Category: Professional Development

For many people, the “work” side of work-life balance is somewhat more defined than life. While it may be hard to manage a myriad of tasks and shifting priorities, work is generally time-bound and there are some boundaries, if one is disciplined about it and communicates expectations with others. Back-up coverage may be possible, shifts or work hours can be managed and many jobs come with leave or sick leave. 

There are lots of strategies and tips out there for finding work-life balance:  Set Boundaries!  Just Say No!  Set Priorities!  Take Breaks!  These tips are grounded in good intentions and hold some gold on their own but may also sidestep the deeper questions that cause the best work-life balance action plans to fail.  Here are some different ways of reframing the work-life balance equation to create change from within.

Are you or members of your team drowning in paperwork or having trouble finding things? A messy workspace or filing system can affect productivity and increase stress. This exercise makes a great team activity and will walk you through getting organized in less than an hour a week over eight weeks. 

Organizations around the country are introducing formal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to harness the power of difference and mutual respect in organizations. However, making these DEI programs real comes down to real people communicating and working with each other every day: with peers, supervisors, teams, customers and colleagues.

Organizational goal planning is a common activity that can happen any time of the year – but the New Year is a particularly good time for teams to regroup and reassess.  In this article, we provide a quick reminder of the general process involved in organizational planning, and then focus on the content of the goals themselves.

We often think of New Year’s resolutions in personal terms – thinking about and writing down goals or activities we would like to achieve and do in the coming months and year.  It is also a good time for organizations to engage in developing or refining organizational goals, either to mark the start of the new year or a new quarter.

If you are looking for a job, or hoping to move to a better one, you’re probably doing all the right things: Networking, updating your social presence on LinkedIn, honing your resume. But are you also improving your skills? And in particular, are your Excel skills where they need to be?

Microlearning is training that delivers bite-sized pieces of information to learners.  Together, several microlearning courses can be combined to create a larger training program – but each should be able to stand on its own as well. 

National Coffee Day is in September, and the event raises an interesting question: What could you teach someone in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee?  This is not just a theoretical question – for learning and development professionals, that question is at a heart of a new training approach: microlearning.

When the world locked down, those who transitioned to working from home assumed it would be work as normal, just not in the usual workplace. Many also thought their work would return to the office – once the pandemic had waned.