Assignment:
Question 1: Work/Life Balance in the Modern Era -
Using this article: https://familylivingtoday.com/work-life-balance-modern-era/
Is work/life balance possible? Finding the perfect balance between work and your life can be difficult, but it's definitely possible. You don't want to slack off at work, but you also don't want to push your family and home life to the side.
Answer the following questions...
1. What has the most positive impact on your work/life balance?
2. What has the most negative impact on your work/life balance?
3. How do you feel the Ops Center views Work/Life Balance?
4. What else can the Ops Center do to improve Work/Life Balance?
5. What are some things that you can personally do to improve your work/life balance?
Question 2: HBR IdeaCast -
Serco recently emailed everyone the below podcast links from Harvard Business Review. Read the description, click the link, listen to the podcast and share you insights about what you learned, how it is relevant to your job or our contract. What would you recommend to leadership or changes would you suggest based on this podcast?
1) HBR IdeaCast - Engagement Within Teams
Feeling motivated and purposeful on the job is a key driver of engagement within teams. Understanding the impact your performance has on others helps build energy towards a shared mission within your team and with others throughout the company. At Serco, we strive to encourage people to contribute their unique strengths in order to improve our services and create value for our customers. Leveraging individual contributions and supporting collaboration within our teams is how we learn, innovate and grow as an organization.
Understand Your Purpose and Leverage Individual Strengths for Impact
HBR IdeaCast offers a free resource to teams and managers to encourage deeper thinking around the meaning of engagement. This is Serco's second Viewpoint Podcast Feature - particularly helpful if your team is pursuing action planning around dimensions such as Diversity & Inclusion, Learning and Development or Empowerment / Autonomy.
In this podcast episode:
- Professor of organizational behavior Dan Cable explains why people often lose their enthusiasm for their work and what we can do, both individually and within teams, to feel more motivated and purposeful on the job.
- Learn about "job crafting" and how it can be used to add value to your customers and at the same time help you advance in your own career.
- The importance of self-expression, creativity, and experimentation and how it can enhance outcome quality and productivity as well as engagement within teams.
As members of the Serco family we are all responsible for fostering a culture of innovation and inclusion. We individually contribute to making Serco a place where we value diversity and where people can express their point of view and share ideas. Whether you are managing others or are part of a team, you have the opportunity to make a difference in your personal development and to contribute to making Serco a successful organization where we all can be proud to work.
Click the link below to listen to the podcast episode HBR IDEACAST: Make Work Engaging Again ,Image result for hbr ideacast
2) HBR IdeaCast - Engagement Within Teams
Learning and development is an essential part of building engagement among teams. We know that learning is one of the key dimensions in driving overall engagement in the workplace here at Serco. Our annual Viewpoint engagement survey provides valuable insight on how our employees feel about their learning and development opportunities. Whether you are managing people today or part of a team, understanding your own learning needs and the needs of your team is important for staying motivated and productive at work.
Use Learning to Engage Your Team
HBR IdeaCast offers a free resource to teams and managers to encourage deeper thinking about the meaning of engagement. This is Serco's first Viewpoint Podcast Feature - particularly helpful if your team is pursuing action planning around dimensions such as Career Opportunities or Learning & Development.
In this podcast episode:
- Executive coach and speaker Whitney Johnson talks about the S-shaped learning curve we all follow, and why it is critical for managers to understand where the people they manage are on their individual learning curve - the low end, the sweet spot, or the high end.
- A highly productive team is a collection of people at different stages of their learning curve. Each stage of the learning curve has its advantages and team members at different stages will contribute to the overall team success in different ways. Johnson refers to this type of diversity in group as an "A-team" - optimized for innovation with the ability to manage through change.
- At the low and high ends of the curve people feel less motivated, but for different reasons. The middle of the curve is the sweet spot for engagement and where the majority of the team members should be in order to achieve high team engagement and productivity. There are things managers can do to ensure that their employees stay in that sweet spot as long as possible. Johnson also advises on how leaders can help people who have reached the very top of their learning curve take a leap into a new S-curve, and repeat the learning cycle all over again.
It is important for managers to help develop their employees and support team engagement through learning. Additionally, we all benefit from understanding our own individual learning curves and by initiating learning and development conversations with our leaders.