Janice’s Blog
Quiet Firing: What is it and What Can Managers Do About It?
Recently Gallup released a new report entitled “Quiet Firing: What It Is and How to Stop Doing It.”
We’ve all heard about quiet quitting, in which an employee shows up just to collect a paycheck and bide their time until they either qualify for their pension or find a new job.
But what is quiet firing?
What Can we Learn about Leadership from a Team of Iditarod Mush Dogs?
Recently I had the joyful experience of going on a mush ride with a team of Iditarod huskies. For those of you who are not familiar with mushing or the Iditarod, the Iditarod is an annual 1,100-mile dog sled race from Anchorage to Nome. The dogs train all year as do their mushers. There are many dog sledding tours throughout Anchorage where I was speaking for the Alaska Association of School Business Officials (ALASBO).
Knowing the story of Balto, the true story of the 1925 Diptheria epidemic in Nome, and the transporting of life-saving serum along this trail, I thought it would be fun to take a mush ride with my family.
Banish Organizational Burnout for You and Your Teams
These days there is a lot to be stressed out about, whether you are in Learning & Development, Human Resources, IT (Information Technology), education, healthcare, or any other profession. Stress can come from sad issues in the news, like the recent mass shootings or from the lingering issues related to Covid-19.
No matter what type of stressor is affecting you, left unchecked, your emotions can erupt into full-blown burnout.
Manage Time to Prevent Stress and Burnout
One of the biggest sources of stress that clients ask me about is time management.
The biggest challenge is figuring out how much time each item will take so you can plan your items around your workday, be it eight hours or more or less.
I was recently introduced to a system that makes so much sense to me. It is called the Time Management Matrix that was conceived of by President Dwight Eisenhower.
Caregivers: Care for Yourselves
Did you know that one in five Americans is taking care of a loved one, often a parent who is stricken with a disease or simply nearing the end of their life? Furthermore, more than 50 million people in the US are caregivers to aging parents.
I’d like to take you on a journey of self-discovery told through the voice of one caregiver whose aged father, suffering from liver failure, lives with her. Just imagine being awoken at four in the morning because your father got confused and thought you had missed his paracentesis appointment. Paracentesis is basically a procedure to remove fluid buildup in the abdomen.
How to Tell if You’re Burning Out and Five Tips to Banish Burnout
This week in my Banish Burnout presentation a woman asked an interesting question. She indicated that she was working on managing her stress, but she worried that upon occasion she might be experiencing burnout.
She asked, “How can I tell if I’m burning out and what can I do about it?”
This is such an important question because when you get caught up in the busy-ness of life with all the ongoing unknowns and annoyances stemming from Covid-19 and other stressors, you can inadvertently neglect your mental health.
Pause to Banish Burnout
Why is pausing important?
Pausing is the key to learning how to control or modulate our emotions.
When stressed it is normal to have some sort of initial stress reaction. But, how long should the anger last and how angry should you get?
It turns out that our stress reactions are rooted in patterns of behavior that neuroscientists call neural pathways. These can get developed somewhere along the way in childhood from parents, teachers or peers. The problem comes when our parents or teachers were not equipped to teach or did not role model healthy behavior.
The Great Resignation: How to Engage & Retain Employees
As you no doubt know, this year has been one of the toughest years in recent history to recruit and more importantly, to retain top talent. Dubbed as The Great Resignation by psychologist Anthony Klotz, this period of time was marked by 4 million people leaving their jobs in June and another 4 million in July and August, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
Workers are desperately seeking emotionally intelligent workplaces. That means a C-Suite needs to not only understand their workers, but also truly value them and their opinions.
What Good Are Employee Benefits if No One Knows About Them?
As I interact with clients from different industries, talking about burnout and how to prevent it by changing behavior, I am amazed to learn that many employees are not aware of the key wellness benefits available to them through their jobs, especially mental health benefits.
Many companies are finally paying attention to the importance of incorporating and expanding mental health benefits into their wellness strategy. If we haven’t learned it before, we certainly learned this important lesson last week when Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, famous for her magnificent and seemingly fearless aerial feats, announced that for her safety, both mental and physical, she was taking herself out of the most competitive event of her career.
How burned out are people at their workplaces, who in general, don’t have to literally soar and twist through the air with the whole world watching?
Gratitude Goes a Long Way to Banish Organizational Burnout
What better way is there to engage employees than to make them feel good about their work life by showing gratitude?
There was a period of time not so long ago during the difficult recession of 2008 when many were happy simply to have a job, any job. Gone are those days when an employer shows gratitude by simply paying workers a fair wage for work done. Now vibrant benefits packages are a given. But all of that money invested and extra-fluffy add-on benefits mean nothing if a team member is being overworked, emotionally or verbally abused, or simply under-appreciated or neglected.