Work Lab
Employee morale is often taken for granted until it's too late. One proactive leader wrote and asked me how to improve and keep spirits high at work. Here are my thoughts...
In short- think connection, recognition, and resolution. These are the three essential pieces to building and keeping morale high.
You want to love your job but you just don’t. On top of that, you can’t quit—at least right now. Perhaps your job was better when you first started and the environment has changed. Or maybe you’ve changed and you’re now struggling to get motivated to do the same work. Maybe you got a new boss who you’re not that crazy about. Whatever the circumstance, not loving your job AND not feeling able to quit can leave you feeling really stuck.
This easy-to-follow worksheet was designed to help you better your immediate circumstances while keeping your eye on your long-term vision and dreams. By completing these simple lists and questions, you will identify what you like about your current job, what you don’t like, and what you can reasonably change. Do this with the intention of:
No, really. It's an honest question. What are you talking about?
I came across The Good Men Project during a typical click to click to click browsing session. I was curious to learn what was meant by "good men" and why the hell this too had to have the "project" bit at the end. (I think PMI's relentless marketing is to blame for the runaway use of this term for anything and everything people want to say, do, or explore on the Internet. Time for a universal find and replace!)
Anyway, I got sucked in and spent a good hour or so clicking around trying to understand what good men are talking about. Scanning the site, I saw stuff on social and family issues, professional challenges, and personal values. This are thoughts on how to raise good children, achieve work/life balance, and improve relationships.
I was surprised. I guess not surprised that men were talking about these things (after all there are men's opinions all over the place) but previously unaware that they were swapping views within a circle of other men.
Prior to coming across this site, I'd imagined that most man-to-man conversations (outside of work or direct father to son type stuff) were focused on sports, maybe a little politics, and on the one slow sports day each year, you might get a a calendar review that went something like, "I went to X, then ate Y, then sat in traffic back to X."
To my knowledge, no such site exists for women. In fact, women have been trying to un-have the conversation about what makes a "good woman" for more than 50 years now.
It made me wonder what people are talking about within their circles of same-ness. For me? I have a pretty good handle on running conversations among federal management consultants (procurement is broken), working moms (there's never enough time), and half-assed vegans (green smoothies count, right?)
Reflecting on what people are talking about with others they view most similar to them (in life stage, circumstance, interests, race, religion, and so on) provides a lot of insights into their worries and priorities. Understanding these ongoing conversations is important-- not so that we can parachute in to solve them-- but so that we can better understand each other, be more empathetic, and more helpful when the opportunity presents itself.
It's sometimes difficult to answer the question-- what's on your mind? To get to the same place we might instead ask, what are you talking about?
There’s a rumor passed down from one Anthropology 101 class to the next each year. Eskimos have like 30 words for snow. Whether it’s true or not, the idea that communities come up with more descriptive terms for their most frequent events makes sense. It also makes sense that someone else who sees a snow a couple times a year would be baffled by this buffet. It’s just snow. Snow is snow.
Meetings are my snow. And, probably yours too.
Many of us work in a climate where the weekly forecast calls tons of meetings. They’re often back-to-back and sometimes go for days on end. Many are purposeless, energy-depleting endurance events and others have no value. It’s not news that meetings are unpopular.
But for someone who spends a lot of her time planning, attending, facilitating and following-up after meetings, this bad rep bums me out, man. I kinda like ‘em—especially the ones that are clear in the objective and when everyone is paying attention and participating.
Using the umbrella meeting label for any event calling for 2 or more people to communicate with each other is how meetings became comparable to unmedicated dental work. I’d argue that not all meetings are the same and the bad ones are ruining it for the rest. For example, conference, summit, gathering, and party are all meetings. These terms conjure up something specific with the expectation that something interesting will happen. Right?
On the flip side, here are a couple words that I think should be added to the lexicon that describe what we hate with more precision.
We should skim these dreaded events out of the pool and reserve the word “meeting” for those occasions when we get together with purpose, focus, and function.
Together, we can save meetings. Will you join me?
I get so much out of reading Seth Godin's posts because he puts words and perspective to many of the common frustrations we encounter at work. His precision around communications is just so, so useful such as this post on how to win an argument with a scientist.
Seth's point is to know when to stop talking and charting and start to regrouping and trying another angle. This trick is knowing when additional data and logic has ceased to persuade your audience. Recognizing this this point-- which may come at time between the spark of an idea and full implementation-- saves tons of frustration and rework.
To make it a little personal, I'm interested in nutrition. The more science the better. I'm a complete sucker for any food-related headline starting with, "New study shows...."I'll read and consider it especially if it relates to the benefits of wine and chocolate.
Conversely, I'm completely uninterested in an electric toothbrush. I couldn't care less about how many dentists agree and actually get annoyed when certain people keep pointing to the science. A plain ol' toothbrush and floss seem to work great for me and I might resort to posting my cavity to cavity count scorecard in the bathroom if those same certain people persist.
We accept and embrace science when it jives with how we already see the world. This truth doesn't mean that we can't be convinced to change our minds, it just means that we have to examine other angles. This is the fundamental challenge of communications at work and what makes coming up wit the strategy so interesting.
Watching people swim laps is pretty boring. Some people are faster, some are slower. Most do some kind of flip turn, some cling to end to sneak in a couple of deep gasps before paddling back in the other direction. The lane ropes separately them are absolutely critical to maintaining order and ensuring everyone gets the basic “work” of their swim done.
Watching people (especially kids) play in the pool is totally different. It’s loud, a little chaotic, and unpredictable—swimmers disappear periodically under the water only to pop back up some place else. If someone thought to bring a raft or noodle, the ever-changing games are played just a little differently. Occasionally someone gets kicked in the head but still there are no ropes separating the swimmers. Those would defeat the purpose.
Our organizations are largely built to sustain lap swimming. There is a ton of work to do each day. We need clear focus and direction to get things done. However, few of our best organizational leaps forward cleanly fall within the boundaries of one division.
So every once in a while, an opportunity comes up at work that requires experts from different divisions—a chance to pull people from their organizational swim lanes into the big open pool to do something special. There, they’re all mixed together and suddenly need to rethink how they swim.
When cross-divisional opportunities come up (especially big, important ones), someone will often pipe up with the idea to create one big lane (a combined organizational unit). It idea is that they’re relieved of their regular swimming duties and allowed to focus on the new, new thing. These initiative or project-focused units are typically promised a new box on the org chart, a new hierarchy with new leadership positions, and is often shown reporting directly to someone very senior. The whole thing can be really attractive to those tapped to create something new, as well as, the leadership who thinks they’re buying progress, agility, and accountability.
The message is that this new project is important and we can’t trust the existing organizations to come together, get creative, collaborate, and work it out. After all, we need to get it done already. Right?
Well, sometimes these realignments absolutely make sense such as when the business model is fundamentally changing and certain services are no longer needed or will be outsourced.
Other times, these pop-up project-focused groups undermine the existing structure. Assuming that you’re not doing away with finance, communications or IT any time soon, projects that skim a few key resources from these functions create more problems than they solve.
Alternatively, time is better spent helping existing organizations collaborate productively. A series of facilitated planning discussions focused on who does what and when can move projects forward faster and with fewer kicks in the head.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) hosted the Federal Real Property Association (FRPA) members today at their 90 K Street NE offices to show off their revamped and renewed workplace. Over the last several years, a team led by Trent Frazier has worked on tackling a big problem. CBP had a large and growing workforce delivering a critical mission that was facing a large and growing rent bill if something didn't change.
What they did: Removed assigned desks/offices, removed desktop computers and telephones, and removed the requirement and expectation to be physically in the office for set hours, 5 days/week. Added tablets with computing and phone capabilities, added shared work and collaboration space, and reinforced existing team-building and performance management practices.
What they accomplished: What they've accomplished is both logical and remarkable. Logical in that all of the steps CBP took just make sense. It is remarkable, however, that they've so fundamentally reimagined work and workplaces for a federal program with all of the tradition and history that is both rich and constraining.
CBP started where many agencies are today. They had a federal and contracted workforce very much accustomed to working in conventional space—with a literal and figurative tether to a desk in an office. CBP saw this as a problem and an opportunity. Their workforce and the way people work was changing. That force was happening with or without intentional action on the part of CBP.
Many employee’s responsibilities had evolved over the last decade to essentially require the movement of information from one place to another while interpreting, analyzing, and making recommendations in the process. CBP’s physical environment didn't match where they wanted or needed to go to support that more agile, mobile, responsive mission work.
So to start, they stopped viewing their workplace as a real estate challenge and, instead, viewed it as a people challenge. Makes sense, right? Right. Well that mindset became fundamental to all of the decisions that followed and was the first point Trent and his team needed to sell to senior leadership.
With the executive staff onboard (at least in concept), CBP launched a pilot because, of course, that’s the cool thing to do in DC right after complaining about traffic and the weather. And sometimes things are popular for good reason, they got some great lessons learned at out of the test. Here are a few:
“We all talk about ‘results-oriented management practices’ but that was too lofty of a goal going in. We needed to focus on the basics like calendaring and electronic file storage but ended up getting the bigger stuff too.”
Listening to Trent talk about CBP and their workplace transformation, you get the sense that he is precisely the right person to be leading this change. He has the experience, the insights, and vision, and the sense of humor to disarm even the most skeptical CBP agents. In his closing remarks, he said, “It’s not hard to come up with the technical solutions. It’s hard to convince people that they’re the right ones. Change management is critical.”
Indeed.
Color Grid: Spring 2 by Allison Long Hardy
Strategic plans are like dust bunnies. They have a cute name but are an annoying reminder that there is something else we should be doing. They're amassed from the fur, fluff, and fuzz floating around and tend to reproduce in dark corners. Strategic plans are often the end goal of a long process with at least a meeting or two scheduled along the way.
Strategic planning meetings can be great but have limitations. Done well, they...
Sadly, the initial interest and excitement generated during the meeting can flip to disappointment quickly after. The problem usually isn't in the meeting itself, it's the follow through. To avoid frustration and reduce the risk of long-term eye-rolling, there are two choices.
I overheard crumbs of a conversation between two people at Starbucks the other day. I was waiting in line. I wasn't trying to be nosy, really. They were within two feet of me. Living in and around DC, however, you never know what juicy bit you might hear so I didn't make any attempts to distract myself either.
Anyway, the gist of the conversation was one person pitching the other on creating a business partnership. The closing comment was, “Hey, this was great. Thanks for your persistence on this. I’m glad we finally got together.” I suspect that all of the seated twosomes around the shop were having conversations that we’re basically the same at their core. Call it networking or catching up or getting-to-know-you or whatever, a lot of things start this way over a latte.
“Thanks for your persistence on this,” stuck with me. It’s not something you hear said out loud often but it struck me as a compliment. I can think of dozens of things I've bought or bought into and now love—products or services or experiences or job offers—that took someone more than one try to sell me. When approaching someone new with something new, we give up too easily. We all do.
But what happens when we approach someone with whom we have an established relationship—our leadership or boss—with something new?
I scanned the recent experiences of friends and colleagues and, of course, my own that came to mind. I thought of my friend and neighbor who doggedly pursued recognition for a key client over about a five month period. In the end, her persistence paid off and she ensured that the client won an important industry award given out by her organization. I thought of a colleague with deep reservations about the risks in a prospective scope of work who pushed for a half dozen rounds edits with the account lead and client to get it to a place she felt more comfortable supporting the assignment. And I thought of a former boss and mentor who fearlessly (and like a charming goofball) works every room, everywhere she goes turning over stones looking for fresh opportunities.
After just this quick mental search, I decided that it’s impossible to know whether we’re more persistent with those we know than those we don’t. I suspect that we’re a little better when we know the mind of the recipient and have a much more open door to reach them. I also suspect that because we know them we filter the kinds of ideas we approach our leadership with in advance. We assume a “no” so we don’t even ask.
For those issues you have raised and ideas submitted...
The Work Life Lab is a place to explore what works- and what doesn't- when trying to strike that elusive sense of work-life balance. I'm a working mom with three kids. I try things and share my experiences with the hopes that some of the best strategies might work for you too.
Robin Camarote, LLC | , Falls Church, VA