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Well-functioning systems can save us time, enhance collaboration, and boost productivity. However, we must acknowledge that systems can also falter, leading to frustration. This week, we faced several system failures, prompting us to reflect on how to effectively...

Effort versus value is a concept that is relevant to many aspects of our lives, including work. Often, we can become bogged down in tasks that require a lot of effort but don’t actually contribute much value to our work or the organisation we work for. Therefore, it is important to reassess, prioritise, and tweak our efforts to ensure we are getting the most value out of our work.

When a team is on the same page, they work well together, they get things done. It’s a great place to be. There’s a great atmosphere. People are motivated and fulfilled. People are happy. The work is rewarding, there is return on the investment, and it helps the team to be able to function well and to go the long distance.

Work is often not easy and when you work in a team, a lot of people contribute to create something important, something that will benefit others. There are seasons when work is long and hard, and for some people, it doesn’t seem to ever stop. There are constantly people to attend to, issues to address, and reports to write. It can feel like putting out fires every single day. In any organization, team members are the lifeline that keeps the work moving forward. 

There’s lots of change happening in the world at the moment, and there’s a lot of change happening within the workforce as well. We are beginning to experience a significant shift in the roles played by different generations. 

The modern workplace is a diverse melting pot of people from different generations. It is common to have a mix of younger and older employees working side by side. However, this intergenerational mix can sometimes lead to misunderstanding and a disconnect between people from different generations. Communication can be challenging, and working together effectively can seem impossible. In this blog post, we will explore how to bridge the gap between generations in the workplace by better learning and understanding, listening, giving voice, and being open to new ideas and opportunities.

Digital strategy is a bit of a buzzword at the moment. Some organisations have a digital strategy in place. It might be a highly planned and intentional strategy, or perhaps one that has been thrown together quickly to try and make some quick changes. The secret to a successful digital strategy is to have a real purpose for what is driving the strategy and understanding the role of digital strategy.

We hope that when we communicate with people, they get the message. The communication is clear, it’s effective, it’s concise, everyone’s on the same page. Sometimes, though, that’s not the case. When the other person doesn’t receive the message, they don’t understand it, communication is rocky, and you don’t have a clear outcome.

Whether we think about it or not, we have a lot of first-time encounters, both in person and online. This can happen in person when you’re meeting with someone for the first time. It could be a first date. It could be being in a meeting with people. It could be being in a lecture or something like that. Online, we have new communication coming in all the time, whether that’s email, social media, or all sorts of communication. And that happens both in the way that we receive it and in what we send out to people as well. 

So you’ve made it to Friday. It’s the end of the week. You’ve been working really hard to try and get everything done. You’re ready for the weekend to come and you’re ready for your paycheck to hit your bank account so you can go home and not think about work. And work is definitely not the most important thing, but it’s still important to understand the value of the work you’re doing and the meaning that that work has, to understand the contribution that you’re making and to recognise the significance of that. 

It’s very easy in our work to just keep doing things the same way that we’ve always done them. The problem with this is it’s hard then to improve on what we do. If we just keep doing things the same way, we’re going to get the same result each time. It’s good to step back and look at how we can make our work simple.

It’s Monday morning and you’ve got a list of tasks that are a mile long. There’s a lot to do and you just hit the ground running. You sprint really, really hard to try and get everything done. But a lot of the time, not everything does get done and we get tired in the process of running really hard. We need to think of work not as a sprint, but as a marathon. It’s a long race and a long game, and the work is probably never going to be going to end. We want to make our work sustainable.