Bev's Tips for a Better Work Life

Tips for a more rewarding and resilient career

For almost 20 years, Bev has been coaching
professionals to thrive at work, navigate
transitions and grow as leaders.

team building

Need new energy? Clear some clutter!

Posted by Beverly Jones on

A little bit of tidying

can bring you a big boost

Are you feeling stuck, bored or besieged?

A good strategy for getting out of the doldrums can be to attack the clutter that is clogging up your desk, your office, your home or your life.

You have a clutter problem if you don’t have enough room to get your work done; if your things always look muddled; if you can’t quickly find what you need; or if you have too much paper or other stuff to neatly stow away.  Clutter can waste your time, drain your energy, repulse your friends and colleagues, and block your efforts to move forward. Even if most of your belongings appear to be in good order, you can generate fresh energy by getting control of the excess that may be piling up in drawers, closets and secret corners.

Untidy office (c)trekandphoto fotolia
Untidy office (c)trekandphoto fotolia

Here are reasons that it might be time to do some tidying:

  • To increase productivity. A chaotic workspace is not an efficient workspace.  One reason is simply that you waste time whenever you have to search for the papers or tools you need. More profoundly, clutter can distract you, repeatedly pulling your attention away from wherever your focus should be.
  • To reduce stress. Clutter can make it difficult for you to relax. It can bombard you with too many distracting stimuli, and send the message that your work is endless and out of control. And if you’re surrounded by things you’re not using anymore, you many find it harder to let go of past struggles and shift attention to your bright future.
  • To clarify priorities. Sometimes people like to have key projects within sight, to remind them about their most important goals. But if files and reports are stacked across your office, nothing stands out. When you limit visible projects to the ones that are most urgent today, you’re forced to think about your goals and make decisions about how to spend your time.
  • To project a positive image. Although you may feel comfortable in your disorderly office, your boss, colleagues or clients may be disgusted by your mess. If you want to come across as an organized professional your workspace should look shipshape.
  • To generate fresh energy. It can feel liberating to purge stuff you don’t love, aren’t using or are unlikely to finish. Tackling clutter is a keystone of feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of balancing natural energies in our surroundings to create harmony and well-being. Practitioners associate clutter with stagnant energy, saying that it leads to many forms of disharmony, like lethargy, depression and repressed creativity.

Once you decide it’s time to tidy up, give some thought to the best way to go about it. Three key steps to banishing clutter are to:

  1. Purge. Gather up stuff that you aren’t using, that you don’t truly value, or that’s taking up more space than it’s worth. Then decide which items to toss and which to immediately give away.
  2. Sort. Organize remaining items by placing them in categories.
  3. Store. Assign storage places for each category and put documents and objects away, keeping similar ones together and placing frequently used things close to where you’ll need them.

Many writers recommend some variation of the purge/sort/store approach to banishing clutter. Where there’s considerable disagreement among the experts, however, is on the question of whether to clean up everything at once or do it gradually. For myself, I prefer to break a de-cluttering effort into small chunks, and to create change a little at a time.

Author Marie Kondo has a different view, however.   Her wildly popular book, “The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing,” urges that you “tidy up in one shot.” She urges that you “concentrate your efforts on eliminating clutter thoroughly and completely within a short span of time.” She advises you to make tidying a special event, not a daily chore.

Whether you’re ready to try Kondo’s sweeping approach, or just start getting rid of one item a day, a de-cluttering effort may bring you surprising benefits, including new oomph in your career. Are you ready to give it a try?

Celebrations support a healthy workplace culture

Posted by Beverly Jones on

Build your team & boost productivity

with 13 ideas for workplace celebrations

Celebrations can enhance your workplace culture and help team members do even better work. Sharing appreciation for success and good fortune can support the well-being of individuals, foster a sense of community and promote the health of your whole organization.

Creating a celebration can be a wonderful way to acknowledge achievements and encourage people to continue to excel. Positive reinforcement is a powerful motivator and a celebratory event can be a smart way to offer good feedback.

Celebrations provide times when colleagues come together, get to know each other better and develop a shared perspective. Enjoying festive occasions helps workers become friends, and having friends at the office helps you do your best.

Arranging celebrations can provide a moment for reflection, allowing people to develop a collective focus on the right stuff. It’s a way to draw attention to the organization’s goals and values, and to remind participants that they work at a great place.

Consider these 13 ways to celebrate at work: [Read more…] about Celebrations support a healthy workplace culture

For a thriving team, communicate, communicate, communicate

Posted by Beverly Jones on

For a team strong, effective team

Have structure and communication

If you want a quick sense of whether a team is working well, take a look at how the members communicate. It’s long been intuitively obvious that talking frequently is a basic step of teambuilding. But the new science of mapping team communication patterns suggests that how team members talk with one another may be more important than their skill, personality, intelligence and discussion topics combined.

A 2012 Harvard Business Review article offered a fascinating account of how MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory can chart and portray the interactions that characterize high-performing teams. When working with a client organization, the Lab’s experts equip members of the client’s teams with electronic badges that collect data on communication behavior. When a team member wears a badge, it records her tone of voice, body language, the people she speaks with, and more. Then the Lab uses data visualization techniques to create maps that vividly illustrate how members stay in touch.

Even though the data doesn’t reveal what is actually discussed, the maps allow the Lab to predict high performing teams with surprising accuracy. Lab Director Alex “Sandy” Pentland wrote that they had equipped 2,500 individuals, from a broad variety of projects and industries, with badges. He said, “With remarkable consistency, the data showed that the most important predictor of a team’s success was its communication patterns.”

What is most surprising is that it doesn’t seem to matter what members discuss. What counts is the way they routinely talk with one another. Regular social conversation during breaks is at least as important as business talk during project meetings.

Pentland said that, regardless of the type of team or its goal, successful teams tend to share several characteristics, including these:

  • Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
  • Members connect directly with one another, and not just with the leader.
  • Members regularly meet in person, they face each other, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
  • Team leaders circulate actively, communicating with everyone equally, listening at least as much as talking, and making sure all members get a chance to communicate.

While communication is key, teams also need structure. Even if you’re not the leader, these strategies may help you to strengthen your team:

  • Define it. Be clear about the basics. Members should know who is on the team and who is not, as well as what they’re supposed to be doing together.
  • Model respect and positivity. Be relentlessly positive and treat everyone with respect. In healthy teams, every member’s contribution is recognized. Notice each person’s strengths and look for ways for each to shine.
  • Share leadership. Even where there is a designated leader, every member takes responsibility and shares accountability for success.
  • Address the need to belong. Humans have a fundamental need to be part of communities, particularly those that allow us to make contributions that are appreciated by others. So focus on the power of belonging, and find ways to reinforce it. Even silly ways to embrace membership, like T-shirts or mottoes, can enhance team spirit.
  • Celebrate little victories. Team members are most likely to feel satisfied and motivated if they believe they are making progress on meaningful work. To keep up the team energy level, find appropriate ways to celebrate even small wins.
  • Create norms. Even if leadership is loose, high performing teams need some structure. For example, when the team conducts group meetings, members should agree on elements like:
    • Scheduling,
    • Attendance requirements,
    • Promptness,
    • Participation in discussions,
    • Cell phone usage and other interruptions, and
    • Ways to track and follow up on action items.

There’s no single formula for creating a great team. But a good starting point is to engage regularly with each member, listen as much as you talk, find ways to acknowledge each person’s contributions, and enjoy the camaraderie that team membership can bring.