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Showing posts with the label work place

The Best Ways to Use Breaks to Be More Productive (Infographic)

To be your most productive self, take a step back from your work. Between working,  exercising  and spending time with family, you may think you’re giving yourself enough  breaks , but what about during work? Taking breaks throughout your work day is vital to maximizing  productivity . Think you don’t have time? Even a 30-second break can account for an increase in productivity. There are different strategies for a work-break balance too, and it’s important to find the one that is best for you. For example, try out a 25/5-minute split -- that means work in 25-minute blocks and take five-minute breaks between. If that doesn’t work for you, there’s also 50/10 minute split. What you do during your breaks is just as important. If you only have five minutes, eat a healthy snack, read an article or even try to solve a Rubik’s Cube. When you have 10 minutes, make a coffee run, tidy up your desk or watch a TED talk. If you’ve got more than 10 minutes -- take a walk outside, call a

How to Get Experts to Work Together Effectively

How should teams of experts working on knowledge-intensive projects be structured? Should they be hierarchical? Or will flexible, self-organized groups perform better?  Teams often struggle with how to get the most value from the members’ expertise, to minimize conflict, to integrate their diverse expertise, and to leverage it during all phases of a project. The traditional approach is to put the person with the most experience and expertise in charge — for example, a head coach or a chief programmer. The assumption is that this person has the expertise to make the best decisions about how to allocate tasks and responsibilities. Teams that adopt this model feature a rigid hierarchy, whereby final decisions are centralized through this single, formally designated individual. The downside of this approach is that when projects increase in complexity and team size, the central individual can become a communication and coordination bottleneck for the team. Another approac

How to React to Biased Comments at Work

Bias at work can be overt and insidious. It can be shocking and enraging. But the subtle “Wait, what just happened?” moments are far more frequent. Take these examples: A client assumes you are in a subordinate role because of your age. A prospective customer only makes eye contact with your white colleague. A coworker calls you “angry” while your equally assertive male counterpart gets labeled “strong” (a far too often occurrence for women as   one of our previous studies   showed). Moments like these leave you questioning others’ intentions and your own perceptions. The inner dialogue can sound a bit like, “I’m upset. But should I be? Do I have a right to be?” At best, this shadowy bias is exhausting. At worst, it is soul destroying. Bias’s sometimes slippery nature also makes it difficult to eradicate in the workplace. Leaders implement policies that prohibit discrimination against protected classes, but rules can’t prevent unconscious, unintentional bias. How do you legis

How to Tell Your Boss You Have Too Much Work

These days it seems like most people have too much on their plate. Everyone complains about feeling overworked. So how do you tell your boss you simply have too much to do? No one wants to come across as lazy, uncommitted, or not a team player. How can you protect your image as a hard worker while saying uncle? What the Experts Say No matter how busy you are, it can feel exceedingly difficult to talk to your boss about your heavy workload. The reason is twofold, according to Julie Morgenstern, productivity expert and author of  Never Check E-Mail in the Morning .  First, you may worry that by saying something you’re going to lose your job. “In the bottom of your belly is this feeling that if you can’t handle the work, there’s someone else who can; you feel dispensable,” she says. Second, “the natural tendency is to think, ‘I am not working hard enough, smart enough, or efficiently enough. I should be able to handle this.’ So you suffer in silence.” But doing so is dangerous for

Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter

Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey  report  on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. In a global  analysis  of 2,400 companies conducted by Credit Suisse, organizations with at least one female board member yielded higher return on equity and higher net income growth than those that did not have any women on the board. In recent years a body of research has revealed another, more nuanced benefit of workplace diversity: nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people who are different from you may challenge your brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen its performance. Let’s dig into why diverse teams are smarter. They Focu

Will Your Ethics Hold Up Under Pressure?

No executive wants to wake up and find themselves on the cover of the Wall Street Journal , exposed in some widespread breach of ethics. The Volkswagen debacle  is every leader’s worst nightmare. Waiting to see if your organization’s ethical fabric is as bullet proof as you hope isn’t a great strategy, argues  JonathanHaidt . He is a  professor  of Business at NYU, the New York Times  bestselling author of landmark book  The Righteous Mind , and founder of  Ethical Systems , a research-based non-profit dedicated to helping strengthen the ethical backbone of the business community. Over two engaging interviews, he shared his insights and hopes for helping organizations realize greater ethical strength by taking a systemic approach to cultural, structural, strategic and procedural system design. For him, this is more than a field of study. It’s a cause. He says, Business is the engine of growth for all of humanity. The spread of markets and modern business practices is the reason

Six Things You Don't Owe Your Boss

The typical workday is long enough as it is, and technology is making it even longer. When you do finally get home from a full day at the office, your mobile phone rings off the hook, and emails drop into your inbox from people who expect immediate responses. While most people claim to disconnect as soon as they get home, recent research says otherwise. A study conducted by the American Psychological Association found that more than 50% of us check work email before and after work hours, throughout the weekend, and even when we’re sick. Even worse, 44% of us check work email while on vacation. A Northern Illinois University study that came out this summer shows just how bad this level of connection really is. The study found that the expectation that people need to respond to emails during off-work hours produces a prolonged stress response, which the researchers named telepressure. Telepressure ensures that you are never able to relax and truly disengage from work. This prolonge