Energy – Page 5 – mardihumphreys.com

Off-balance

COVID-19 and its variants have allowed us to blur our boundaries between work and not work for the last 21 months. For whole industries The Great Resignation is fueled by the results. As 2022 approaches, society contemplates the future of work and how to make it sustainable for both employers and workforce. In the meantime, what if you tried integrating your job with your life instead of striving for work-life balance?

Isn’t Work a Part of Your Life?

Why are the two entities compartmentalized and put on a scale? When you assimilate what you do for a living into the rest of your life, it’s easier to bring your whole self to both. For example, if you work for a small business, maybe you have to handle accounting as well as on-boarding new hires. When you apply those pivoting skills to work and not-work responsibilities, you create flexible solutions for both. You may have to pioneer these types of innovations at your company. People are creatures of habit. How likely is it that your manager will offer to meet with you to brainstorm ways you can do your job outside of the office? Since you know how best to accomplish your projects, you have to demonstrate how your plan works best. For example, make sure your manager knows you are creating win-win situations for all the parties involved. Wasn’t the client impressed with your dedication to their account when you joined the videoconference from your car during your child’s basketball practice? You also have to monitor your boundaries. Remember that a task you do for your employer is work whether you are doing it in the office at 9:00AM or at your kitchen counter at 9:00PM. Communication (with management, teammates, clients), prioritizing (urgent vs. important), and organization (empowering others to help both at home and work) are key elements for successful work-life integration.

Declare Your Boundaries

To gain some control, try block scheduling. It may help you with the logistics of integration. These blocks can be however long you want. Maybe start with thirty minute blocks and increase up to an hour if you can manage it before taking a break and moving on to the next one. Obvious blocks can be your current work projects broken down into tasks and family medical appointments, but remember to schedule not-so-obvious blocks for exercise, self-care, and leisure. This also helps you see what activities you value and how much time you really need for them.

Change is Hard

Our relationship to work is changing. Employees have more leverage than ever right now. Workforce is waiting to see how governments will respond to the call for reformation of childcare, living wages, and paid time off policies. Employees are shaking up the business community with their insistence on flexibility like shorter work days/weeks, and hybrid work models. While we navigate this transition, do what you need to do to take care of yourself, especially your mental health. You can both do your best for your employer and yourself.

How did you integrate what you do for a living into your life in 2021? Please share in the comments.

Filling in the Gaps

I love to see people thriving in second act careers. There are plenty of reasons for someone to work beyond the age that the Social Security Administration dictates: The novelty of retirement has worn off. Your children have grown and flown. You served twenty years in the military. You can’t afford to retire. Traditionally, the older you got the less opportunity knocked. Enter COVID-19 ushering in the Great Resignation. Companies are now forced to get creative in hiring. If you are an elder job hunter (a forty-year-old employee is considered old in America, btw) now is the time to act. One way to differentiate yourself from other candidates is to offer your services as a mentern.

What’s a Mentern?

A mentern is an employee who simultaneously teaches and learns, combining the characteristics of a mentor and an intern. Usually over 50 years old with about 25 years of experience in the workforce, a mentern wants to teach skills, like emotional intelligence, while learning skills, like digital intelligence. For more information, the book Wisdom @ Work by Chip Conley is the story of the birth of a mentern, and the movie The Intern is an example of the concept in action.

Why Would Companies Want Them?

Technology disrupts every industry. It is a huge fault in logic to assume that digital natives (Millenials and Gen Z) have an indisputable advantage over their elders (Boomers and Gen X) when it comes to IT skills. Technology changes at a speed that can give you whiplash. New software comes online every day. Every employee has to learn, use, unlearn, rinse, and repeat with each upgrade. Menterns have years of experience refining and iterating processes based on experimentation and feedback. This knowledge can be transferred to a digital native open to learning from other people’s wisdom. When digital natives are promoted to managers, they are habitually promoted for their technical skills and not their people skills. They are left to fend for themselves to figure out how to coach a team. A mentern has years of practice communicating, problem-solving, collaborating, and leading. Pairing a mentern with a digital native can fill in the gaps of both. This is how sustainable companies are built.

How Do You Become One?

If you are a good leader, you already have an inclination to both learn and serve. If you are also humble and curious, then you have the makings of a successful mentern. Your goal is to share your wisdom, experience, and network with a coworker two generations younger than you while also listening and learning how to use the tools you need to successfully navigate emerging business processes. It’s work to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory skills, but the ability to do so is the secret to a successful menternship. As with most skills it becomes easier with practice.

Elders and digital natives both want the same things: opportunity, income, and flexibility. If each generation starts on their side of the gap and then starts building a bridge to cross it, imagine the resulting exponential growth in productivity. Interested in becoming a mentern? Here’s a website you should check out.

How would your company benefit from menterns? Please share your experience with the concept in the comments.

Your Network Is Your Net Worth

You have a job you love and you wouldn’t even dream of leaving it. But what if it leaves you? COVID-19 protocols spotlighted not only how fragile businesses are, but also the importance of maintaining a professional network even when you aren’t actively seeking employment. Change comes whether you’re expecting it or not. Best practice is to build your network when you don’t need it.

Use LinkedIn Robustly

95% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates. To attract people you want to connect with, audit your profile. Search for your job title, identify profiles you like, then use them as inspiration to update yours. Pay attention to their headlines and use the same keywords they do so that colleagues can find you. Do you need to upload a new headshot? When you show up to a meeting looking 10 years older than your profile picture, that does not help you make a good impression. Remember that LinkedIn is a conversation. Don’t just spruce up your profile and wait. Connect with people at companies you want to partner with, follow their companies’ pages, and promote them on your timeline.

Personally Connect

The best way to get a job at a company you want to work for is to have a personal connection there. Recruiting employees is expensive for companies. When hiring, managers both approach people they know and get recommendations from their peers because it mitigates their risk of a bad hire. As we continue to recover from the pandemic, now is a great time to reach out to your weak ties (acquaintances, people you worked with briefly or a long time ago and lost touch with, met through a friend, etc). Ask them how they are doing and offer to catch up. You may be surprised at how many people you know that fall into this category. It’s simple and doesn’t have to take a lot of your T.E.A.M. Make time to connect over in-person or virtual coffee. Add value to your warm connections when you can. A positive comment on a decision maker’s Facebook page, a like on their company’s Instagram post, sharing their LinkedIn article; these are easy ways you can pay it forward and stay top of mind.

Give and Take

New possibilities can take you by surprise. They come along when you’re doing your job well and your network notices. Be open to unexpected opportunities and explore them. A broad and diverse network not only propels your own career growth, but it also allows you to intelligently recommend other people. You feel good when you are able to supply people with opportunities. It’s likely at least one of your associates is looking for employment. You can tap your network to help them. Connecting good people to good jobs benefits everyone involved in the interaction. The employer gets a good hire, the seeker gets a good job, and you get to be the hero who introduced them.

Is networking scary for you, not just at Halloween, but all the time? How do you nurture your professional network? Please share in the comments.

Sleep On It

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” is the hustler’s motto. There are at least a couple of movies and a couple of songs with that statement as the title. It implies that strong people don’t need sleep. In reality, getting adequate sleep not only makes us stronger, but also smarter, and not getting enough sleep can eventually kill you.

How Much is Enough?

A recent study by the CDC found that 41 million Americans in the workforce are sleep deprived. How many hours an adult needs varies by person; it can be anywhere between six and ten. When you don’t get enough, you accumulate a sleep debt that sooner or later your body will force you to pay. If you feel moody, are making more mistakes than usual, or falling asleep in meetings, then you aren’t getting enough. That lack of sleep can lead to poor decision-making, depression, and/or burnout. If you deny your brain the time it needs to recharge, then it will punish you with poor functioning, like trouble focusing on tasks, misunderstanding communication with your team, and difficulty controlling stress. These indicators can manifest in as few as three consecutive nights of sleeping six hours or less.

Why is it Important?

You need to be physically healthy to do your best work, and getting enough sleep is key to your physical health. Your body repairs its tissues, manufactures hormones to fight infections and viruses, and lowers your blood pressure while you sleep. Also during sleep, your brain constructs and reinforces neural pathways that help you remember things you’ve learned, which strengthens your ability to solve complex challenges at work.

Best Practices

Get on a schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same times every day. Then, before bedtime:

Three hours: Finish eating, and drinking caffeine and/or alcohol
90 minutes: Finish vigorous exercise
60 minutes: Turn off the TV, cell phone, and laptop. Read a real book, listen to soothing music, or meditate instead
At bedtime: Eliminate light and noise and adjust the room temperature; cooler is more conducive to sleeping

Damage Control

After a sleepless night:

Try to begin your day with exercise, outside if possible. You could go for a run or ride your bike, but a brisk walk through nature while breathing in fresh morning air and listening to your favorite songs followed by gentle stretching will also put you in a good mindset to face the day.
Your body may try to rest at an inopportune time later in the day. If that happens, it’s more productive to take a 15-30 minute break to let your brain rest than to keep plowing through your to-do list.
Caffeine may get you through the morning, but the crash could have you zoning out during your afternoon Zooms. If you can’t grab a 15 minute nap, then take 10 minutes to either meditate or eat a healthy snack and chase it with a glass of water while watching an uplifting video; maybe this one. If you don’t have 10 minutes, then take one or two minutes to either stretch or take a few deep breaths.

Many of us have trouble sleeping since the advent of COVID-19. What are some things you do to get a good night’s sleep? Please share in the comments.

No Labor Today

Our wedding anniversary typically falls around Labor Day. My husband and I usually schedule time off work around the holiday weekend to celebrate by traveling a bit. This year marks our 30th wedding anniversary, so we decided to do something special. We visited Grand Teton National Park. We not only needed a grand gesture to celebrate our milestone, but also to get as far away from our day-to-day as possible. Pre-COVID-19, I wrote about how it benefits your job when you take a break from it. Mid-COVID-19, a break feels mandatory. With the blurred boundaries between work, home, school, etc., how can you process what you just lived through (and continue to live through) and use those learnings to iterate the next version of your life post-COVID-19? You don’t have to go all the way to Wyoming, but you should unplug, reset, and filter.

Unplug

We chose to get away to a place with little to no cell service, mostly because I can’t be trusted to enforce my OOO boundary. But maybe your children are in the throes of the beginning of both the school year and their fall extracurriculars so you need to stick close to home. Get creative about taking time to recharge. For example, take half-days off for a week. While the rest of your household is doing their things, turn off your phone, laptop, Xbox, etc., and change your scenery. If your job is sedentary, go to a Metropark and bike, walk, or kayak. If your job is physical, go to the library and read, journal, or listen to music. Whichever you choose, commit to only answering your mobile if there is a life (not work) emergency.

Reset

Get out of your comfort zone. Choose one activity you’ve never done before and do it every day for the week. If you work by yourself, follow CDC guidelines and do a project with others. If you work with others, find a solitary pursuit. You could:

Volunteer at your local food bank, church, or YWCA
Study coding with Python
Learn to cook your favorite restaurant meal with YouTube videos
Listen to different music (e.g., rap if you’re a country fan)
Read a different genre (e.g., non-fiction if you normally read sci-fi)

By the end of the week, you’ll know whether or not your choice is an activity you enjoy. If it helps you reset your mindset, then make time in your schedule to keep doing it.

Filter

At the end of each day, journal about your new activity. You could write, doodle, voice memo, whatever is your choice for making notes. Think about:

What did you see, hear, touch, taste, and/or smell?
How did it make you feel?
What did you learn?
What does it make you want to change?
What does it make you want to keep doing?
How will you use these new insights to influence your work?
Are there priorities you have to reset? People to whom you have to communicate boundaries? Comfort zones you have to get out of?

Prioritizing your physical, mental, and emotional health gives you the energy you need to bring your best effort to work, life, and people in your circle of influence.

What are you going to do to recharge? Please share in the comments.

Making Waves

The pandemic made us take a hard look at our priorities. What is now most important to you? In terms of your job, if you were able to pivot (e.g., a restaurant moving from fine-dining in person to at home delivery) or to transition to WFH (e.g., software developing), you’re grateful to have found a way to continue making a living. But now that we’ve moved into COVID-19’s phase of vaccines and variants, do you want to keep this up?

What Do You Want?

It’s time to decide what aspects of the working-under-quarantine conditions you want to maintain. Has the way you had to work made you want a different job, maybe even a different career path? If so, you have loads of company. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 3.6 million Americans quit their jobs in May 2021. But before you start searching for a new situation, get clear on why you want to leave your current one. If you’re running away from this job instead of running to another one, your discontent is likely to follow you. Ask yourself:

Am I burned out?
Did the pandemic reveal a side of my company’s culture that I can’t support?
Were my manager’s expectations unreasonable?
Did I discover a remote position would be best for work-life integration?

During the work day, when you feel frustrated or stressed, write down what you’re working on or what’s happening. Is it a project, person, and/or PTO? The answers will help you define your non-starters when considering your next role.

Defining what you don’t want narrows your choices down to what you do want. Compensation (salary, PTO, insurance, retirement benefits), location, culture, and leadership development are all obvious details you need to consider. But also ask yourself:

What does your perfect job look like?
Where are you doing it?
When are you doing it?
Who are you doing it with?
Why are you doing it?
How are you doing it?

What values do the answers to these questions reveal (e.g., freedom, culture, growth)? Rank them in order of importance. For one work week, notice what you are doing when you lose track of time as well as what you are doing when time seems to drag. Write these down and analyze them. While looking for a new position, search for one that allows you to do more of the work you enjoy.

How Do You Get It?

Once you figure out what you want, make a list of companies whose mission, vision, and values match yours. LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Business Journals regularly identify great companies to work for. Target people in these companies you can reach out to for informational interviews. Notify your network that you are looking for a new role. Ask them not only for introductions to hiring managers you want to meet, but also ask how you can help connect them to the decision makers they want to meet. It’s tempting to apply for every job that looks like fun, thinking that eventually one will take, but that’s actually a time waster. It’s more effective to invest your time building relationships with your network. Insiders know a position is available before it gets publicly posted. A good rule of thumb is to network with five people for every one job application you submit.

Are you thinking about a new position? What are you looking for in a company? Please share in the comments.

Defense Mechanism

It’s my mom’s birthday and I’m reflecting on some of the work she’s done so far: Registered Nurse, Director of Nursing, Sunday School Teacher, and now a Christian Counselor. These jobs share a common thread: compassion. Being the well many draw from saps her energy and she has to intentionally replenish it. Can you relate? If you are a parent, teacher, or in any type of care-giving role, what you assume is burnout due to the constant stress, change, and loss thanks to COVID-19 may be Compassion Fatigue (CF).

What is it?

Also known as secondary traumatic stress, CF is one of your body’s defense mechanisms. You become emotionally and physically exhausted when you’re repeatedly exposed to stressful events. This can leave you numb to others’ suffering. The condition is usually associated with health-care workers, but anyone who is consistently exposed to someone else’s hardship (e.g., first responders, clergy, public librarians) can experience it. CF can also be caused by a heavy workload, excessive demands, and long hours. For example, the mom working from home while supervising her children’s online school is a candidate for CF. You’re particularly susceptible if you watch a lot of news, have too many priorities competing for your energy, or work in a dangerous environment. Remember, since COVID-19 began, environments once considered innocuous are now seen as dangerous (e.g., grocery stores). Any time you have less energy, add more fatigue, then have to expend more energy, you are at risk. For example, you’re worried about your at-risk parents’ health while you are working longer hours, then a friend tests positive for COVID-19.

What Does it Look Like?

Symptoms of CF can be both physical and emotional. Watch for these behaviors in both yourself and those you interact with:

Physical:

Distracted, forgetful, withdrawn
Aches, pains, nauseous, insomnia
Work absenteeism, unproductive, relationship conflicts
Self-medicating/Substance abuse (food, alcohol, drugs, gambling, more work)

Emotional:

Helpless, sad, hopeless, isolated
Anxious, worried, overwhelmed, depressed
Irritable, restless, tense, self-doubt
Dissatisfied with self and/or job

What Can You do About it?

Self-awareness: When you feel three or more of the above symptoms, define your triggers. When you just don’t care anymore, why is that? What is the root of the stress? What can you control? Will you accept help from others at home? Can you delegate tasks at work?

Boundaries: Prioritize your needs over what others need from you. Set, maintain, and enforce limits for: work-life integration, time spent scrolling through social media, care giving, realistic expectations.

Self-care: Do something everyday that boosts your energy: eat well, exercise, read, listen to music, drink water, journal, sleep, meditate, pray, talk to a friend, spend time in nature, laugh.

Compassion Fatigue should not be normalized, but talking about it openly should be because it’s not going away. Everyone has a new, longer-term complication and they want your support. For example, adjusting to emerging working conditions (e.g., remote, in-office, hybrid), concern for their young children going back to school, or comfort after the death of a loved one. Figuring out how to balance restoring, conserving, and giving away your energy is a key to effectively helping those you love and work with.

Are you experiencing Compassion Fatigue? What measures are you taking to recover from it? Please share in the comments.

Satisfied ≠ Engaged

When I hear the term employee engagement, in my head I see a scene like the photo above; engaged people satisfied with their work. I thought engagement was synonymous with satisfaction, but no. An engaged employee is probably also a satisfied one, but a satisfied employee is not necessarily engaged.

What’s the Difference?

Satisfied employees do their job, but don’t look for ways to contribute to the mission or vision of the company. They’re satisfied with short term incentives like a raise, and dissatisfied when the work gets stressful. Satisfaction is how happy employees are, which may include things like getting paid for doing as little work as possible. Satisfied employees avoid accountability, try to maintain the status quo, and resist change.

Engaged employees are enthusiastic about their positions, dedicated to the company, and work beyond their job descriptions. They believe in the company’s mission and actively promote it. They’re both mentally and emotionally dialed in to their work, teams, and organizations and expect a long-term relationship with all three. They embrace change; taking the initiative to seek out processes that can be improved and improving them.

Why is it Important?

Eighty-one percent of business leaders said engaged employees perform better than satisfied ones. They’re more productive, less absent, attract new talent, and stay with the company longer than satisfied employees. This results in growth and innovation in a thriving economy and the ability to bounce back after a recession. Engaged employees know their role in the company’s objectives. When an employee knows their purpose, they filter their work through it. The company can then harness and channel this energy to reach its goals.

How Do You Do It?

Communication: Employee engagement starts at the top. Senior leadership should authentically view employees as their most valuable asset and prove it by:

Casting a vision for the company, clearly and repetitively stating it, and lead accomplishing the company’s mission by example
Giving organization-wide updates on the health of the company including changes. Disclose what leadership is doing to improve the current conditions
Focusing constructive feedback on employees’ performance (not the person) and following up
Offering a process for anonymous company-wide feedback and implementing employees’ responses
Publicly recognizing engaged employees and giving them a system to publicly recognize each other

Cultivation: Business moves at the speed of trust. Senior leadership can build trust with employees by:

Defining what success looks like to the company and how to reach it with honesty and integrity
Providing clear expectations, holding people accountable, and focusing on delivering results
Making enriching employees’ lives a company value and acting like it (e.g., supporting employees’ career development with both money and time)
Developing cross-functional teams to complete projects. Pro-tip: When coworkers do projects together, they organically bond and create positive team memories because they achieve communal success

Contribution: Engaged employees want to feel like they’re instrumental to the success of something bigger than themselves. Senior leadership can tap into that desire by:

Matching roles to employees’ strengths
Giving employees tasks they find both interesting and challenging
Sharing ownership of the company’s mission
Reiterating how the work employees do contributes to the company’s success

A company with engaged employees experiences less turnover, higher sales, and more customer satisfaction. When an employee quits their job in America, it costs the employer about $5000 to replace them. It was hard enough to find good employees pre-COVID-19. It’s so challenging now that it’s simply a wise business decision to invest in keeping the ones you have.

Does your company have an employee engagement strategy? How does it work? Please share in the comments below.

Who Are You?

During the first team meeting after Jane got promoted from individual contributor to manager, she admitted she was nervous about the new role and asked her team for help. Her honesty and vulnerability were counter productive. Instead of regarding her as authentic, Jane’s direct reports perceived her as weak and unable to do her job. They didn’t trust her decisions, making it impossible to lead them. Her leadership style should have evolved as she gained experience, but instead Jane lost the courage necessary to promote her ideas.

What Bringing Your Whole Self to Work Means

Being both courageous and comfortable enough with coworkers to reveal both personal interests and flaws, thus creating space for them to reciprocate
Normalizing what employees experience outside the workplace affects them in the workplace
Includes both the impression we give of ourselves (consciously or unconsciously) and the impression we have of coworkers
Some elements we consider: authenticity (“This is me, warts and all”), humility (“I don’t know everything”), and vulnerability (“I need your help”)

Bringing your whole self to work is a relatively new concept. It presupposes that employees want to find purpose and higher meaning through their jobs. During the industrial revolution, no one looked for engagement with their work. They worked to buy food, clothing and shelter. They looked for purpose and higher meaning at church, in nature, or through art. Even today, some employees will never see their jobs as a source of fulfillment. If employees spend their energy trying to fit in to the culture, then they don’t have a lot left to be innovative, engaged, and productive.

Why You Don’t

Maybe, like Jane, you brought your whole self to work in the past and got judged or were less than your coworkers expected
The culture of your workplace is not conducive to sharing, keeping conversations at surface level
You fear revealing certain parts of your personality will make you appear unprofessional (e.g., you remain silent in a meeting after your feelings were hurt)
You are ashamed of something in your background
You feel pressured to always be right because your work culture does not support learning from failure

Why You Should

The more willing you are to be authentically vulnerable, the more positive an impact you have on both your work and your team. Bringing your whole self to work:

Breaks down silos
Accelerates trust
Creates a culture where honesty is valued
Removes the stress of hiding flaws
Allows genuine connection (critical to successful networking)
Enhances productivity and performance
Boosts creative problem solving
Helps managers resolve conflict in a constructive way

Someone who recognizes when to risk being vulnerable also recognizes a smart business risk when they see it.

How You Can

Start the authenticity ball rolling by:

Both recognizing and appreciating coworkers. There is a difference. Recognizing is feedback on performance. E.g.,“You gave an excellent presentation today.” Appreciating is expressing gratitude for valuable human qualities (e.g., humility, kindness, humor) regardless of whether the deliverable succeeded or failed. E.g., “It’s obvious you care deeply about serving our customers.” Recognizing and appreciating them helps coworkers feel seen. This leads to deepening trust and improving job performance
Having a growth mindset. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn, and we learn more when we do it together
Leading through both modeling and celebrating behaviors like: speaking up, taking smart risks, and owning mistakes. This enables your workforce to feel psychologically safe which leads to creativity which leads to productivity which leads to revenue

How comfortable are you bringing your whole self to work? Please share in the comments.

We Can Work it Out

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels

American employees have worked in office buildings since 1906, even though emerging technology enables us to work from anywhere, any time, and with anyone. Companies buy buildings, so we must use the tools that work in them. Besides, if you can’t see your employees, they aren’t working, right? Let’s face it: If they’re watching Netflix at home, they’re probably watching it at the office too. In 2016, 43% of employees spent at least a few hours working remotely. During COVID, the exponential increase revealed outdated assumptions about it. The top three are: productivity, communication, and culture.

Productivity

This study shows employees are actually 35-40% more productive working remotely than in an office. Managers can boost productivity by:

clearly communicating goals (deadlines, KPIs)
giving individual contributors necessary equipment (laptop, industry specific software)
encouraging calendar sharing and ad-hoc communication (IM, video chats)

Time and activity tracking apps are available to keep an eye on the workforce (e.g., Teramind) or managers can insist on hourly activity reports. But, going overboard backfires. Productivity slows when employees have to interrupt their work to report on it; not to mention the distrust it cultivates. Working remotely not only increases productivity, but also reduces costs from real estate, employee absenteeism, and turnover. Research suggests a hybrid-remote work model could collectively save American employers over $500 billion a year.

Communication

Technology allows teams to communicate who is doing what, how close to the target they are, and what the result should look like. Data privacy is an issue; mostly a people one. For example, do all employees know they shouldn’t use free coffee shop Wi-Fi? Most data privacy issues can be addressed through company-wide training, secure VPNs, and well-communicated best practice policies. Implementing a hybrid-remote work policy helps employees understand business expectations, and advances both transparency and accountability for everyone. What should a best practice policy include?

COVID protocol: What are the rules for masks and social distancing? Must employees be vaccinated to work in the office?
Logistics: Who decides if an employee can work remotely; the employee or the employer? When in the office, does the employee have a dedicated workspace?
Equity: Is the remote employee reimbursed for office supplies, internet, and electricity? Will in-office employees receive better performance reviews due to unconscious bias? Is there a central company information hub that’s accessible to all employees?

Culture

A pleasantly surprising result of pandemic-induced remote work is that it has made some underrepresented groups feel more seen. Helping teams bond takes employers’ creativity, as well as time, and technology can facilitate initiatives.

Use employee recognition software to issue company-wide wellness challenges. By broadly defining wellness, (e.g., drinking water and meditation count as well as physical exercise) employers get more buy-in.
Schedule a recurring weekly thirty-minute coworker coffee, or happy hour (or both) via video chat.
Onboard new employees by pairing them with existing employees via instant messaging for one shift.
Engage employees with brief company-wide surveys (e.g., “What do you need most right now to be successful at your job: training or tools?”)

There’s no going back to the office-centric model. If an employer’s attitude is, “My employees have to work where I want them to, and I want them in the office,” then 54% of workers are willing to leave that employer when they find a position that supports remote work. If management and individual contributors come together to communicate what is working and identify where waste can be eliminated, we can create a sustainable hybrid-remote solution.

Do you want to go back to the office full time? Please share your preference in the comments.