for W3c validation
Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive.
Flexible working now arriving at aisle three
Anne says: There is actually so much that is just wrong about the opening paragraph and accompanying photo that I had to take a deep breath before I started ranting writing.
However, the point of the article is not about working (flexibly) in a supermarket space. It’s about commercial real estate and, along with hybrid work practices and flexible patterns, the evaluation of offices as a cost and ways to better utilise real estate footprints.
There’s some interesting examples of businesses being “multifunctional”, that is, allowing their premises to be used after their working hours. One such example cites hairdressers that are allowing bars to use their premises at night. All I can think of is the mess that needs to be cleaned up and hygiene procedures before the hairdresser can use the space in the morning!
These are not new concepts – commercial kitchens have been sharing facilities for many, many years. What is changing is the view of working spaces – not simply shared offices or coworking facilities. Organisations are now innovating how they will work and what their space requirements will be – without the fixed concepts of pre-pandemic.
While we’ve discussed hybrid and flexible work models in numerous Friday Faves, the extension of thinking about models of real estate to expand options has become a new dimension in the mix of working models. But I do feel reasonably confident that we won’t be working in supermarket aisles!!
Read: https://workplaceinsight.net/flexible-working-now-arriving-at-aisle-three/
Managers, what are you doing about change exhaustion?
Jakkii says: Ah, change. As reliable as death and taxes, as the expression goes… or should.
The past two-and-a-bit years of covid have been ones of endless change, and worse, change in the face of ongoing uncertainty. It’s no wonder people are exhausted, and it’s certainly no wonder we have change fatigue.
“The heightened level of uncertainty in both our work and home lives pushed many of us into change exhaustion. Gartner found that employees’ ability to cope with change in 2020 was at 50% of pre-pandemic levels.”
Change fatigue and resistance is absolutely not a new concept, and it didn’t just come about because of covid. But we’ve all been impacted differently, and we’ve all been forced to face change – temporary or permanent – in both our personal and professional lives over the past couple of years. It’s not surprising that, in that context, research showed our ability to cope with more change reduced drastically in the midst of the pandemic. I’d be interested to see what research says now, in 2022, about our ability to cope with change; anecdotally, I’d guess we’d still see it sitting well below pre-pandemic levels, even if it may have recovered somewhat from 2020.
“Too often, organizations simply encourage their employees to be resilient, placing the burden of finding ways to feel better solely on individuals. Leaders need to recognize that change exhaustion is not an individual issue, but a collective one that needs to be addressed at the team or organization level.”
Whatever our current collective state of ability to cope with change, organisations are always going to have some need at some point to change and adapt and to bring their people along that change journey. As the authors note in the article above, it needs collective understanding and collective approaches. The article offers four practices for helping teams and entire organisations manage and overcome change fatigue.
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Pause to acknowledge change, and the discomfort that comes with it
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Adopt the mantra, “I am a person who is learning _______.”
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Make a plan from which you will deviate
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Invest in rituals
As always, you can read the article for more detail under each heading, but the core points of these really are about naming the negative emotions associated with change to allow them to be resolved (or at least managed); reframing change as a learning opportunity instead of an “I can’t do this” situation; making a plan so we can start to move forward but keeping it flexible so that the plan can change as the journey continues and everyone learns and knows more; and leaning into rituals and habits that help give us points of certainty and reliability, and ultimately help us counter and alleviate the stress of the unknown in change.
For me, this is very much about focusing on the people side of change, having empathy and compassion for how people are feeling, and providing ways of finding structure and comfort in the face of uncertainty. More than just ticking a box on a change plan, it’s about connecting with one another and sharing the load as you walk the change path together and come through the finish line. Possibly into a brand new change.
Read: https://hbr.org/2022/05/managers-what-are-you-doing-about-change-exhaustion
This is what an NFT consultant does all day
Jakkii says: I came across this Buzzfeed article that is really more of a diary-of-an-NFT-consultant piece and, well…. I don’t feel any further informed. Presented here without further comment… though I would love to hear your thoughts!
Friday Five
some of you have never had to download mp3s one by one and painstakingly change the song title and artist credits for it to appear somewhat put together on your ipod and it shows
— local 94zphile (@houseofwhalien) May 10, 2022
Five things you might find interesting this week:
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Cluttercore: What’s really behind Gen Z’s revolt against minimalism?
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Social media platforms still can’t stop mass shooting videos from going viral
