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5 Zingers on How to Successfully Work From Home When You Have No Choice

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Once there was an elephant

who tried to use the telephant —

No! No! I mean an elephone

Who tried to use the telephone —

~ Laura Elizabeth Richards

With the mass enforced exodus from the workplace to home due to the coronavirus there has been a plethora of articles extolling a tyranny of tips to teach neophytes how to show up for work when you are forced to work from home.

Many of these tips take the form of commandments to the newly minted home worker.

  1. Thou shalt shower and dress properly before starting your day.
  2. Thou shalt work only in a spot in your home dedicated to your work!

At 65 years of age, let me face the elephant in the room, or at least in the picture below an elephant in the River Kwai. I have worked out of my home for 40 years and have seen many changes in how I work. In addition, what works one day may not work the next so as opposed to cajoling commandments, I offer 5 invitations to entertain as you muddle thought the trials and tribulations of doing homework when you thought you had left it all behind after grade twelve.

Before you read the five invitations, here is my one real tip: If you ever face an elephant while standing downstream in the River Kwai and the elephant needs do an elephant size number 2, swim to the side and upstream as fast as possible.

Do it your way. The Buddha said be a lamp unto yourself and Frank Sinatra sang, “I did it my way.” By all means read tips and articles and talk with others but primarily carve out your own path. Some of us love to do household chores between work tasks while others of us need to sequester in a small basement room with minimal noise and no family interaction. Don’t be surprised if your ways and means of work alter based on how you are that specific day, what is going on with anyone else living in the home (including the cat), and the nature of your task.

View this experience as an experiment. Perhaps when the crisis is over you will want to request more opportunities to work from home or you will know that you are meant to be in a bustling office with a cacophony of sounds and a myriad of incidental interactions. Be reflective about how your experience unfolds even if you capture yourself folding laundry when you desperately need to complete the quarterly projections. Stay curious and learn more about your own best ways of working.

Make memories. At one point during my career working from home, I had 3 children under two years of age inhabit the same place I worked (twins were born when our son was one). It was bat-shit crazy at times and the pablum on a report definitely diminished the report’s gravitas but today I have playful memories of the challenges and the time spent at home cemented a close relationship with my children.

Be mindful of your own engagement. To me engagement is caring. Take moments during the day to monitor how much you care about what you are doing. If you are full of care for your work, good— but if your caring is low be careful and don’t become careless. Good relationships can contribute to our caring so know that you may be on your own at home but you are not alone. Make good use of the plethora of tools to stay connected and supported with coworkers from email, text, and the phone to Skype, Zoom. and WhatsApp.

If you can laugh, you can last. Given this is a forced change know that things will go wrong. You may find yourself watching a game show at ten in the morning or you may find yourself with an appetite like an elephant knowing the fridge is just a few short steps away. If you work in your housecoat be sure it doesn’t suddenly fling open when you answer the door to sign for a package.

Please note that I inserted three elephants into this article and loosely referred to a bowel movement with the real elephant in the River Kwai. It wasn’t funny at the time but it brings a smile to my face now as I never knew how fast I could swim when fully motivated. Perhaps even if you feel you are sinking at times the necessity of working from home will help you to swim more powerfully into your work.

I am not prone to prayer but I like to start my working day with this modified serenity prayer composed by an anonymous woman named Jane N: “God grant me the laughter to see the past with perspective, face the future with hope, and celebrate today without taking myself too seriously.”

Perhaps before you return to the office you may discover, “there is no place like home.”

…….

Do you want some coaching/support/guidance on how to work at home? If you would like authentic and down to earth coaching directly with David Zinger, one of the world’s leading experts on employee experience and engagement, on how to work well at home I invited you to contact me for 1 or 2 individual coaching sessions via phone, Zoom, or Skype. During this challenging time I will reduce my fee to $100 Canadian a session — which is under $75 US per session. To get started email me: david@davidzinger.com.

Working from Home

The Secret Power of Moments for Full Engagement

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I believe one of the biggest barriers to full engagement in work is fear. Fear arrives in many forms. One form I am familiar with is procrastination. We put off. We delay. We think we lack good time management or tenacious willpower.

What we lack is a way to tackle the fear that surrounds being engaged and the answer resides in moments. The fear can range from the idea that even if we do our best it won’t be good enough to not even knowing how to do a task and afraid to ask for help.

We can often do in moments what we can’t do in grand plans, big strategies, and “smart” goals because moments shrink fear to something so small that we are no longer afraid.

Here is a simple equation to explain this:

Engagement = Moments > Fear

The next time you encounter personal disengagement and you believe fear is lurking behind the scenes I encourage you to remember this statement:

Moments shatter fear into tiny fragments that can easily be managed and overcome.

Take your next moment, separate it from the herd of endless time, and focus your work in that moment. When you start to string or stack together many moments you may even surprise yourself about what you can accomplish. The poet, William Blake, encourages us to see the world in a grain on sand…

Engage along with me, our best is yet to be.

What we can do as organizations to alleviate or prevent Burnout

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Resilience should not be a cover up for work that causes burnout.

Understanding burnout can teach us a lot about work.

Are your 7 needs at work being met?

The need for (1) autonomy (2) belonging (3) competence (4) positive emotions (5) psychological safety (6) fairness, and (7) meaning?

For over 36 years, I have appreciated and been influenced by the work and research of Christina Maslach on burnout. I credit her work, specifically her book – Burnout: The Cost of Caring – for keeping my love of work alive and preventing a permanent hardening of my human heart. Her presentation in 2018 on burnout may not be slick or even riveting but it is solid and certainly essential. Not everything we need for good work has to glitter and be under 2 minutes.

The presentation may help you prevent burnout, understand burnout if you have experienced it, or engage in small steps to co-create a better workplace for all.

 

Career Zingers #32: Whim

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I was listening to an interview of Jack Docherty with Stuart Goldsmith on The Comedian’s Comedian podcast. Near the end of the podcast Stuart asked Jack what his career plans were for the next 5 to 10 years. Jack responded, “I have no plan.” He said he operates more on a whim and was somewhat apologetic for this and openly wondered if this was the right way to go.

Bend in the path.

Whim can be defined as a sudden wish or idea, often one that cannot be easily explained. This seems to go against the grain of life and career planning — knowing your short and long term goals.

There are many paths to career development. I am not opposed to meticulous career planning with long term goals but I am opposed to people who tell you that there is the only one true path.

Jack, myself, and countless others navigate our careers on whims. We may improvise a life and possibly take the proverbial road less travelled but as Robert Frost so eloquently stated at the end of his poem The Road not Taken, “that has made all the difference.”

Work Engagement: How to Overcome Resource Myopia and Feel Like a Million Bucks

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The ability to marshall our resources for work has a huge impact on work engagement and managing stress. Yet many of us struggle to mobilize the wide variety of resources we have available to us.

Buckets of Pearls

For twenty years, I was a practicing counselling psychologist. My clients taught me much about navigating through their challenges but one thing that stood out for me during those years was how many clients suffered from, what I called, resource myopia.

Visual myopia is a type of near-sightedness where you have difficulty reading road signs and seeing distant objects clearly. Resource myopia is the failure to see personal, social, organizational, and structural resources available to you that seem distant in time, place or memory.

Clients would enter counselling with a problem or concern and fail to see the people, actions, attitudes, knowledge, and other resources that could help them endure, manage, master, or transform what brought them to counselling.

Many clients had used these resources in the past but were now failing to use them and even failing to see that they were even possibilities. My job was less about offering advice or solutions and more about helping them to see and use the resources they already had or could draw upon to deal with the current situation.

It seemed to me that resource myopia was similar to being unaware of our breathing. We are always breathing – it keeps us alive! Yet many of us just take it for granted. Meditators and mindfulness practitioners know the power of breathing to bring us into the moment and to contribute to our over all well-being. Yet many of us fail to see this resource – the ability to take a breather from work – that is literally right under our noses.

A game show example of resource myopia would be a contestant on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” experiencing the demands of a question they don’t have the answer for yet they fail to reach out for a lifeline by asking the audience, getting half the wrong answers eliminated, or phoning a friend.

I am 64 years of age but that does not stop me from being a fanboy of the Job Demand Resource (JD-R) model of work engagement.  I appreciate the rigour, the research, and the immediate relevancy of this approach advanced by a number of academics around the globe including Arnold Bakker and Wilmar Schaufeli.

Here is a brief explanation of the JD-R model from an interview I conducted with Arnold Bakker in 2016:

The JD–R model is a scientific model that can be used to predict employee well-being, including burnout and work engagement. Accordingly, although every job is different, each job has certain characteristics that can be categorized as job demands or job resources. Job demands (e.g., workload, emotional demands) are the drivers of a stress process undermining employee health, whereas job resources (e.g., autonomy, feedback, opportunities for growth) are the drivers of a motivational process in the workplace.

https://www.saba.com/blog/dr-arnold-bakker-on-employee-engagement-and-work-part-2

This brings us back to resource myopia. I believe many employees are myopic to the resources they have available to meet the demands, hassles, threats, and conflicts embedded in work. Perhaps they have forgotten about a powerful tool they could use, a co-worker who could help them, or the possibility to lessen the demands through conversation with their supervisor.

To overcome resource myopia get your “I-checked” with a reflective pause or a work based fine tuning that corrects your murky vision of the resources available to you for the work you do.

Remember job resources can be physical, psychological, social, or organizational factors that help you meet the demands of work, achieve goals, and reduce stress. For example, exercising autonomy, building strong work relationships, seeking opportunities for advancement, utilizing coaching, and learning are just some examples of job resources.

So here is my encouragement to you. To foster work engagement and lessen work stress, the next time you are experiencing work demands that you feel challenged to meet or are causing undue stress, pause and take time to identify, determine, gather, and utilize the resources you already have but are failing to see.

You just might feel like a million bucks after advocating to get your unrealistic work demands cut in half, spending some time on the phone with a friend for emotional support and practical advice, and tapping into the extensive social networks that can offer you the working wisdom of crowds. So what are you waiting for……go phone a friend.