What can employers do to help employees beat commuter blues. And what can employees do to help themselves? Find out in this month’s article.
Are you living a ‘Hygge’ life? If you haven’t discovered this amazing Danish lifestyle trend sweeping the world, it’s time you did. In this article, we make it easy for you.
“69% of professionals in NZ state that work-life balance, including flexible working, is their top priority when seeking a new role.”
– Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment
NOTE: If you are well versed in the benefits of getting work-life balance right, we trust you’ll find the insights in this article useful to share with the managers you’re working with.
Sustainability. It is quite possibly the most urgent issue facing humanity right now. We have long known that companies and other organisations can cause extreme negative consequences on the environment, even if these are unintended. So what can we do about it? And what is sustainability?
A definition of sustainability
“The quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance.” Read More
“It is not what the coach knows; it is what his players have learned.”
– Anonymous
The Best Leaders are also Excellent Coaches
We all know great leadership is made up of many different elements, skills and roles. These all come together in people differently around experience, education, personality and leadership style. However, one important leadership role that is often overlooked is that of coach. Leaders are also mentors, and the labels of Coach and Mentor are often used interchangeably in a business context. But there is a big difference between the two.
Is ghosting really that scary?
Until recently, ‘ghosting’ was a term used almost exclusively in the dating world. It’s when the person you’re dating disappears without further communication, never to be heard of again. In essence, like a ghost, they were there and then – poof – they vanish without an explanation.
However, it is a phenomenon that is filtering into the workplace, much to the frustration of HR professionals. Companies are reporting applicants simply not turning up for job interviews, successful candidates failing to arrive for their first day or, in extreme cases, employees quitting their job on the spot with no warning or reason. They just vanish.
The problem with ingrained patterns of thinking
As humans, we naturally develop patterns of thinking based on repetitive tasks and commonly assessed knowledge. This is useful because it allows us to quickly apply the same actions or learned responses to the same or similar situations or problems.
What are schemas?
These patterns of thinking are often called schemas. A schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps us organise and interpret information. They can be useful because they let us take shortcuts when interpreting the massive amount of information in our environment. For example, we have schema for horses. We know they are large, have four legs, hair and a tail. When environmental stimuli (i.e. a horse in a paddock) match this schema, this pattern of thought is brought to mind and we know we are looking at a horse.
The trouble with schemas
But schema can also be troublesome. Because they are generated automatically, we make assumptions (using the horse schema, we assume it’s a horse, but it could be a donkey). Schemas can prevent us from seeing a situation or problem in a new way that would allow us to develop a new problem-solving strategy. In life – and in our work – this can cause us to blindly try to solve problems without questioning or further study.
Using Design Thinking
When we use a Design Thinking approach, we seek to challenge assumptions and redefine problems in an attempt to find or develop alternative solutions or strategies that may not be obvious with our initial understanding. For this reason, Design Thinking is often referred to as ‘outside the box’ thinking.
We are proud to be sponsoring The Mt Albert Mud Run on 26 May. It will be a fun community event, so come and join us!
It was Brain Awareness Week recently. This annual global campaign is designed to raise public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. That got us thinking… we know that research on the human brain is discovering new information around Learning and Development all the time, so we took a look at what HR can learn from neuroscience.
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