Guest article written by Jenny Holt
As a leader, you’ll have to make tough decisions that will impact your team on a daily basis. One of these decisions is whether or not your staff should work from the office or remotely.
Many leaders are resistant to the idea of a remote team, but it’s increasingly becoming the norm. Allowing your team to work remotely could increase their productivity, happiness, and well-being. There are, however, various pros and cons associated with home-working.
As we explored in my last article, The Martian, by Andy Weir, provides a dramatic parallel to some of our most challenging professional situations. We previously talked about empowering our teams and people. In this article, we’ll focus on the remaining two business questions we posed:
How important is our ability to solve problems and depend on our individual skills and strengths? And how critical is our investment not only in our teams but in each individual?
There are very few leadership transitions like being a newly commissioned officer in the military.
Typically, on graduation day from a military academy, ROTC program or Officer Candidate School program, young men and women in their twenties pin on second lieutenant bars and immediately find themselves in charge of huge teams and millions of dollars of equipment in one of the harshest working environments imaginable.
Feeling burned out at work is both frustrating and exhausting. Even if you enjoy some parts of your job, the continual stress can be overwhelming. If you feel overworked and under-appreciated, it’s easy to feel angry and resentful toward your team members or your boss.
Occupational burnout is characterized by exhaustion, lack of enthusiasm and motivation, feelings of ineffectiveness, frustration, and cynicism, and results in reduced efficacy (the ability to produce your desired results) within the workplace (Wikipedia).
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. Nearly 70 percent of U.S. workers feel the same way, though this shouldn’t be too surprising. At its core, occupational burnout is caused by excessive and prolonged stress. And these days, the workplace is more stressful than ever.
Most people in my life know I have a passion for running. However, most people in my life do not know that running is much more than just my cardio routine; it is a daily reminder that I am consistently setting and conquering new goals, which is especially important when other areas of my life feel dull.
My passion for running is not only apparent in my closet, stacked high with old running sneakers. It’s also reflected in my professional life.
Employee engagement has had quite a run in the spotlight and many organizations are intent on cracking the code to develop and sustain high levels of engagement that, in turn, drive other business performance outcomes.
Research suggests a direct connection between engaged employees and a variety of performance outcomes, including productivity, profitability, reduced turnover, and customer experience. Yet, sites like Gallup continue to report that only one-third of the global workforce is engaged at work.
There are multiple theories as to why employees may disengage with their employers, but my recent conversation with Mike Ettling, president of SAP SuccessFactors, shed light on a technological factor that I hadn’t previously considered.
I thought I’d struck pay dirt when I landed my first internship in college. I was interning in the Human Resources department of a trucking company and I felt like I’d finally arrived.
My responsibilities included sitting alone in an office all day, screening resumes for truck drivers and forklift operators, conducting phone screenings, and setting up in-person interviews if candidates met certain criteria. Spending countless hours alone in a room with stacks of applications, a computer, and a telephone made me appreciate the effort it takes to find the right talent to move an organization forward.
Looking back twenty years later, it’s astonishing how things have changed and how—in some ways—they’ve stayed the same. Technology has evolved through several evolutions over the last two decades, and those paper job applications are a thing of the past.
Sol 17 – I woke up today with a killer headache, alone in an unknown place, with a book full of instructions on what to do next. The worst thing is, I have no idea who I am.
Sol 19 – Major breakthrough today. I remember, my name is Susan. I work here. Unfortunately, I don’t remember where “here” is.
The “war for talent” has been raging for years. Companies are doing whatever they can to attract and retain the highest caliber workforce possible in our fast-moving and hypercompetitive business environment.
But some leaders in the talent space, like Mike Ettling, president of SAP SuccessFactors, don’t buy into the “war for talent” narrative, suggesting that we have created this pervasive belief through the influence of our own biases.
In our quickly expanding, technologically reliant world, uncertainty and interdependence are far more common now than, say, 30 years ago. This rapid change has given way to agile organization structures, functioning in more democratic or flat ways. Frameworks (i.e. Scrum, XP, Lean) have aided these sort of initiatives, and the need for them has become increasingly more relevant.
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