorganize, and even get rid of things that are no longer useful to you. It’s a tough, yet satisfying process.

Spring is also a great time to perform a similar process with your leadership. Take time to be intentional about your approach to leadership, picking things apart and holding them to the light, critically evaluating your systems, processes, and workflows can reap incredible dividends for you and your team.

Here are a few keys to help you make the most of this process in a way that empowers your team.

1: Take Stock

This is the first and perhaps most important step. You can’t make good decisions without knowing what you’re working with. You may be thinking that as a manager or team leader you would already be aware of these details. But you might be surprised at how much you weren’t aware of before taking on this exercise.

2: Involve Your Key Players and Stakeholders

As you take stock, include observations from members of your team. If possible, seek outside perspectives as they can be extremely valuable. If you manage a large team, identify the stakeholders, project leads, and other key players and bring them into the conversation.

3: Identify Areas of Success

It’s not just about focusing on what needs to be fixed, it’s important to identify, recognize, and celebrate successes. When your team can see that you notice and acknowledge even the smallest wins, it will help them see any critical comments you may have as constructive rather than discouraging.

4: Identify Growth Areas

Take a hard look at what you’d like to improve. Don’t just look at outcomes, consider your team’s processes, workflow, communication, relationships, and structure. What core assumptions are you making about these fundamental dynamics? If there is friction or dysfunction, what is the root cause? Where can you eliminate tiny inefficiencies?

Don’t leave yourself out of the equation. Think about how you can grow as a leader and take steps to refine your leadership approach.

5: Make a Plan, Together

Now that you’ve taken the time to observe and reflect, you can begin to formulate a plan. How you tackle your growth areas will be unique to your situation, but again, it’s important to include others in this part of the process. As you arrive at strategies, focus on collaborative solutions that don’t place the burden of change on just a few people. Aim for everyone on your team to be an equal participant in addressing pain points and growth challenges.

6: Live It Out

Once you have your plan, and once you’ve made sure to effectively communicate your plan, it’s time to implement it. Lead by example and be sure to ask for feedback. Keep an open mind about course corrections when an approach isn’t working as expected and stay flexible until your team adapts to the changes.

It’s important to remember that the goal here is not to reinvent the wheel. If your company has a healthy culture, most of your structures, processes, policies and workflows will remain. While this exercise may lead you and your team to have larger conversations revolving around significant changes in the form of major restructuring or innovations, that shouldn’t necessarily be your expectation. Most likely, if you embrace this as an annual practice, the changes you and your team will make will be in the form of subtle optimizations.

Your people are your most valuable resource. If you’re ready to take the next step in your team development, check out our Team Building Training. You’ll learn the keys to leading a high-performance, agile, and engaged team that can adapt to changing circumstances.

Partner with your employees to co-create a workplace that serves BOTH your needs. Download our guide that shows you how to engage your employees to create a culture that empowers your team members to thrive and enables your company to improve profitability, performance, and customer satisfaction. When your employees thrive, your business thrives.

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Time Management in a Hybrid Workplace

Time Management Strategies

As companies make a more permanent transition to a hybrid workplace, the importance of time management is necessarily increasing as well.

A recent study discovered that nearly 70% of companies expect the “new normal” to be a hybrid workforce, with some employees working from home and others working from the office on any given day of the week. A percentage of this magnitude reveals the need for companies to create a more intentional hybrid strategy so they can operate most effectively within these hybrid conditions.

According to a Korn Ferry Advance Career Coach, employees themselves are still trying to discern what type of environment they want to work in, and where they can be most successful. Now is the time to create new systems and work habits, especially related to time management at home and in the office.

To be effective and efficient in a hybrid workplace, companies will need to look outside of things like time management apps and reimagine and restructure time management for their individual teams. Expecting effective time management to be a one-size-fits-all solution does not take into consideration the individuals working within the systems. As you consider how to improve your team’s time management skills, think R.E.M.O.T.E.

THINK R.E.M.O.T.E.

Right Place, Right Time

The cornerstone of hybrid productivity is knowing the optimum environment for each task. In order to avoid being at the wrong place when you need to accomplish a required task, you’ll need to plan ahead. Look at your workload and determine which tasks will require your presence in the office, and which ones are best suited for working remotely.

Expectations

It’s always important to clearly communicate expectations with your team, and hybrid work environments present a unique opportunity for you to create a more informed set of expectations. By becoming better acquainted with the realities of the people on your team, you and your employees can work together to create a more tailored set of expectations. An understanding of the contexts of your people and what you can realistically expect from them will minimize the uncertainty associated with remote and work-from-home jobs while increasing loyalty, accountability, and productivity.

Make an Intentional Environment

Effective time management is dependent on an efficient work environment. When creating a work-from-home space, try to make it similar to your workplace office. For example, if your office has two screens, try to create a similar setup in your home office. At home, this will aid in the transition from home life to work life, and the less you have to change about your general work habits, the more streamlined your work will be, regardless of location.

Own Your Personal Productivity Style:

Everyone has a distinctive cognitive style, so is it any wonder that we all have a unique set of work strategies too? Personalizing your strategies to suit your individual strengths, preferences, needs, and talents, and encouraging your team to do the same, will greatly enhance your performance in a hybrid workplace. The first step is to know if you are a Prioritizer, Planner, Arranger, or Visualizer.

Task Batching

Along with planning, batching your tasks can help you work efficiently. Are there conversations you need to have? Determine in advance who you need to talk to and plan to have all those conversations while you’re in the office. Similarly, allocate all your individualized tasks to a day when you are engaged in remote work. Knowing in advance what you have to do and grouping similar tasks together improves productivity.

End Goal In Mind

Prioritize your goals for the week. When you know where your priorities lie, you can fit everything else around them. If your goal is to have an important conversation while you’re in the office, consider what you need to accomplish at home to support your overall goal. Because these goals change each week, the way you navigate your tasks at home and in the office will change too. Recognizing and planning for this flexibility will make all the difference in the long run.

For additional time management tips and strategies for hybrid environments, click here to download the Work Smarter, Not Harder Tips to Thrive in 2022.

If you are ready to optimize your hybrid productivity, prevent burnout, reduce stress, and magnify your team’s performance and results, start now! Click here to schedule time to talk.

Could your team benefit from our services and training? Learn more at https://www.workingsimply.com/productivity-training/

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Prevent Burnout and E.M.P.O.W.E.R. Your Choices

The days blur together, your eye drops no longer help with Zoom fatigue, and the thought of opening the pigsty that is masquerading as your inbox makes you want to scream.

Overwhelmed, overstretched, and just entirely over it, in the last year, seven in 10 workers have experienced burnout.

The World Health Organization recognized burnout as an official occupational syndrome back in 2019. It’s defined as the result of chronic workplace stress characterized by three things:

1)     Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion

2)     Increased mental distance from, or cynicism about, your job

3)     Reduced professional efficacy (aka you’re unproductive)

Typically, burnout is an organizational issue, meaning we, as employees, are not responsible for solving it. Still, it is not entirely out of our control. We can choose to set boundaries that protect our mental, physical, and emotional health. The challenge is that our efforts to do so are often hijacked by guilt.

Will our boss be upset if we don’t respond to their 9pm Slack? Will we look lazy and selfish if we don’t put in a 60-hour week? Will our team members think we’re unmotivated if we take a full hour for lunch?

Questions like these make us feel like we should always be giving more, doing the most, and working harder. We are driven by the guilt we might feel if we put our personal needs first or the fear of disappointing others.

But at what cost?

When we are given a choice, and we still select our jobs over what our bodies and minds need — real breaks, time with loved ones, and empty space to rest and think — we end up letting the most important person down: our self.

That’s why it’s important to learn how to say no to the voices in your head and start making choices that give you the energy to do your best work. Before you respond to the next request for your time or talents use this anagram to E.M.P.O.W.E.R. your decisions by taking the steps outlined below.

Evaluate: When your face turns red and it feels as if your head is going to explode from one more request for your time and talents, take a breath and evaluate the facts. Remember a fact is an actual occurrence. It is something that can be proven through observation or measurement. What are the facts of the request? How much time is required? How much preparation is necessary? Get the data.

For example, let’s say your boss sends you a slack at 9pm on Tuesday and asks you to join her for a virtual new hire recruiting event the following Monday night. Before responding, consider the facts of her request. The event starts at 6:00 pm and ends at 7:30 pm. You do not need to prepare for the event and its via Zoom, so your total time investment would be 90 minutes.

My story: What is the story you are telling yourself about this request? A story is a judgement or assumption you use to make sense of why you are being asked to contribute to yet another project or event. When we are burned out, we often assign motives to the people asking for more of our time to explain the logic behind their actions. However, stories are usually inaccurate because they are driven by our subjective emotions. To make the best decision, you need to separate feelings from facts.

Sticking with our original example, you might tell yourself the story, “Of course my boss sent this Slack now! She doesn’t respect work-life boundaries because she expects everyone to be available and work 24/7, like she does.” To separate the facts from your feelings, re-read the message your boss sent. Did she ask you to respond immediately? Or are you making assumptions driven by your own anxieties? It’s important to debunk any false narrative you may be telling yourself so that you can respond based on the facts.

Priorities: Once you’re clear on what’s fact and what’s fiction, you’re ready to consider whether it’s worthwhile to take on a new request. At this point, that guilt-driven voice in your head may jump in to tell you that, yes, you should absolutely do it. Don’t listen. Instead, stop and evaluate the priority of the task you are being asked to do. How does this ask for your time align with your responsibilities, the organization’s strategic goals, and/or your personal needs?

In the case of the 9pm Slack request, at this point, you want to determine if the new hire recruiting event aligns with one of the organization’s strategic goals, as well as your professional goals. For example, if your company is trying to recruit and hire twenty new analysts this year and one of your professional priorities is to build relationships with leaders throughout the company, you may want to attend. However, if you are more focused on building your skills as an individual contributor and believe that these extra hours will be more draining than energizing, you should probably turn your boss down.

Opportunities: Next, take it a step further, and think about the opportunities that you may gain from taking on, or turning down, the request. Ask: “What doors will this request open for me if I participate? Will it enable me to advance in my career, develop a new skill, or build new relationships? Or is it illuminating something that requires additional attention in my personal life?”

For instance, if you were to attend the new hire recruiting event, you could strengthen your networking skills and meet leaders from all divisions in the organization. But if you were to decline, you might have a relaxing night with your friends and do an even better job on a project that is aligned with the skills and capabilities you want to develop. Weigh the cost-benefit of each decision and choose the one that aligns with the goals that are most important to you.

Who: Who made the ask? What is your relationship to this person? What’s at stake in the relationship if you say yes or if you say no? Answering these questions will help you figure out how to best frame your response should it be “no.”

If your manager is making a request, like in the recruiting event example, and you decide to turn it down, you may need to discuss your decision with her. This will allow you to explain yourself and set healthy boundaries without appearing dismissive of her ask.

You might say, “I appreciate the invitation to attend the new hire event. I have three projects due later this week and was going to use this time to prepare. I’d like to explore how I can support you and the company without attending the event. Would you be open to that?”

On the other hand, if a request is coming from a peer or work friend, the stakes may be lower, and you can respectfully explain why you are declining without a further conversation.

Expectations: Expectations are the guiding principles and ideologies we use to inform our decision making, and they often lie just below the surface of our awareness. Ask yourself, “Whose standards are influencing my decision to say yes or no? What does the person making the request expect of me, and have they clearly set those expectations?” The goal is to clarify and decouple your expectations from the expectations of the people in your life.

For example, if you know your manager expects her team members to be visible at corporate events, this might change how you respond to her request. However, if you realize that you are the one setting unrealistic expectations for yourself, you may feel more comfortable and confident in your decision to decline.

Real: We all have the same 168 hours in a week. Every time you say yes to something you are saying no to something else. Get real about the implications of your decision. What is the best and worst thing that could happen if you said yes or no? This is an essential final step to ensure that you thoughtfully consider both the positive and negative implications on your time and energy of your decision.

If you say yes to attending the new hire event, the best thing that may happen is you assist your career advancement. If you say no, the worst thing that might happen is your manager could question your allegiance to her — but remember, there are also ways to clarify your decision and potentially avoid this outcome. In the end, the ball is in your court to set boundaries that support your mental, physical, and social-emotional wellbeing.

Guilt and the “shoulds” lead us to overcommit – and when you overcommit, the quality of our work and life suffers.  Avoid bankrupting your life. Stop the “shoulds” from undermining your decisions and E.M.P.O.W.E.R. your choices, starting today.

For additional tools and strategies to prevent burnout and empower your choices, click here to download the Work Smarter, Not Harder Tips to Thrive in 2022.

If you are ready to enhance employee wellbeing, prevent burnout, reduce stress, and magnify your team’s performance and results, and enable your team to work smarter with our productivity training, start now! Click here to schedule time to talk.

Could your team benefit from our services and training? Learn more at https://www.workingsimply.com/productivity-training/.

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Productivity in a Hybrid Workplace

Working Productively from Home and Office

In recent years, we’ve seen an enormous increase in the number of people working from home or in hybrid work environments. While at first this was seen as a temporary trend catalyzed by the pandemic, it’s become increasingly clear that remote and hybrid workplaces are here to stay – demand for jobs with the option of working remotely is at an all-time high.

What’s also becoming clear is that this shift toward more flexible working environments is driving productivity increases for companies that embrace it. Here’s why.

1: Time Efficiency and Fewer Distractions

One rather obvious factor is that workers are simply spending less time traveling to and from the office and more time focused on getting their work done. While this does account for some of the difference, it’s not the full picture.

Employees are also able to transition between different kinds of tasks more effectively with fewer distractions. Remote employees report that they experience fewer interruptions throughout the day when working from home compared to the office for certain tasks.

2: Hybrid Workplaces Allow for More Freedom

Not every employee has access to a distraction-free workspace in their homes. Children, pets, or basic lack of space can be counter-productive for certain kinds of work. A hybrid workplace gives you and your employees the flexibility to schedule their workday around what’s best for them.

If an employee has a quiet room at home to work in, they may choose to work on tasks that require focus and concentration there. If they are working on something that needs collaboration from other co-workers, they may choose to come into the office. The freedom to structure their time based on their particular needs means higher quality of work output in less time.

3: Mental Health Benefits

The freedom to choose the most effective place to get work done is enormously beneficial for an employee’s mental health. How long have we been sitting in meetings only to ask “Couldn’t this have just been an email?” The shift to tele-conferencing has meant fewer of these types of interactions for many people.

The hybrid workspace has also allowed night owls the freedom to do their work not just where they want, but when they want. People who work best in the late afternoon or evening can now, in many cases, make that choice without disrupting the rest of their team.

 

 

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