by Kate Evert | Dec 22, 2020 | Community, Creativity at Work, Innovation, Leadership, Sacrifice
I don’t know about you, but the last time I had this feeling about a year ending was probably 4th or 5th grade. In grade school, some of your personal heroes were the room mothers. They showed up at key dates: Halloween, the last day before winter vacation, and Valentine’s Day. I associate room mothers with sprinkles, you know the kind you find on cupcakes or amazing sugar cookies.
But the most important day that they refereed was that last day of school before winter break. Because the only thing that stood between a bunch of kids getting out of school for two whole weeks was that sugar infused party, complete with sprinkles.
Now this is when we take pity on any grade school teacher. Those poor teachers spent the entire morning trying to calm a class full of children that acted as though they had already ingested a container full of sprinkles before they even got to school. We wriggled in our seats, barely able to contain our excitement …. if it had snowed outside, the distraction reached new heights. So, in an effort to keep us in our seats those poor teachers, who we might add were completely exhausted from trying to teach an entire semester, thought that they would outwit us, by giving us games and puzzles instead of work to keep us occupied until those room mothers showed up.
We’d sit there with our pencils in our fingers and start on the worksheets. We quickly figured out the teacher had tricked us into doing some math before we could color in a winter scene, or do a word search to review our spelling words from first semester.
In tribute to all those teachers from our childhood, and all of those teachers who have been coping as best they can in the fall semester of 2020, here’s a word search in hopes that this just might distract you for just a couple minutes as you wait with fingers crossed, hoping that the principal will get on the intercom and let us out with early dismissal from this year.
by Kate Evert | Dec 15, 2020 | Community, Covid-19, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Innovation, Inspiration, Leadership, Strategy
December is a tough time of year.
I do not like the days getting shorter.
In typical Decembers, I do not like the craziness of holiday shopping, the hectic nature of too many invitations jammed into the early part of the month, and the frantic feeling BEFORE December 25th. But what I do enjoy about December? Candles and lights. The more candles and the more lights, the better.
Several years ago two wonderful authors entered my December. One wrote a moving children’s book and the other discussed how she, as part of an interfaith family, embraces December. The children’s book that I discovered, and delighted reading as a library volunteer, is called The Christmas Menorahs How a Town Fought Hate. It’s a true story from 1993, when Billings, Montana took a terrible hate incident and used it as both a teachable moment, and a moment of united defiance against hate. I then heard Chicago author, Barbara Mahany, discuss how she treasures the December darkness as deeply spiritual, as a way to go inside, to shut out the early December hecticness, to embrace the two candle-centric holidays that her family celebrates. In turn, I now cherish our Advent wreath that burns brighter as the days grow dimmer.
In this December of 2020, when most of the world is facing a darker December than most, when we could all benefit from lighting as many candles in the darkness until the vaccine lightens the darkness for us, perhaps you can find this special holiday book, and read it to a young person in your life? Or perhaps, in need of hope and light, you can just read it yourself to reaffirm that light is indeed stronger than darkness.
by Kate Evert | Dec 8, 2020 | Corporate Culture, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Future of Work, Human Capital, Leadership Agility, Productivity, Strategy, Work Place
Photo by Christina Morillo, from Pexels
Back in February of 2018, our blog highlighted some best in class recruiting practices. We noted that companies like Microsoft had adapted their screening and selection processes to capture the needed talent of those candidates on the autism spectrum. In so doing, they were actually employing a more robust way of screening all candidates and predicting success within a role and a company culture.
As we all continue to navigate remote working, especially in a certain Midwestern city that has had really low level clouds for several days, what if you heard that there was a place to work where you started your morning with two questions:
- How “interactive” do you feel today?
- What’s your energy level today?
What if you also heard that this same company listed everyone’s preferred communication and feedback preferences? Versus, you know, waiting two days for a call back and then learning someone NEVER checks their voicemail?
A recent article focused the spotlight on Ultranauts, a tech company that has engineered itself not only for remote working, but for the diverse needs of its employees—many of whom are on the autism spectrum. This company’s practices are valuable for all of us right now. Not only because they allow the workforce to absorb information in the ways that they
prefer—but because it practices the key components of good employee communications:
1. Tell them what you are going to tell them
2. Tell them
3. Tell them what you told them
AND with technology to take notes, so that no one gets stuck being the scribe!
While Ultranauts developed this culture to accommodate the sensory-overload that many on the autism spectrum experience on a daily basis, in this current environment, these practices offer a great deal to all of us who are on so many different sorts of overloads and prioritizes employee-first communications, so that all succeed—no matter what.
by Kate Evert | Dec 1, 2020 | Agility, Corporate Culture, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Future of Work, Human Capital, Leadership Agility, Performance Management, Performance Reviews, Productivity, Strategy, Work Place
Our last blog shared insights on what activities will drive the workplace of the future. That concept of a workplace poses a huge challenge for many managers out there.
A recent podcast by GBH’s Innovation Lab addressed what organizations must build as they are dismantling cube space: management skills, competency assessments, and performance reviews to match the new workplace. Leaders having trouble coping with remote working will benefit from this program’s insights offered by experts, Professor Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and Liz Fosslein, head of content at Humu. Each organization will need to study and then tailor a return to work hybrid model that fits their organization.
Quite often when we start work on a compensation project, one of the first questions we ask is the state of the performance management program. Too often we get guilty looks followed by hemming and hawing. As Covid-19 began to shut down the world, CHRC probably had a better understanding than most as to why the majority of managers in the US would be very uncomfortable with a remote workplace. The reason many leaders fall back on MBWA (management by walking around) is either because their organization does not have a robust performance management system and/or they have never been trained to manage in the first place.
At the end of the day, remote work is here to stay, and even when it is safe enough to return to large office buildings, hybrid remote and in-office work policies must be developed thoughtfully, in conjunction with robust performance management systems, versus being allowed to regress back to the routines of the MBWA practitioners. For those who thrive working remotely, if the majority of their coworkers return to the office, it could be detrimental to their career and could have a disparate impact on certain groups of employees who gravitate towards working from home. Professor Bloom is emphatic that organizations be prescriptive about “days the senior management are at home,” to ensure that people can be in the office to truly collaborate and innovate, not merely to posture and curry favor with the boss, and “to prevent a promotional advantage and stress everyone out.”
