Planners’ Picks
A collection of resources from CSN planning committee members worth mentioning
Students are back on campus, school is in session, and we lead ourselves and others into the fall semester. Explore these resources on team development, DEI, hybrid/remote work, and a weekly dose of personal self-leadership development.
||| Resources on Work Culture & Team Development |||
Let us, then, be up and doing
Rich Gassen published an article on Linkedin 5 years ago about participation in honor of Labor Day.
One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing more is doing more. It may or may not involve more activity. We’re not talking, necessarily, about action but of involvement.
Revisit the entire short article here:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-us-up-doing-rich-gassen/
“The goal is not to be perfect by the end. The goal is to be better today.” – Simon Sinek
Defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work
To future-proof citizens’ ability to work, they will require new skills—but which ones? A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries suggests those that governments may wish to prioritize. All citizens will benefit from having a set of foundational skills that help them fulfill the following three criteria, no matter the sector in which they work or their occupation:
- add value beyond what can be done by automated systems and intelligent machines
- operate in a digital environment
- continually adapt to new ways of working and new occupations
The 3 things that keep people feeling motivated at work
In the modern economy, motivation is a tricky thing.
A hundred years ago, when people like Frederick Taylor were pioneering the field of scientific management, motivation was pretty easy. The idea was you could switch people from an hourly rate to a piece-rate system to do a set of repetitive tasks, and it would incentivize them to do the tasks faster. It was a rudimentary idea, but in some organizations, it’s still the philosophy behind how pay — especially incentive pay — is set. And there’s actually a decent amount of research that incentives like that can work to increase motivation when there is a really clear understanding of exactly what tasks must be done to earn the reward. But in knowledge work or creative work economy, those easy-to-understand, repetitive tasks are becoming rarer and rarer.
Fortunately, there’s another option to increase motivation.
https://ideas.ted.com/3-things-that-keep-people-feeling-motivated-at-work/
||| Resources on Hybrid and Remote Work |||
Is Your Job Shifting to a Hybrid Work Plan? These Tips Can Help
Since the start of the pandemic, many nonessential workers have had to adjust to a remote work environment. This shift introduced new challenges, such as navigating virtual meetings and recreating a productive workspace from home. As the pandemic evolves, some companies are choosing to return to the office 100 percent of the time, some are adopting a fully remote policy, and others are entertaining the idea of a hybrid work model.
Unlike a fully remote organization where everyone works from home, a hybrid plan means that you might be working in the office while other key teammates are working remotely (or vice versa). Here are a few tips to maintain effective communication between workplaces.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/hybrid-work-plan-communication-tips/
How To Host Inclusive Hybrid Meetings
Learning & Talent Development recently collaborated with the Center for User Experience, the Office of Strategic Consulting, and the Office of Compliance to create guidance on best practices for inclusive meetings with both in-person and virtual participants.
You can access the guide for information on how to set up meeting rooms, leverage existing technology, build inclusivity into meetings, and much more.
https://it.wisc.edu/learn/guides/inclusive-hybrid-meetings/
“Civility costs nothing, and buys everything.” – Mary Wortley Montagu
A Compassionate Guide For Your Return to Work Plan
Author and speaker Heather Younger asks: How do we, as leaders, navigate managing two groups of people with entirely different histories this past year as they converge into one?
The best way to keep your workplace united after so much time apart is to be there for them on an organization-wide level. Reach out to each team member, each group of team members, whether united by age, race, culture, background, religion, or opinions, meet them in their shoes. Another term for this form of meeting a person where they are at is empathy.
The WFH group of employees and the non-remote folks will have vastly different experiences from the past year, but at the core, they don’t differ too much. The past year has been hard and filled with change, regardless of if that change led you home or not. Stand with your team as they relive and are shaped by their past experiences daily. Comfort, advise, and care for each employee as new changes will bring about new struggles.
The empathetic actions I have described so far are incredibly important, but right there with them is the compassion component at the same level of importance. It is powerful to sit with a person in the midst of their struggles or their joys. It is another incredible thing altogether to take action to alleviate their pain or share with them in their joy.
https://employeefanatix.com/a-compassionate-guide-for-your-return-to-work-plan/
||| Resources on DEI |||
Resources at CUPA-HR around diversity and inclusion
Stories of diversity and inclusion can enrich a campus community and move the institution along the path to greater cultural understanding and competence. In these facilitator guides, you will find tools to help you use the project’s portraits and videos to facilitate discussions on campus. CUPA-HR offers these materials and conversation starters for topics like microaggressions, race and ethnicity, LGBT issues, and more.
https://diversity.cupahr.org/discussions/
||| Resources on Self-Leadership Development |||
Stay Cool Under Pressure — Without Appearing Cold
If you’re a manager who handles stress with ease, while your boss and team become wound ever tighter, you may give the unfortunate impression that you don’t care about the work or your colleagues. Being cool under stress is an asset, but your colleagues may read your unruffled nature as “nonchalance.” This perception could hurt your career trajectory. This article discusses three ways to change that perception.
https://hbr.org/2020/11/stay-cool-under-pressure-without-appearing-cold
Linkedin Learning: Leading with Emotional Intelligence
Emotions are all around us in the office, and it’s important for leaders to understand how to harness them to cultivate productivity and positive relationships. In this course, Britt Andreatta shares how to boost your emotional quotient (EQ) to better lead teams, work with peers, and manage up. Learn what emotional intelligence is and how it factors in at work, and discover concrete techniques for raising your own EQ. This includes perceiving yourself accurately, exercising emotional self-control, understanding and managing your triggers, and developing empathy. Then, turn those lessons around to build your awareness of others and become a more inspiring—and effective—leader.
Learning objectives
- Analyze the brain science behind emotional intelligence.
- Identify and assess your emotions.
- Determine how to exercise emotional self-control.
- Identify your triggers and how to respond the them.
- Assess how others respond at work.
- Determine how to maximize team performance using emotional intelligence.
- Discover how to catalyze change.
Downloadable Action for Happiness September Calendar: Self-Care
Self-care isn’t selfish, it’s essential. No-one’s perfect. But so often we compare our insides to other people’s outsides. This month we’re encouraging everyone to be kinder to themselves (as well as others), especially when things go wrong. Self-care increases our resilience and helps us get more out of life. It also helps us accept others as they are too.
https://www.actionforhappiness.org/september
||| Upcoming Events |||
Live Webinar: Character & Happiness – with Angela Duckworth
Thurs 9 Sept – Online via Zoom – 1:00-2:00pm CST
What is character? And how does it support wellbeing?
At this event, psychologist Angela Duckworth will share what she’s learnt in her years of research into character. She’ll explain how we don’t need to rely on talent to be successful or to achieve goals; instead we can develop our strengths to respond wisely to whatever life sends our way.
Angela defines character as “everything we do to help other people as well as ourselves”. She believes we can cultivate character strengths in three dimensions: strengths of heart (e.g. gratitude), strengths of will (e.g. grit), and strengths of mind (e.g. curiosity).
Pre-register below:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/character-happiness-with-angela-duckworth-tickets-162422908291
“The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.” – Carlos Castaneda