worklife organization

Worklife Organization Tips to Help You Declutter For Good

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Organization: a word that elicits much joy and much pain. It’s a relief when you have it and it’s stressful when you don’t, and everyone has an opinion on how to “do it right.”

One major theme in the books, articles, and blog posts about organization is decluttering. It’s out with the old and ditch the unuseful, and in with the new and keep the highly useful. When you start thinking about decluttering and organizing at work, it’s helpful to think about organizing three different spaces: physical space, mental space, and digital space. This article will point you toward a few ideas and resources that can help you to declutter and organize your worklife in all three areas and increase your productivity.

Remember: worklife organization is intensely personal, so there is no “right way” to do it. In order to be successful, you’ll likely have to try out a few ideas and tweak them to work best for you and your work environment.

To-Do List

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workplace creativity

Workplace Creativity Cultivated: Try These 5 Simple Tips

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“If you love what you do, you never have to work another day in your life” – Marc Anthony.

Every company has the potential of offering a fun, energetic and creative environment.  This is a positive place where people can be trusted to do their jobs because they are happy and inspired by their employer’s engagement strategy.

An engagement strategy is a business plan that focuses on keeping employees engaged in the work they are doing.  This can be accomplished by making cultivating workplace creativity a priority.  Cultivating workplace creativity is proven to increase employee productivity, retention, and sales.  As a result, companies have larger profits and happier workers.  Many companies have engagement strategies, but fail to implement them.  So try these five simple tips and see how workplace creativity strategies improves your business.

GAMIFICATION

Apply motivational techniques to everyday tasks to improve workplace creativity.  Video games hook their users with quick responses, goals, badges, transparency, competition, leveling up, and collaboration.  These same methods can be applied in the workplace.

  1. Quick Responses. Use weekly meetings to provide feedback and evaluations. Encourage employees to offer ideas via email and respond daily.
  2. Goals. Set clear, achievable, short term goals
  3. Badges. Provide awards or praise when employees reach these goals. Some companies use a point system.  Employees accrue points for reaching short term goals which can then be accumulated and traded in for larger prizes.
  4. Transparency. Let each employee know where they stand vs other employees.
  5. Competition. Transparency, goals, and badges create competition in the workplace. Competition is a great way to keep members engaged and cultivate creativity.
  6. Leveling Up. Offer training and opportunities for advancement
  7. Collaboration. Encourage people to team up, bounce ideas off each other and assist each other in reaching the goals.

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how successful teams make team building count

How Successful Teams Make Team Building Count

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Congratulations on completing your team building experience!  You should now have a super powered team that is completely perfect.  No?  Your team is only mostly perfect?  Well, that’s because your team building should never be “completed.”  The value of any team building comes from reflection and implementation.  The actual activity, while probably awesome and Instagram-worthy, is neutral in achieving your goals.  Follow these strategic steps to create value for your team in between epic outings. 

Debrief, Debrief, Debrief!

During your event one of our team building ninjas likely led your group in a discussion about how your team performed during the challenge.  Your company likely already has a debriefing procedure or strategy in place to discuss how projects turn out. Debriefing is where we examine the experience to find the value and actionable data. The key with team building debriefing is the actual activity is inconsequential.  The specifics of what your team did to accomplish a team building challenge doesn’t matter nearly as much as how your group functioned. 

Michelle Cummings, a leader in team development and coauthor of A Teachable Moment warns “If participants are not allowed to reflect on their experiences and relate them to the outside world, then a lot of the learning may be lost” (Cummings. “Effective Debriefing Tools and Techniques”) Gather the team together once you’re back at the office.  Engage with the staff about how they felt and what they noticed after the activity.  You can even ask each member to write down one take away from the event. Utilize these takeaways as talking points in the future. Check out Cumming’s guide “Effective Debriefing Tools and Techniques” for some great ideas on switching up your debriefing technique. It will keep things fresh and interesting.  Read more

Remote Office Sharing with Hoffice?

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I recently came across the concept of the Hoffice. It’s a fledgling movement in Sweden that gives working from home a twist. Instead of heading to a cafe or working by yourself, other telecommuters are invited to share someones home. They work in silence for 45 minute blocks. In between those blocks they chat, exercise, etc. I know that when I work from home I am VERY easily distracted (cats). I haven’t tried co-working spaces because they usually seem claustrophobic and… too quiet. I like the way Hoffice blends interaction and productivity. If you’d like to read more about it – check out the article on BBC News – > http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20161230-the-swedes-ditching-desks-to-work-from-strangers-homes

Or head to the Hoffice website – http://hoffice.nu/en/