What’s Going Down at Work: Pollsters Tell the Story
March 4, 2017 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Organizational and individual energy have hit some low points. Workers are stressed out, rusted out, burned out and ready to walk out according to some pollsters with their finger on the pulse of productivity. Read below on some of their findings on what’s going down and what you can do to help energize yourself in the midst of it all.
- Boring jobs kill. The researchers at the University Of Texas School Of Public Health found that workers who spend their lives in undemanding jobs with little control over their work are 35% more likely to die during a 10-year period than workers in challenging jobs with lots of options and decision-making. Learning how to deal with the stress and cope with the job demands help you to become stronger and more resilient to stress as published in Psychosomatic Medicine.
- Attitudes roll downhill from supervisors to front-line staff to customers, and keep them coming back. Try delighting your employees. When employees are treated well, they will treat your customers well, and people like doing business with people who like doing business.
- Enhance your energy and image over the phone by answering with your vocal tone ending on a higher note than at the beginning of the greeting. When your tone goes up, it conveys enthusiasm about the call. When your tone goes down, it conveys a more abrupt and annoyed feeling. Standing or at least sitting up straight improves breathing and vocal tone.
- Make a point to take a mid-day break and get away from your desk or other workplace to take a mental health break in order to come back refreshed and more productive. Average American workers only spend 15 minutes per day for lunch and most eat on the run, at their desk, or in their car.
- Absenteeism hit a 7-year record high according to a survey of 401 companies. 25% of absences were taken by people who weren’t really sick. Citing the main reasons for playing hooky- stress, and belief that workers had earned the time off. One of the winning excuses was, “If it is all the same to you, I won’t be coming to work. The voices told me to clean all the guns today.”
- A USA Today survey showed 75% of CEO’s and 88% of middle managers listed balancing work and family as a major concern. What are you doing in your life to actively balance personal and professional stuff?
- A Gallup Poll found 4 out of 10 workers report that they are frequently angry while at work. Maybe they should call in sick and stay home to work on balancing their life? If you notice your fuse getting shorter; take a look at your balance between personal and professional lives and actively work on simplifying and putting more fun into your day.
- A poll by Maritz Research found dissatisfaction with the way employers offer recognition. The survey of 1001 adults nationwide found 34% of them do not feel they are recognized for their work performance in ways that are important to them. Only 40% felt they were adequately recognized.
- Other findings indicated 26% of employees are unhappy with the way they are managed and 32% intend to change jobs. These restless employees say they’re looking for better compensation and career opportunities. Now comes word that, at least in the advertising, marketing and creative industries, only half of recently polled firms are concerned with employee retention. The Creative Group, a staffing services company in Menlo Park, Calif., reports ad agency executives and senior marketing executives with the nation’s 1,000 largest companies may be in for an unpleasant surprise. Many companies don’t focus on retention until it’s too late to staunch the flow of experienced, productive people, says Tracey Fuller, executive director of The Creative Group. Now is the time to ensure top performers feel valued and respected, and have positive interactions with their managers.
Page Up: Sometimes We Must Go Back to the Beginning
February 19, 2017 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Sometimes things get so screwed up, we need to go back to the start and re-paginate to get things back in order. It takes some effort and persistence, but it pays off in the end with everything lined up just as it should be. Perhaps we have a few dog-eared corners, but that’s what a life lived with full experiences comes with. So take a deep breath and mend fences, build bridges, forgive, or get closure on things in your past which are haunting you or holding you back so you can release the draining energy.
Go back to the beginning and set things straight so the rest of your pages will fall into place more easily. When we are held back by our past mistakes or mishaps or misdirected choices, we have a hard time moving forward. Once we realize that we need to page up to patch it up and then let go to move on down the page of life, we release the power that it once had on us and we free up our energy for more positive things.
Showing You Care for Your Colleagues
February 4, 2017 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Over the years I’ve interviewed many hundreds of clients in what they do to keep their customers, care for their clients, and show their colleagues they really matter in more ways than the obvious. I’ve compiled some of my favorites for you to glean from them on what they’re doing right to reach out and show their workplace love.
- Surprise your team and take them to lunch, to a mall with $50 each and tell them they must spend it all on themselves and whoever has money left over will give it back to you.
- If you are game – or in good financial standing – take them on a trip or a cruise such as Phillips International’s Chairman, Tom Phillips who took 1350 employees and their families on a Disney Cruise to celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary. Meeting planners who are interested in cruises as incentive programs can visit www.corporatecruises.com for deck plans and virtual tours of 360 ships and an online RFP service as well as destination info and tax-deductibility guidelines. Another site for unbiased info on cruises and destinations is www.cruisecritic.com. Bon Voyage!
- Forget the Euro – time is the currency of the new millennium and giving the gift of time is a powerful incentive. Almost 40% of Americans now work more than 50 hours per week (National Sleep Foundation) and Americans work up to 12 weeks more in total hours per year than Europeans with 26% of all US employees not taking a vacation according to a study by Boston College. Many companies are now offering perks and incentives to help employees gain back some time such as giving them the services of a lawn care company, pest control, monthly house cleaning, or having a car detailer visit the workplace. ServiceMaster offers these types of home services on a large scale across the country.
- One of my early clients, Northwestern Mutual has a dry cleaner pick up and deliver clothes to the workplace. Their dry cleaner also offered to accept Fed Ex packages for workers during the holidays and then deliver them to the workplace to avoid having holiday packages sit on doorsteps or having to drive to the Fed Ex shop to pick them up. They also offer several clubs and affinity groups in their organization such as a choral group, a band, and professional associations for staff to meet others with similar interests and promote loyalty and a sense of community. People are less likely to leave a community of friends than a company of cubicles.
- Below are ideas from various clients on what they’re doing to show they care about their teammates:
- Help keep employees healthy and informed about their health and well-being to reduce your costs for sick-leave, mental-health day absences, retention, and insurance claims. Here are some tips for planning a wellness program excerpted from Human Capital Magazine:
- Provide people with the facts, and raise awareness regarding the risks of being overweight.
- Help them identify risk factors including Body Mass Index and blood pressure.
- Empower employees to change and provide them with the knowledge and tools to improve their situation – books, trainers, coaches, nurses, health club memberships, time off each week to work out, seminars, seated massages, healthy choices in the cafeteria, and smoking cessation or Weight Watchers classes.
- Implement a total wellness program into your menu of options for employees – more than an exercise program, it includes a combination of activities that focus on health promotion and disease prevention and healthy, active lifestyles.
- The Society for Human Resource Management’s annual survey of several hundred employee benefit managers found that 31% subsidize or reimburse gym membership fees, 22% provide on-site fitness centers, 24% offer weight-loss programs, and 11% offer nutrition counseling.
- One high-tech company in Washington DC gave employees a stipend for monthly house cleaning and yard work to allow them extra time to work out – no excuses for not having enough time.
- A survey by Career Builder.com found that the majority of workers are dissatisfied with their career progress with 63% reporting that finding a better job would improve their quality of life.
What are you doing for your team to energize them and help increase their quality of life at work? How are you showing your team that you care about them in more ways than giving them a paycheck?
Improving Meetings, Morale, and More
January 4, 2017 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Seems we can’t get away without having meetings. Communication is a key element to empowered workplaces and effective employee morale. But it seems that so many get it wrong when it comes to hosting meetings. What is up with that? To help pump up the effectiveness of meetings; I share the following tips.
If your meetings are becoming stale, try www.effectivemeetings.com with lots of tidbits for running terrific meetings.
Improve your all-employee meetings
- Draw on the experience of top performers and celebrate the successes of others – have them share their stories.
- Work actively with professional speakers to familiarize them with your organization.
- Encourage informal interaction with round tables and allow for socializing activities.
- If you are presenting awards: staff should participate in the selection of rewards.
- Employers should reward measurable activities or a point system.
- Offer reward that have some brag value – offering cash may be fleeting.
- Recognize employees who talk up the company and spread good words.
Improve morale with the five R’s
- Rewards: check competitor’s salaries, perks, and benefits packages and exceed it or get more creative to retain top talent.
- Room to grow: offer a chance to grow professionally and personally and advance skills through a mentoring program, promotions, and training.
- Recognition: Practice regular formal and informal praise and appreciation. Generation X and the incoming Millennials are used to getting feedback every 60 seconds with computer games and expect to know where they stand and get noticed for it. We tend to get antsy just waiting for our computers to download and that’s only 22 seconds. An annual appraisal won’t cut it.
- Respect: Make a determined effort to listen with an open mind and show genuine respect to avoid the “Because I’m the boss” attitude.
- Reasonable Workloads: Productivity will decline if workers are expected to produce 110% all the time. People need time to renew and refresh to avoid burnout and especially since September 11th, we need to understand that there will be a general defocus in work and productivity. Offer flexible work schedules, job sharing, telecommuting, and compressed workweeks.
Freedom from Fatigue
December 4, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
We’re a nation of over-doers, over-schedulers, and over-achievers which makes us fatigued both emotionally and physically. I offer some ideas from past clients on how they fight fatigue in the workplace along with my personal experience and research in fighting personal fatigue. Read on to help energize yourself and your workplace.
- SAS of Carey North Carolina, a privately held software company with a turnover rate a fraction of that of its competitors. They offer free amenities on their park-like campus including a health club, medical care, M & M’s every Wednesday, a chance to have lunch with their kids at the subsidized childcare center, and subsidized country club memberships to the company-owned golf course. They have also arranged for local businesses to bring their services on campus such as dry cleaning and car detailing to save worker’s energy, effort, and downtime from work running errands. They know that if workers are being taken care of and are happy, then they won’t feel fatigue, and will take care of the customers and that will make the owner as well as the customers happy. It’s all about removing the everyday irritants and obstacles to living a balanced life so workers can focus on their work without extra stresses of running errands and juggling life priorities.
- I asked one of my clients, trucking industry executives, what they did to energize their workplace and here are some of their answers:
- Have a spring bonnet contest with each department entering one bonnet to be modeled by one of their team members. Judges for this Alabama company selected the one with a live chicken on it as the winner. The gentleman in the audience declared that his bonnet would have won if he had known the use of livestock was allowed.
- One Fedex exec goes out on the floor and sings happy birthday to each person on their special day and he also sends candy bars with notes attached for those doing a great job.
- Another Fedex manager has found that asking his customers to supersize their order (similar to the fast food industry) is helpful as a recovery strategy. When following up with a customer whose package went astray, the liaison asks for another chance to do an even better job and it has resulted in tens of thousands of extra income – just by asking them to supersize their order.
- A Hilton Generational Time Survey of 1220 adults asked Americans how they felt about their lives:
- Need more fun – 68%
- Need a long vacation – 67%
- Often feel stressed – 66%
- Feel time is crunched – 60%
- Want less work, more play – 51%
- Feel pressured to succeed – 49%
- Feel overwhelmed – 48%
- When we look at these statistics, it seems even more important to evaluate how our workplaces are helping our employees balance their personal and professional lives and to make it easier for them to do the job we pay them to do.
- Seven Kinds of Tired:
- tossing and turning tired – not enough sleep
- everybody-but-you tired – overdoing it, too busy
- ditching-your-diet tired – skipping meals, overeating, unhealthy choices
- allergy tired – worn out seasonally, watery eyes
- hard-times tired – troubled home, lost your job
- under-the-weather tired – listless and groggy
- exercise-overdose tired – always on the go, overactive and stressed to fit your fitness in
That are you doing to fight fatigue at work? What are you doing to energize your personal life and your physical self? Take steps now to enjoy freedom from fatigue – you’ll be happier in the long haul.
Your Housekeeping and Hard-Work Habits Are Telling Your Story
November 4, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
All work and no play make Americans sick according to a study of 632 people by Oxford Health Plans that found 1 in 5 workers can’t use up annual vacation time because their jobs are so demanding. 33% never leave their offices once they arrive at work and that same number work and eat their lunch simultaneously and the pace of work is so relentless that 34% say they never have downtime. Taking a vacation for creative renewal is essential to staying healthy and productive, although the US gives the least vacation time among the industrial nations. (US – 13 days vs. Italy – 42 days).
Your work space may be telling on you. An IOGEAR survey found that 73% of respondents said their impressions of colleagues were influenced by the way their desks were organized and 70% said a messy desk was perceived as less career driven.
Although I advocate some executive toys and stress-busting items, there needs to be appropriate balance to alleviate the perception that you may not be a team player. On the other hand, a desk strewn with fast food wrappers and old coffee cups may denote an unbalanced workaholic. Visit these sites or stores for great organizing ideas for your home or office:
The Container Store
Pier 1 Imports
Target
Other tips from the world of Feng Shui to help improve your space and your energy:
- Tired of being tired – sweep away eyesores to release energy. Every messy pile has a negative force field around it that draws energy and deleting the clutter releases the energy.
- Down in the dumps – lift items off the floor to feel happier since low-lying items attract low, sad energy. Find a higher space to store things to elevate your mood.
- Slim down with less stuff – subconsciously we may be holding onto stuff the same as we are holding onto our extra weight – to protect ourselves and feel less emotionally vulnerable. Try shedding some outdated sentimental items that were once treasured and are now clutter.
Underline: Underline Your Principles and Stand by Your Values
October 19, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Defining your boundaries makes it easier to turn down unwanted offers or requests on your time that are not in alignment with your clearly defined values and principles. Stick by your guns to keep you from wavering and accepting anything that is incompatible with your standards. Doing so gives you the energy to follow through with your plan congruent with your stance.
One in four workers in America have an anxiety-related illness such as stress or high blood pressure, and the sales of antacids, pain killers, and anti-depressants is at an all time high. These signs of the times represent a workforce and a nation out of alignment. Is your body telling you that something is out of alignment in your life?
Take a close look at your work life and personal life and decide if you are acting with congruence. Monitor your body signals and heed the warning signs when it is telling you something is out of kilter. Be rock solid in your principles and your values and make sure that what you do when nobody is looking is what you really stand for – that’s called integrity and that will keep you from the energy drain of covering your tracks or operating below the proverbial line.
Hone in on the goodness of your values dear to your heart and be true to them. Ensure that your work is in alignment with your values in order to avoid energy-sapping stress. Living in congruence with your deeply held beliefs is enlightening and keeps you authentic to your mission here on Earth.
As we grow, our values may shift priorities – be aware of what you value and why, to give you more guidance in your daily choices. Once you truly know your values, it is much easier to say no to requests on your time, which do not correlate to your beliefs.
Clients Comment on Morale-Boosting Ideas
October 4, 2016 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
I often get ideas from clients on how they boost morale in their organizations. Here are some of their ideas along with some tidbits I’ve picked up on how to enhance your work experience to live and lead Hartfully:
- Have a mascot for the office who can wear the official badge, pin, or t-shirt of the department. This can be a stuffed animal or beanbag character. Other departments have been known to kidnap the mascot and hold them ransom for pizza or candy. Sometimes the mascot sits at the reception desk to oversee visitors – it adds some playful professionalism.
- One payroll professional wore a crown and a sash that say Payroll Queen when she personally distributed paycheck stubs to the team.
- One accounting firm offered free 15-minute seated massages during the month of April when their team was particularly overworked.
- A city recreation department’s executives hosted a breakfast cooked by them for their organization to kick off the summer staff meeting.
- Another recreation department used some of their own staff in a training film with the theme of COPS – catching frontline personnel staging bad customer service for the film. They also interviewed colleagues about what they thought was good service and the best part about the film was the bloopers and outtakes that they added to the end of the film. The audience went wild as they saw their co-workers goof up and be themselves in front of the cameras.
- The admin staff at a physics lab gets together for weekly lunches during the summer to create fresh salads made from the gardens of the workers with a recipe from an Italian grandmother.
- In similar fashion – another office hosts a cookie exchange over the holidays to expand on the variety of cookies each household offers without all the work of baking different cookies. They take it one step further and deliver extra plates of cookies to the local fire department, police station, and nursing home.
- Special Events Magazine reports that two-thirds of respondents to an online poll believe that in-person interaction tops technology as a communications tool. Some 66 percent of respondents said that technology-video conferencing, Webcasting and the like-is not as effective for communication in meetings as is in-person communication.
- Eliminating just fifteen wasted minutes each day adds up to ninety-one extra hours a year, more than two full workweeks. Organize and energize your space, your stuff, and your life to gain valuable time you can use for more fun in your life.
- Ask yourself what is the best use of your time right now and then act on it.
- Create systems that work with your preferences for sorting papers and stuff – try horizontal surfaces and vertical surfaces for storage bins.
- Look at your time you have allotted for a project and then add to it – things usually take longer than you plan.
- Put your personal and professional appointments on one calendar to avoid double-booking yourself.
- Finally, decide right now to think FAT: file, allocate (give to someone else), or toss.
- Findings in a recent USA Today article: HR experts say employees exposed to stresses such as layoffs are more likely to engage in violent behavior. Nearly 35% of workers say they’ve seen an increase in anxiety and stress-related physical ailments in their workplace in the last year. 27% report a rise in emotional problems such as insomnia and depression.