New Home
The Watershed Solutions blog has moved! Please visit our new home at watershedsolutions.ca to stay up to date with all our great content!
Look forward to connecting with you on our new blog!
Quotes of the Week
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. ~ Winston Churchill, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out. ~ Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father of the United States of America
In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. ~ Bill Cosby, Comedian
I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying. ~ Michael Jordan, Professional Athlete
Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness. ~ Oprah Winfrey, Philanthropist
Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street. ~ Zig Ziglar, Author
Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed on an equal or greater benefit. ~ Napoleon Hill, Author
How Work/Life Balance Drives Employee Engagement
I recently attended an HCI webinar “It’s Five O-Clock Somewhere”- Increasing Employee Engagement by Improving Work/Life Balance. Work/life balance is something we all need to maintain; it’s also strongly connected to employee engagement. Employers who do not effectively manage balance fuel burnout and demotivation- the enemies of engagement!
Kevin Sheridan, the presenter and Chief Engagement Officer and Chief Consultant of HR Solutions, began the webinar by defining employee engagement. He classified our desire to be part of the value that an organization creates into 3 categories: engaged, ambivalent and disengaged.
- Engaged: “highly engaged and committed to the mission, vision and values of the organization”
- Ambivalent “not apt to go the extra mile”
- Disengaged “negative energy, they focus on problems”
According to his research, only 27% of employees are actively engaged while 60% are ambivalent/ not engaged and 13% are actively disengaged (HR solutions’ International Research Institute). Sheridan attributes much of this disengagement to a lack of respect for work/life balance on the part of employers. He supported this claim with some research:
- 86% of male employees and 67%of female employees work more than 40 hours a week (The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict, 2011).
- 74% of people say it is important to them that their organization consider and, where possible, support flexible scheduling arrangements or job sharing (HR Solutions Research Institute).
- 87% of employees say it is important to them that their organization allows employees to choose from a variety of benefits to meet their individual needs (HR Solutions Research Institute).
- In 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked. Today, 70 percent of children live in households where both parents are employed (The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict, 2011).
The presenter also emphasized the importance of flexibility and outlined three possible strategies.
- Providing alternative work options for employees
- Recognizing and respecting work life balance as an important trend
- Supporting virtual teams to minimize employee stress levels
Here are a few tips that have been inspired by Sheridan’s cardinal three;
Allow Employees to Work from Home Once a Week: Being more flexible with employees means you exhibit a high level of trust regardless of where they are working from. Allowing employees to work from home once a week also means that they no longer start off their day with the hassle and stress of a commute and they can work in a comfortable environment. This helps to strengthen the employee/ employer relationship.
Adopt Emailing Hours: It is more difficult for workers to draw a line between work and home given technologies that provide 7/24 access. In the same way that employees have set working hours (i.e. 9-5) employers should introduce emailing hours and refrain from contacting their staff past a mutually agreed upon time. This will make it easier for employees to create a division between work and home.
Equip Employees with Stress- Relief tools: Stress is an inevitable. Rather than trying to eliminate it, it is important to help employees manage it. Managers and leaders should equip their staff with tools to deal with stressful situations. Perhaps it means encouraging your staff to take a few minutes at the start of each day to walk through a guided meditation or sending them a funny cartoon, video, quote or story to get them laughing and relaxing. What is most important is to show them that you have an interest in their wellbeing.
Quotes of the Week
Image courtesy of Photography by jscreationzs/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. ~Edwin Land, Inventor
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity. ~T. S. Eliot, Poet
Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties. ~Gail Sheehy, Journalist
Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work. ~Rita Mae Brown, Writer
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous. ~Bill Moyers, Journalist
Rule of art: Cant kills creativity! ~Camille Paglia, Authour
The heart and soul of the company is creativity and innovation. ~Robert Iger, CEO Disney
Book of the Week
We: How to Increase Performance and Profits through Full Engagement
Author: Rudy Karsan and Kevin Kruse
Date: January 24, 2011
Pages: 236
“We live in a new era where work and life are blended as opposed to balanced, entitlements are a thing of the past, and job satisfaction is at a record low. This is a crisis for individuals because negative emotions at work spill over to our personal lives and cross over to those around us.” – Rudy Karsan
The book We: How to Increase Performance and Profits through Full Engagement provides relevant and actionable tips on how leaders can inspire immediate personal and organizational growth through interactive exercises, videos and anecdotes. Karsan and Kruse inform readers of the great impact engagement can have on a company’s financial performance that is validated from findings of over 10 million worker surveys, as well as their personal experiences as leaders of emerging companies.
Here are their fundamentals for driving employee engagement and your bottom line
- Growth: Employees need to feel that they are advancing in their careers or learning new things
- Recognition: Employees need to feel appreciated and believe that their ideas count
- Trust: Employees need to trust senior leaders and feel confident about the future
Quotes of the Week
None of us is as smart as all of us. ~Ken Blanchard, American Author
We must all hang together or most assuredly we shall hang separately. ~Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father
Teamwork is the ability to work as a group toward a common vision, even if that vision becomes extremely blurry. ~Author Unknown
If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. ~Henry Ford, Industrialist
No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Poet
In union there is strength. ~Aesop, Writer
Bust through Stress in 3 minutes or less
The reality is that stress is an inevitable part of life. However, the key to living a more balanced life is to manage stress so it doesn’t manage you as opposed to trying to eliminate it completely.
Here is a quick Watershed Training Solutions Stress Busting strategy:
Take 10 Slow Deep Breaths – Why? Breathing is one of the easiest systems to control in order to relax (Dr John Mason, Guide to Stress Reduction). Close your door or put on a headset so your colleagues won’t be disturbed. Close your eyes. Take 10 deep slow breaths where the exhalation is longer than each inhalation. As you breathe, make sure your abdomen fills up like a balloon when you inhale and sinks in when you exhale. Very quickly you will feel more relaxed and able to refocus.
Enjoy this tip? Check out our sample e-book Stress Busters: Simple Strategies in 3 Minutes or Less to gain access to 35 proven strategies for dealing with life’s ups and downs!
Book of the Week
Author: Daniel H. Pink
Date Published: 2009
Pages: 272
The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. – Daniel H. Pink
The Book Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us is an informative read that puts decades of scientific research into perspective- without denying the realities of what truly motivate us. Trade in your carrots and sticks for a strategy that is bound to motivate your employees, while increasing your productivity and driving your bottom line.
Watershed Training Solutions Stamp of Approval: This book is a phenomenal resource that we used in our latest newsletter article Intrinsic Motivation: The Key to Increasing Employee Engagement and its related tip How to Boost intrinsic Motivation to Increase Employee Engagement. Pink offers sound reasoning supporting his push for intrinsic motivation as well as effective strategies that managers, leaders and individual employees can use to boost this critical motivator. Checkout our Article and Tip to learn more!
Quotes of the Week
Image courtesy of Photography by sheelamohan/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
“The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” –Ken Blanchard, Author
“Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.” –Vince Lombardi, Football Coach
“A good leader is not the person who does things right, but the person who finds the right things to do.” –Anthony T. Dadovano
“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” –John Quincy Adams, American President
“The quality of leadership, more than any other single factor, determines the success or failure of an organization.” –Fred Fiedler and Martin Chemers, Psychologists
“The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.” –Warren G. Bennis, Author
At Watershed Training Solutions (WTS) we are all about making your life easier. Let us do the research and present you with the facts, stats, tips and tricks that you will need to increase your awareness and bring positive change to your workplace.
We won’t crowd your inbox with useless ads, nor will we be the cause of your information overload. WTS’ promise to you is one hard hitting email at the start of every month!
Sign up today– it’s free, it’s useful and it’s taking the search out of research
Watershed Solutions Blog 