boundaries in a - craig dowden · we delve into radical office space design, exploring some of the...
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YOUR WORKPLACE | VOLUME 20 ISSUE 4 | JULY/AUGUST 2018 3
JULY/AUGUST 2018 VOLUME 20 ISSUE 4 YOURWORKPLACE.CA
TABLE of CONTENTS
W H AT M AT T E R S5 Could a Dumber Phone Make
You More Productive?
7 Collecting Data on Employees: Cutting-Edge or Creepy?
8 Power Up: Crickets
T H E E X P E R T S
10 GARBER // How to Care for Yourself When it’s Your Job to Care for Others If you’re feeling drained or tapped out, know that you’re not alone
12 DOWDEN // Assume the Project is Dead and You Killed It Grim though it might sound, conducting a pre-mortem before a big project can help ensure positive results
14 KOSTECKA // You Can’t Embrace Inclusion then Expect Everyone to be the Same Learn how to create D&I initiatives that really work
16 MATHERS // Why Canadian Employee Engagement is Falling while Global Engagement is on the Rise As exciting as new technology and business practices are, the impacts on engagement aren’t all positive
F E AT U R E S
18 We Want You to Be a Deviant Not all rebellious acts are bad — learn how to infuse happiness into work through positive deviance
20 Employees Need Boundaries, not Walls Two organizations innovating workspace design discuss the new trends that are improving the open-plan office
25 How to Work Around the Clock (and Stay Sane) When it’s always nine-to-five somewhere, how do global citizens avoid working a 24/7 workday?
29 The Trick to Ensuring Flex Work Doesn’t Become Endless Work What you need to know to manage the challenges of flexible working arrangements
41 Exploring New Ways of Learning at Work At this year’s Imagine Your Workplace Conference we tried out some new techniques we want to share with you — and we invite you to suggest your own brave ideas for reinventing learning in the workplace
I N E V E RY I S S U E
4 UP FRONTMaintaining Boundaries in a 24/7 Life
6 READER FEEDBACK
33 YW PROFILE Photographers Without Borders
37 CONVERSATIONSRewire Your Brain to Become a Better Leader
44 THE BUSINESS-MINDED READER
46 WHAT I THINK Why Authentic Gestures Are Important, Even When No One Believes Them
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COVER STORY
25HOW TO WORK AROUND THE CLOCK
(AND STAY SANE)
4 JULY/AUGUST 2018 | VOLUME 20 ISSUE 4 | YOUR WORKPLACE
JULY/AUGUST 2018VOLUME 20 ISSUE 4
EDITORIALEDITOR-IN-CHIEFVera Asanin
EDITORIAL ADVISORY COUNCILJ. Scott Allinson VP, Public Affairs HRPA
Nancy Buck VP, Human Resources Communitech
Sandra Carlton Joint VP, Mission, Values & People Providence Care
Dr. Craig Dowden Organizational Psychologist
Julie Einarson VP, Culture and Communications Benefits By Design (BBD)
Kim Macey, BBA, CHRP VP, Human Capital, DP World
ASSISTANT EDITOR Emily Follett-Campbell [email protected]
COPY EDITOR Wade Guyitt [email protected]
CONTRIBUTORSSam Boyer Alice Chen Kyla Colburn Craig Dowden, PhD Janet Garber Sarah Juggins Anna Kostecka Todd Mathers Lisa Sansom, MAPP Lesley Taylor
ART ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTORAnthony Aird
PHOTOGRAPHYTom Arban Photography Richard Johnson Photography Pixabay Shutterstock Stephen Wild Stockphotosecrets
Maintaining Boundaries in a 24/7 LifeIt used to be easier to say “no” to work. Only a few select professionals,
like firefighters and surgeons, were expected to be available at all hours. In the not-so-old days, if your boss wanted you to work on a file at some inopportune time — late at night, say, or on the weekend — the only way
to get it was to go into the office and retrieve that stack of paper from the filing cabinet. Now, access to any document is pretty much instantaneous. If you were on vacation in a rainforest in Costa Rica, or some other remote locale, you couldn’t attend a work meeting, at least not easily, and not without prohibitively expensive long-distance phone charges. Now you can video conference meetings from pretty much anywhere.
More and more often we are expected to be on call. The 2013 Canadian Work, Stress and Health study found that 28% of Canadians who work full-time for an employer frequently check work-related e-mail or text messages after hours. The numbers now are likely higher. When technology enables us to work from anywhere at any time, how do we avoid working everywhere, all the time? Accepting a 24/7 work world shouldn’t mean the loss of your personal life.
In this issue we take a look at how to maintain boundaries in our age of constant connection. Our new Your Workplace writer from across the pond, Sarah Juggins, covers international sporting events remotely; she expresses her enthusiasm for this way of work and the freedom it allows her, sharing some tips. We also take a look at the downside of flex work, examining some of the dilemmas it presents and how to overcome them.
We delve into radical office space design, exploring some of the innovative ways companies deal with the obstacles that new ways of working present. Our experts examine diversity and inclusion, pre-mortems, and employee engagement, and share a personal account of overcoming horrible work-life balance. We speak with a positive deviant and tell you why you should encourage deviance in your organization. Plus, we tell you why you should eat crickets and get a dumber phone.
Enjoy this issue, and don’t forget we love your feedback. If you have a great idea you want to share or a beef you want to vent, give us a shout at [email protected].
Happy working, happy reading, and from all of us at Team YW — make work better!
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6 JULY/AUGUST 2018 | VOLUME 20 ISSUE 4 | YOUR WORKPLACE
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Your Workplace is published six times a year by Your Workplace, owned and operated by 1425545 Ontario Inc. Print run is distributed nationally at newsstands and by single and bulk subscriptions; price for a one-year subscription is $69 plus HST. Visit yourworkplace.ca for more information Copyright 1998-2018. All rights reserved. YOUR WORKPLACE is a registered trademark of 1425545 Ontario Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the publisher. ISSN Number 1496-4406. Printed in Canada. Freelance articles and illustrations will be considered for publication and should be sent to [email protected].
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WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!
OUR PROMISE TO YOU:
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READERFEEDBACK
The story “Spy vs. Spy: Toeing the murky line between competitive intelligence and corporate espionage” in the May/June issue 2018 of Your Workplace was very interesting. Maybe I am naïve, but I thought that spy stuff only happened in the movies. I had no idea that this occurred in Canada … that people would steal intellectual property of the company you work for, for personal financial gain. Great story even though I don’t think I wanted to know about it!
ROSE-COLOURED GLASSES (AKA D. BROWN)SASKATOON, SK
I really love the cover on the magazine this month. Engaging to look at and enticing to read. Well done!
W. B. WILMANFRECON CONSTRUCTION
Good day,
I read your Spring 2018 Wellness Matters Newsletters and really enjoyed it. I don’t know if you’d like to incorporate this in your next issue but I thought I would send it along. To help me reduce stress at work, I do the following:
I sit comfortably in my chair, feet flat on the floor and hands on my thighs or armrests. Then:
1. Inhale slowly to the count of four;2. Exhale slowly to the count of four;3. Inhale slowly to the count of five;4. Exhale slowly to the count of five;5. Continue to the count of eight.
When I’m done, I feel refreshed and ready to continue with my work. Thank you.
CHERYL J. MELANSONCFHA HALIFAXDND, GOVERNMENT OF CANADA
THEEXPERTS
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Following a disappointing project, leaders often conduct a post-mortem. In this time-honoured tradition, the executive will sit with his or her team and explore what went wrong — what were the steps or factors that caused the undesirable outcome? The goal of this analysis is to spark
individual and organizational learning in order to help avoid a similar fate in the future.
» B Y C R A I G D O W D E N , P H D
Grim though it might sound, conducting a pre-mortem before
a big project can help ensure positive results
The obvious shortcoming of this approach is that it occurs after a project is completed and it’s too late to change the results. Although certainly valuable, post-mortems depend entirely on hindsight. However, with some projects, a second chance isn’t possible, and it’s important to get it right the first time.
Daniel Pink offers a brilliant alternative in his latest bestseller, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Time. It’s called a “pre-mortem,” and I recently spoke with him about this learning practice.
“Let me be clear, this is not my idea. It originated from a psychologist named Gary Klein,” says Pink. “A pre-mortem is basically imagining there’s a dead body and analyzing the dead body beforehand to predict what could have gone wrong.”
The first step is to imagine you have a time machine. Before you begin a new project, Pink advises to “ask your team, ‘Okay, let’s go forward in six months or a year from now, when we are supposed to be finished our assignment.
Assume the Project is Dead and You
Killed It
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YOUR WORKPLACE | VOLUME 20 ISSUE 4 | JULY/AUGUST 2018 13
Craig Dowden (PhD) is President of Craig Dowden & Associates, a firm focused on supporting clients in achieving leadership and organizational excellence by leveraging the science of peak performance. Craig delivers evidence-based executive coaching and leadership development training. His first book, Do Good to Lead Well: The Science and Practice of Positive Leadership, will be published through Forbes this fall. Connect with him @craigdowden.
E X P E R T
Let’s imagine it is a complete disaster. It totally went off the rails and did not deliver anything remotely close to what we were supposed to deliver. What happened?’”
This type of forecasting enables team members to reflect on what could be serious obstacles to the project’s success: Is it under-resourced? Are there troubling market conditions? Do we need the buy-in of internal or external stakeholders to make this happen? These provocative questions then allow the team to take preventative action and address these potential areas for concern right away.
Pink used a pre-mortem before writing his latest book. “When I was at the beginning stage, I said, ‘Okay, two years from now, imagine I had not written a book, not finished it, or even worse, had written a bad book. What did I do wrong?’ And I realized that what I did wrong was that I didn’t commit to writing every day. I said ‘yes’ to too many outside things. On this particular book, because there was so much research out there, I got lost in the research. Or [I made other mistakes], such as not regularly delivering chapters to my editor, which meant if I was going off in the wrong direction it would be too late for him to tell me, ‘Hey, you’ve got a problem here.’”
Using these insights, Pink wrote everything down on a card next to his desk as a reminder about his potential pitfalls. He addressed these project risks, organized his schedule and ensured he had the supports he needed in place, including enlisting the help of a research assistant. This enabled him to write a
book that was well-received by critics, became another bestseller and was delivered on time.
“I’m a convert when it comes to the pre-mortem. I think they’re extremely useful,” he says.
And what about critics who say you cannot know everything that could possibly go wrong in a project?
Pink agrees, but says that “although you can’t anticipate everything that might go wrong, you can anticipate a lot of the major and likely obstacles, and then build your project plan accordingly.”
So, the next time you are faced with a major project, either personally or when leading a team, consider conducting a pre-mortem. Looking into the future and anticipating future obstacles is a valuable exercise that will help you identify and plan for potential pitfalls and stay the course. It is a powerful method of learning from which we can all benefit.
IN PRACTICE Questions to ask during a pre-mortem include:
“A pre-mortem is basically imagining there’s a dead body and analyzing the dead body beforehand to predict what could have gone wrong.” — DANIEL PINK
What if the technology doesn’t
work?
What if we’re late?
What if we lose our most valuable
team member?
What if we lose our most important
supplier or customer?
What if we’re too
expensive?
Are we basing demand on a trend
or a fad?
Can we scale faster than planned?
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