Teaching managers to be more supportive of their direct reports’ work/life issues can be a simple and effective route to improving employee health and satisfaction, according to a multiyear study of hundreds of frontline workers and dozens of supervisors in middle-America supermarkets. (Full article: Harvard Business Review, november 2008)
Posts Tagged ‘work life balance’
Supervisor work/life training gets results
Thursday, December 11th, 2008Studio living and working in 2028
Friday, December 5th, 2008At the Innovatieproeftuin, 50 students in Innovation Management and Industrial Design Engineering worked all day on a future workspaces case. The day was organized by the Innovation Platform, the NCSI, student association STAR of the RSM Erasmus University and student association i.d of Delft University of Technology. To start the day, Luis Suarez from IBM gave an inspirational talk about working without e-mail. He encouraged the students to stay in control of their own productivity and to think about the best tools to use for their communication.
The 7 teams were then challenged to come up with their vision of working and living in 2028. Session leaders of each team were briefed about the case a week earlier and came up with solid and creative plans to tackle this case and try to win the challenge. (more…)
‘E-mailverkeer vlakt af bij jongste generatie’
Tuesday, November 18th, 2008Voor het eerst werken vier verschillende generaties tegelijkertijd op dezelfde werkvloer: Babyboomers, generatie X, Y en Z. Dat deze generaties ook verschillende dingen verlangen van de werkomgeving en werkplek, blijkt tijdens de Generations@work-workshop van kantoormeubilairfabrikant Steelcase en het Future Workspaces-innovatieprogramma. (Volledig artikel:Computable, 17 november 2008)
Ondernemen in je loopbaan
Friday, October 31st, 2008Het Nieuwe Werken: dat is werken in een kenniseconomie, met alle ICT-hulpmiddelen die er zijn om samen te werken in (virtuele) teams. Het is ook een ondernemende manier van werken, in een andere organisatiestructuur en – cultuur, waarin vertrouwen de plek inneemt van controleren. Dat heeft serieuze gevolgen voor de inrichting van je loopbaan. En het vormt een fikse uitdaging voor leidinggevenden. (full-text article: Automatiseringgids, 31 oktober 2008)
Instruments: “information overload” self assessments
Friday, October 10th, 2008Information overload is often associated with uncertainty and work pressure resulting from the abundance of information people are confronted with during their daily work. Information overload therefore takes on the symptoms of work-related stress, something that one person is simply more prone to than another. When this form of stress develops, the strengths and weaknesses of your personality and your personal work style play a key role. These three self assessments (interactive MS Excel sheets) are designed to examine these aspects in detail. (more…)
Gezelligheid leidt niet tot prestaties
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008Met collega’s een potje flipperen tijdens de lunchpauze, relaxen in de loungehoek of borrelen op vrijdagmiddag. Klinkt gezellig, maar al dit werkplezier leidt niet tot goede prestaties. Dat blijkt uit een onderzoek van advies en onderzoeksbureau Hay Group. Nederlandse werkgevers richten zich door de schaarste op de arbeidsmarkt te veel op een plezierige werkomgeving, maar zouden zich moeten richten op het werkklimaat.
(full text article: Intermediair, 1 oktober 2008)
Challenges for the nomadic worker: Part 2: In Touch
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008In the series of posts on the main challenges for the nomadic worker, this part focusses on the challenge to stay in touch with the people that are important to you in your personal and professional network.
What is being “In Touch”?
Being in touch is the affective version of being in sync. It is the sense of “being connected” both with people you know well (your strong relational ties) as well as with people you are acquinted with (your weak ties). Important aspects are reassurance of the well-being of significant others, and the ability to let someone else know you are thinking of him or her. (more…)
Time defragmenter
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
What it is: a more efficient day schedule, by grouping fragments of related work (detached actions) into larger, contiguous chunks.
How it works: a wizard analyzes your to do list (for actionable items) and your and your coworker’s agendas (for schedules and availability) to come up with an optimized schedule that requires fewer context switches.
For instance, it will group all activities that I need to do for the same project or with the same person(s) and plan these in one contiguous time slot.
Slow life
Monday, May 26th, 2008A mental shift towards slowing down life’s pace.
SlowLife helps you to escape the hectic of modern times, by explicitly creating moments to reflect, to put things into perspective, or just to enjoy. Examples are: going to your work on foot, taking the time for a good and healthy breakfast with your family, taking an afternoon off just to do ‘nothing’. (more…)
No!
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
Email is frequently used to assign work to others; it has become a “poor men’s workflow system”. Senders often expect a (nearly) immediate response, whereas recipients may think very differently – but are often silent – about that. A simple “No!”-button (“No!” for “I cannot do this”) can lower the threshold for the recipient to give a prompt reply and thus avoid unnecessary confusion for the sender (did she get my message?).
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