Tag Archives: work

Communications, Internal Communications

What Do Work Nightmares Tell Us?

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Since today is  Halloween, I couldn’t resist taking a look at nightmares.  Work nightmares in particular.  These night terrors fall into two categories for me, waking horrors, things that happen at work that embarrass or freak you out, such as calling your boss by your spouse’s name during a meeting, (I won’t touch the Freudian implications of that one). Then there are the nightmares where you suddenly realize that you have to give a presentation in 15 minutes on a topic you know nothing about.  In this post, I’ll explore the sleeping nightmares and what they are trying to tell us.

Our dreams are messages that we send to ourselves. They tell us what we really think about a person, issue or activity. They are also one of the ways our subconscious tries to solve problems that have been presented to us during the waking hours.  Our dreams, even the awkward ones, give us some insight into our own minds.  

I once had a dream in which I was in a huge auditorium with thousands of people. My boss was standing on stage with a microphone when he announced that I would be leading the next part of the presentation. Presenting didn’t faze me, nor did being called upon to do the work unexpectedly, the nightmarish bit was that I had no microphone, no slides and no way of being seen or heard. I couldn’t get to the stage and I couldn’t get my boss’ attention to tell him. When I recalled the dream the following morning, it made me laugh…at myself.  I’d been worried about my budget and the tools I had for my job. My concern was that I would not be able to deliver on objectives because I didn’t have the right resources.  I thought I had resigned myself to working with what I had, but apparently, my subconscious had other ideas and wanted to demonstrate the outcome of working without the right tools.

Looking at your dreams is an opportunity to get to know yourself better, but you can’t be too literal. Just because work shows up in a dream, doesn’t mean the dream is about work.  We spend so much time at work that it makes it easy for our minds to call on those elements to send us messages. The opposite is also true. You could have elements of your personal life in a dream that’s really about work.

If you dream about sharpening a million pencils it doesn’t necessarily mean you are worried about dull pencils. You could be frustrated about menial work you have been doing or a repetitive task. The point is, dreams and their interpretation is a very personal thing.  The same item appearing in the dreams of two people can have dramatically different meanings for the dreamers. What we see, feel and hear in our dreams is all about us. Remember, everyone in your dream is you.

There is also some research that suggests that the flow of a dream is a reflection of your subconsciousness trying to make sense of the random images flowing through. Have you ever woken up to the sound of a radio?  If there is a news broadcast playing, then elements of the news can filter into your sub-conscience before you are fully awake and create interesting and random dreams.  This is true for any external stimuli that might leak into your dream.

Interpreting Your Dreams

What’s important to note is that if you have repetitive, stressful or particularly vivid dreams that feel associated with work, you could be sending yourself an important message. Your challenge is to interpret what that message means for you.

One of the simplest ways of analysing your dreams is to start with what is happening around you. Your waking life will be full of clues about what’s causing the dreams, its generally something that has happened in the immediate past, the last day or week.  Our subconscious doesn’t usually store things for later review. Something in your immediate world has to act as a trigger.

The biggest indicator of what a dream means for you is how you feel in the dream. Although scary things may be happening all around you, if the dominant emotion you are feeling is NOT fear, then the dream’s intent isn’t to frighten, believe me, your subconscious knows what buttons to push to frighten you. If you’d like a little help interpreting dreams, check out Susan P. Cooper and Cheryl Therrien’s, “Dream Catchers“.

Have you ever had a nightmare about work?  Ever come to a realization or a solution based on a dream? What do you do to get rid of scary dreams?

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Management

7 Tips on Finding Balance

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7 Tips on Finding BalanceDo you ever feel like you’re sliding down a rabbit hole of ever increasing demands? I have, in fact I was recently feeling that way. I was juggling a number of activities and starting to wonder which would drop when instead I decided  to create a little more balance. Although I love many of the tasks I set for myself, they add up quickly and before I know it, I can start to feel as lost as Alice. A touch bewildered and overwhelmed and wondering where that Cheshire cat was. I decided that I would have to make some choices if I was going to meet my deadlines and achieve the personal goals I had set for myself. So here are some of the steps I took to get back my balance.

1) Assess: I had to take a close look at what I had to do each day and week and figure out a way to put it in order so that I wasn’t driving myself mad with activity or guilt because I wasn’t getting things done.

2) Prioritize: Next was taking a good look at what had to be done and figuring out what I could delay or cancel.  Bye-bye went my Saturday Morning Chit Chat posts (for a while any way) and slow, slow went the transformations I was doing on the house.

3) Simplify: Simplifying was looking at all the steps in the processes around me and determining if I could remove some.   I love following different blogs and providing comments, but for those blogs that post multiple times a week can be a difficult time juggle, so I decided to visit once a week and look at all the post from that week then. Less chaos and a nice treat when I get there.

For the day job, simplify meant taking the travel out of the job. Working from home means I get more done. There are less interruptions  but, I also get some of those home tasks done because I’m not spending that extra 40 minutes in the car. If you can’t work from home consider asking colleagues to give you a little alone time. Set specific hours to help you  get through some of the bigger or more complicated tasks you have at work.

4) Automate and Standardize: Next I started to look for tools that would help me to bring order to my growing flock of responsibilities. Most of those changes involved using technology to reduce the burden of activities I was carrying at work and home.  That activity is still in progress, but I have high hopes. It also means getting the electronic calendar organized so I’m not moving like a ping pong ball from activity to activity.

5) Acknowledge:  Acknowledging that many of the juggling acts I was facing were brought on by me was a big part of finding some calm. I’m not a rut kind of girl. I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again indefinitely so I am always looking for the new idea, challenge or approach, you name it, I’m on it.  I’m occasionally overwhelmed by change, but I’m rarely afraid of it.

If I’m going to take on new challenges, then I have to accept that some of the things I love won’t get done. It’s my job to ensure that the important jobs are completed and the less critical work is what slides.

6) Strategy: Whatever the solution might be, I know I need the space to think strategically about it. If I’ve taken on a series of activities or been given too many additional responsibilities, I need to get to the root of the problem and deal with it. This may mean putting aside a couple of hours to determine what’s causing the chaos and how I might address it.  It could mean taking a couple of days or weeks.  Whatever the challenge, taking the time required to resolve the situation will inevitably be more productive, cost efficient and sane than trying to manage the impossible.

7) Exercise: It’s important to note that when the time crunch started to be felt I added more, not less exercise to my schedule and I’m looking to incorporate more still. I’m not a fitness guru by anyone’s stretch of imagination, but exercise helps me to stay more alert and agile mentally and physically.

So how do you find the balance between doing what you love, loving what you do and finding time for those you love? 

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Communications, Internal Communications, Management

Silence is Deadly

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Challenger Explosion: Image from NASA,/Wikipedia Commons
Challenger Explosion: Image from NASA/Wikipedia Commons

In 1986 the Challenger Space Shuttle lifted off the ground with millions of onlookers from the world over watching in awe. When it exploded 73 seconds later, those same viewers stared in shocked disbelief. Those who witnessed this horrifying incident can still recall where they were as they watched  it unfold.

What followed were 32 months of investigation and millions of questions. Why, how, when did things start to go wrong and what had caused the explosion were prevalent among them. Perhaps even more amazing were the answers that followed. Every engineer on the project had felt the flight should not happen.  They all had misgivings, hesitations, reasons why they thought it should be rescheduled, yet it was scheduled anyway. When asked why they had remained silent, they said, they felt pressured not to speak up. So they coached their concern in the language of hints and abstractions.  They wrote messages that were lengthy, used convoluted language that so distilled the essence of what needed to be said plainly that the style of writing effectively obscured the message.

Their management, under tremendous pressure to produce results or lose funding was reluctant to acknowledge failure, so reluctant that they eventually evolved and encouraged an atmosphere of false optimism. This structure discouraged anyone who expressed hesitation or doubt about the mission’s success from speaking up. They built a structure of silence and it ended up costing lives.

Over the years numerous people have cited the explosion of the Challenger as a sign post to warn us against the danger of silencing employees.  Plain language specialists use it to demonstrate how organizations can not only lose money but lives by not speaking in simple terms and short sentences. Organizational facilitators use it to illustrate the costs of not having a culture that supports open dialogue.  Any organization, collective or group that is focused on outcomes needs to consider the lesson. Ineffective communications is not just inconvenient, slow or frustrating; it can be disastrous.

The stories associated with the cost of miscommunication are almost countless.  The thing is, we don’t need to add to their ranks. Miscommunications isn’t inevitable, unavoidable or inescapable, it’s a choice. We can choose to communicate effectively by making an effort to understand and pursue clarity in our exchanges. We can take the time to ensure that messages are delivered accurately or we can pretend that we don’t have time to communicate and then spend much more time later correcting our miscommunication.  That is, we can spend more time later if we are lucky.

In our personal relationships, we can address miscommunications by taking the time to know what inspires the people around us and then listening with care.  By understanding what motivates a person we create a window into understanding why they say and do the things they do. By eliminating distractions and focusing on what they are saying, we are more likely to have meaningful exchanges. Coincidentally, the same is true of our work relationships.

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Communications, Internal Communications, Management

Does Working From Home or the Office Really Matter?

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Winter TrafficThere have been a few articles, to say the least, on Yahoo C.E.O. Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban all working from home for all Yahoo employees.  Following her earth shattering announcement was a series of, “She had to do it” articles that explained about the shiftless, mindless, non producing consequences that followed from allowing employees to work from home. Or the list of missed opportunities that it represented.

Not long after that came an article in the New Yorker that mockingly explained something that I had been thinking all along. I don’t need to be at home to be non-productive. Statistics have shown for years that the majority of employees are not engaged.  One study indicates that 60% of employees in Canada are disengaged; another 15% are actively disengaged leaving just 25% who care about their work.  By actively disengaged I mean that they are not only not interested in their work, but they spend most of their time at work trying to ensure that others are not interested in their work. As someone who has to manage and motivate, I’d prefer if those actively disengaged employees were at home…permanently, but that’s another discussion.

The problem with employees who work from home and don’t produce isn’t location, among other things its culture and approach.  The work culture, the management approach, the tools provided to employees to do their work, the incentives given and of course, how accountability is reinforced. Working in the office is not going to be a magic wand that solves a lack of engagement, commitment and dare I say it, poor work ethics.

I would be a poor communicator indeed, if I didn’t add that what’s also missing is communications. It would be challenging for even the most dedicated of employees to get their focus right without clear direction and ongoing communications, no matter where they work.  In a world where teams are increasingly spread across continents, never mind cities, the whole debate of home or not home seems a bit moot. We have to learn to adapt our management approach to accommodate the concept that we won’t always be able to see our employees.

We have the technology required to do it. We have webcast, podcast, teleconference calls, videoconferencing, email and that ancient technology called faxes among other things. Yes, people still use fax machines. We can Jostle or Jive our employees into better engagement, we can even use Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus or any other interactive medium to inform and take a pulse. We just have to figure out how to use that technology to help us effectively manage and motivate staff.

I’m in Ottawa, Ontario and I have someone who reports to me from Halifax, Nova Scotia.  She is easily one of the most dedicated employees I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. I don’t worry about what she’s doing.  I don’t debate the merits of having someone reporting to me that I can’t lay eyes on every day. I know what she’s doing based on weekly reports, calls and daily emails. I also get a clue from the products she produces and the services she delivers to our internal clients. We brainstorm on the phone and I have made fun of her by email.

I should also add that I work for an organization that has 5000 employees, the vast majority of whom work independently taking care of clients in their homes.  These incredible employees spend their days on their own and rarely take time for lunch, never mind making their way into an office.  They epitomize dedication, commitment and have a work ethic second to none. As it happens, the majority of the home and community care sector operates this way. So I think before jumping into the, “You need to be in an office to be productive” line, the more critical question is, what kind of culture have you created for employees to be productive in?

For the record, I’ve stared into space from my office desk and worked 12 hours without pause from home. I have also had great impromptu conversations that produced useful insights while I’m in the office and have been known to put a load of laundry on while at home.  There is no magic related to location. The only real impact that working from home has on productivity, is lower traffic volumes.

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