Planners’ Picks:
A collection of resources from CSN planning committee members worth mentioning
Today we focus on staff working from home, especially alongside children in online school.
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Vital Smarts Work-from-home Habits
Working from home is not a welcome treat for everyone. For 1 in 3 employees, being thrown into a new environment under new pressures has taken a toll on their productivity. Challenges range from feeling disconnected to distracted to disorganized. Perhaps you can relate. Luckily, there are people who are finding their groove and learning new habits and routines to stay productive at home.
In their new e-book, Vital Smarts shares the seven work-from-home habits of highly productive people, as well as three simple skills taught in The Power of Habit Online Training for making these habits your own.
Seven work-from-home habits of highly productive people
Note: Vital Smarts published the book Crucial Conversations, CSN’s 2018 Summer Book Club book.
Autonomy is Built Into Remote Work
In Daniel Pink’s book DRIVE, he focuses on what inspires employees to do great work for their employer through intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is the desire to self-direct our own lives. Pink states that offering more autonomy to employees to do things their way, at the pace and in the style they prefer, and sometimes in an environment that favors good working habits, will produce better work from them. This rings very true for remote workers: we’ve taken away the “office politics” to some degree, we’ve opened up the schedule by being more flexible with start and stop times in many cases, and we are more focused on the output than the method. For more information on offering autonomy to your staff, especially when working remotely, check out the notes and videos associated with a recent presentation CSN did on the book DRIVE.
https://campussupervisorsnetwork.wisc.edu/lmd/
Balancing Work and Life as a Work-from-Home Parent
Working remotely can be hard enough, particularly during a time of crisis. But when the worlds of work, parenting, and school collide, recovering your equilibrium can feel nearly impossible. Andrea Bonior—a clinical psychologist, best-selling author, and mom of three—has been living out these same struggles for months. In this course, she shares tips for juggling your job and your life as a work-from-home parent. This is a Linkedin Learning Module (UW has an enterprise license to access these and many more video trainings).
Workplace Flexibilities: UW-Madison Guidance for Supervisors Assisting Employees with Childcare Needs
Many area K-12 students are engaging in virtual learning and childcare facilities are closed or have reduced capacity. UW–Madison understands that employees who are parents, guardians, or caregivers may face unprecedented challenges in balancing family and work responsibilities. To help support employees and to lessen these challenges, the university expects supervisors and managers to work together with employees to identify and offer workplace flexibilities. This will assist employees in balancing family care responsibilities while meeting the university’s mission. Units, together with employees, may create a customized plan that meets both the employee’s personal needs and the unit’s business needs.
7 tips for parents to mentally prepare their children, and themselves, for an upended school year from Good Morning America
Across the country, millions of students are returning to newly-designed classrooms with new rules, like social distancing and mask wearing, or they are spending the start of the school year in front of a computer screen at home, doing virtual learning, or doing homeschooling.
Either way, the changes and uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic are already having an impact on children’s mental health, data shows. Here are seven tips from Hameed and Dr. Harold Koplewicz, president and medical director of the Child Mind Institute, on how parents and students can prepare mentally for the school year ahead.
How to (Actually) Save Time When You’re Working Remotely
While the widespread shift to remote work hasn’t been without its challenges, it does offer a major silver lining: For many of us, commuting has become a thing of the past. Use the time you save on your commute to the home office wisely with these six tips from Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2020/08/how-to-actually-save-time-when-youre-working-remotely
Reminder: Smart Restart Sessions for Supervisors this week!
Online training is being offered for managers and supervisors who would like to become more familiar with campus resources related to Smart Restart. In the hour-long session, supervisors will review the Smart Restart website and have an opportunity to ask questions.
Smart Restart Training Sessions for Supervisors