This week is Mental Health Awareness Week: a week designed to raise awareness of mental health, and how our employee experience at work can impact upon it… both for better and for worse.
Author: Kathryn Kendall (Page 2 of 11)
I spent part of yesterday delivering one of my favourite training courses we offer via the Benefex University: CPD and Personal Development.
For me, taking ownership of my self-development is always something which has come naturally, perhaps because of my background training as an actor, where ownership of one’s own personal development is essential in order to progress. In the cut-throat world of professional theatre, there are no line managers, annual appraisals, or KPIs. Actors are taught from their first day of training to seek out every opportunity to upskill. After all, if you don’t do it, no one else is going to be doing it for you.
There’s a lot of focus these days in organisations on delivering. Quite right, too. Not before time, we are moving away from the era where performance was judged on hours spent at one’s desk, and to a far more enlightened and productive age, where our stand out performers are those who are seen to be consistently delivering tangible outputs and achieving goals, regardless of the amount of time they spend in the office.
When you think of flexible working, what kind of employee demographic comes to mind? Working parents? Likely primarily mothers? If so, you wouldn’t be alone. Historically, flexible working has very much been seen as the domain of those employees with childcare responsibilities to work around. With the majority of primary carers still being mums rather than dads, it is easy to see how flexible working can have been dismissed by organisations as something which is required by the few, not the many.
Every organisation out there is sitting on a mine of knowledge. In most cases, however, it goes primarily untapped. There is therefore a huge opportunity for business and HR leaders everywhere to grab the source of this knowledge with both hands, to extrapolate it and maximise the impact it can have on organisational delivery.
Search for literature and guidance on how to be a great manager, and you will be spoilt for choice. If you’ve ever gone to look for advice on how to be a great employee though… you might find it’s a very different story.
It’s been an exciting few weeks at Benefex, with the launch of our new Recognition app, which this week we rolled out internally for all of our employees to use. We’ve been huge fans of peer to peer recognition for a number of years now, and having the opportunity to now deliver this via our own software was a pretty landmark moment for us.
For some time now, there’s been a concerning trend which has been emerging. It’s apparent whenever you scroll through LinkedIn, read industry articles which talk about how the brightest and the best got to where they are today, or even have a conversation with friends about how their organisations work.
The current inclement weather may have been a pertinent reminder too late for some organisations that they perhaps haven’t planned for such an eventuality. With the typically mild climate we enjoy, weather which has the potential to impact on business operations is generally few and far between.
It’s an exciting time to work in business. Technology is advancing like never before. We have the increased automation of jobs, and the prospect of widespread AI on the horizon. We are able to work faster, smarter, and in more remote locations than ever before, in an increasingly diverse spectrum of roles designed to support the growth of technology.
With all of this going on, it is important that we don’t forget the very human side of our workforces.