Tag Archives: remote working

Your Resiliency: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 5 of 5

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Pandemic. Recession. Unrest. Apparently, you can count on more than death and taxes in life! You can count on surges of change, too. Maybe you can’t be in full control of where you are as the wave of change hits you, but you can be in control of how you respond. It’s called resilience.

Resilience (noun)

1: the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress

2: an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

-Merriam Webster

As people around the globe continue to wake up every day with COVID-19 still running wild, all of the strengths and weaknesses in humanity and the structures we have created are intermittently revealed. From the pervasive, rippling effects of systemic racism to the pivoting of productive and efficient companies and organizations, there is no hiding during periods of disruptive and wide-spread changes.

Where are you? Are you able to identify and act upon opportunities? Are you overwhelmed and paralyzed by the sudden waterfall of changes? Or are you somewhere in between?

In this series, I have touched upon some of the ways you and your organization could use this surge of change to more fully express the mission and values of your organization through the treatment of your employees. Seize the moment!

Resiliency in Real Life – Your Life, Your Work

Resiliency is described and presented in so many different ways. That is why I’ve collected additional resources below that you can read on your own. But please don’t think resiliency has to be complicated and full of Venn diagrams. Instead, consider the resiliency of Elizabeth Warren!

“Nevertheless, she persisted,” said U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2017.

Sometimes you just have to persist in doing.

Building a culture of resiliency can start with one person. Even if your organization never develops a culture of resiliency, you can have one. And, while not usually as contagious as COVID-19, sometimes your role-modeling is all it takes to spread to others.

Persisting is an expression of one’s faith in change; that change is inevitable. It helps when you have faith, backed up by data, that things have indeed progressed positively for humanity. For that you might want to put the book, Factfulness, on your reading list.

Persisting is about showing up again and again. Believing that change is inevitable helps you step away from the emotion and make decisions and take actions that lead toward your desired outcomes. 

I like to employ simple phrases or mantras I can repeat inside my head to remind me of my faith in change and to block out the negative chatter. One of my favorites? “Just breathe.” If you are religious, you are likely already familiar with a myriad of these kinds of phrases where you surrender your worry to a higher power, such as the Serenity Prayer.

While this kind of resiliency might be pretty easy to visualize as an individual, how does it play out at work?

Like many of you, I grew up eagerly anticipating Saturday morning cartoons on TV, like Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner. Wile E. Coyote was always trying to capture and eat the Road Runner, but he never quite got there. He was persistent for sure! But not successful. Why didn’t his persistence make him successful?

Resiliency is surviving adversity by adjusting to change – persistently.

Wile E. Coyote kept pursuing the Road Runner, but he never adjusted his strategies. He abandoned them after the first try failed. He never did the same thing twice. He had so many good ideas that could have worked with a little tweak, but were lost!

It is very likely that you have witnessed this lack of adjustment in the workplace at some point in your working career. You, however, do not have to replicate this unsuccessful behavior. 

For example, you can persist in implementing a prospect management program by tweaking and adjusting your tactics until you find the combinations that work best in your environment. Then when everything changes (and it will), you know how to go back in to tinker with the program until it works again.

Resiliency as your Springboard

Take time out. Lay down on the ground and explore the vastness of the sky. Look over the water, or up at the mountains. Lay on your belly and focus on the grass-filled microcosm of earth that is usually under your feet. Find a way to put yourself in a place that shifts your perspective.

Then imagine the ways in which you might seize the real and exciting opportunities present in the midst of this crisis.

This could be your moment. This could be your organization’s moment. This pandemic could be the great opportunity to mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

Additional Resources

Did you notice some of the dates on the resources below? Resiliency has been a thing long before the current crisis!

Your Physical Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 3 of 5

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Have you ever suffered a workplace injury? I have! It was twenty years ago and my arm still has problems when I lay on or put pressure on my left shoulder. I was sitting at a desk at the wrong height and typing non-stop for eight weeks while the other secretary was out with a broken arm.

Safety at work is important in every kind of work environment. It’s easy to “see” the importance when there is machinery or heights, but even when you are on your laptop there is physical danger.

In the first two parts of this series, I talked about the opportunity to adjust how you provide online training and data security in the virtual office as well as being mindful to protect your career aspirations.  

And as I mentioned in Part 1 of this blog series, COVID-19 could be your great opportunity to mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

Avoiding Danger to Physical Health

Repetitive strain injuries are no joke. Neither is the misery of a workers’ compensation claim for both the injured employee and the employer. When working from home feels temporary, any old table and chair might do. But injury can happen pretty quickly and you might not be aware of the early signs.

This kind of insidious injury is difficult to diagnose and even more difficult to pinpoint the cause – and it can have life-long negative consequences – like the injury I suffered to my shoulder and arm. Getting ahead of injuries and recognizing that an ergonomically sound work environment is important at home and in the office is worth every penny.

Even so, you do not necessarily need to spend large sums of money on the issue. This is where you have the advantage now. Take the time to explore your options to address the issue. Involve your employees in the process. You may be able to develop a process that provides as-needed intervention (less expensive) instead of trying to be one-size-fits-all (more expensive).

For example, you might use learning materials, such as short videos, “cheat sheets,” and quizzes to help employees assess and improve their work environment. In fact, OSHA has e-tools, including checklists, that you can use for free. As a result of this assessment stage, employees could submit equipment purchase requests according to a defined process. Or they could proceed to a next level of evaluation for extra help, such as a specialist consult.

Keeping It Simple

When I decided to become a consultant, one of the primary motivators was the freedom to travel. Since I had already suffered a repetitive strain injury, I knew I needed to be able to work safely from anywhere, too. But how?

After a few trips I realized that I couldn’t count on having the proper combination of chair and table heights. I shopped around for a tray table that I could disassemble and fit into my suitcase. It had to be light weight, too! Once I found the Table-Mate II table, I bought a few of them. At $35 each this was not a hardship.

Because the tray table height is very adjustable, I can work with almost any kind of chair if necessary. Because the tray part drops down easily and the whole table is pretty small, I can fit it into small spaces and easily put it away when I’m done working. For those of you in apartments, you can understand how fabulous this is!

It took me a bit longer to truly go paperless, but as information technology advanced, this got easier. Now that I can take a picture of signed document on my smart phone and send it via email, there’s nothing I can’t do on the road – with my trusty Table-Mate II tray table, that is.

The rest of my physical safety plan is even less expensive:

  • Constantly reminding myself on proper posture.
  • Taking frequent breaks even if that means waving my arms around while waiting for a web page to load.
  • Scheduling phone calls only when I have a quiet room available (even if it is the bathroom).
  • Scheduling 20-min naps after presentations or lots of video meetings (they wear me out).
  • Offering myself an unlimited Starbucks account as an employee perk; Starbucks is everywhere and as the only reliable place where the chair to table height is correct and they don’t mind if I sit there for hours, a little coffee is cheap rent for an on-the-go office!
  • Purchasing a good-looking, highly functional backpack for toting my laptop for hours through airports and cities; over-the-shoulder bags have caused muscle strain.

Make a Plan Stan

I hope it’s obvious from my example how most people’s needs for physical safety can be met with simple adjustments. I also hope my example of continuing to have symptoms from a twenty-year-old injury demonstrates how surprisingly dangerous working at a desk can be.

Maybe your new plan is simply to ask, listen, and act if necessary. Is anyone having any aches or pains from working at home? Are you? Share the diagram from the Mayo Clinic and ask them if their workspaces conform to those guidelines. If they don’t, you can explore simple options to remedy the discrepancies.

Working from home – or working from anywhere – can be a great experience, but it is not without physical danger. Thankfully, many of those danger can usually be addressed without much fuss!

Additional Resources

Get Ready to (Prospect Research) Work in 2018!

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Back in 2016 when Mark Noll posted “When Technology Killed the Fundraising Star” I wasn’t wholly convinced that Skype was about to replace face-to-face major gift visits. Then, only a little over a year later in August 2017, The Chronicle of Philanthropy wrote “15 New Fundraising Ideas That Worked: Part III” and included one about digital-gift officers. Could it be?

When I look back over the PRSPCT-L list-serv posts in 2017, the eye-popping number of prospect research job openings really gets me thinking about more than the research we perform. It has me wondering about the conditions under which we do it. The nonprofit world is not particularly known as cutting-edge leadership when it comes to managing its workforce, but I muse about whether fundraising could lead the way in helping to redefine the workplace.

Development officers must travel and nonprofits and institutions have been right there with for-profit sales offices in establishing “field offices” where fundraisers work out of the home office in the geographic location where their prospects live. As digital-gift officers emerge, why do they need to be located in a specific place? And with nonprofit leadership skills in hot demand, more leadership candidates are using that leverage to demand to work remotely, too.

And then there’s fundraising research – interacting intimately with development officers and headquarters. Prospect research is also in a great position to work from home!

But you don’t have to listen to me speculate. You can listen to three real prospect research professionals tell you about their experiences working remotely. Warning: it isn’t all sugar and spice.

I was inspired by how candid the panelists were. Pioneers all three! And it felt so good to be among fellow prospect research professionals who share so many of the same experiences working remotely that I experience. It can feel isolating to be the only prospect research professional in a fundraising office, but that gets compounded when you work remotely!

If you work remotely you will love to hear the stories of these three women and if you don’t work remotely, but want to, you will gain a lot of practical and tactical advice. Developing rapport and maintaining presence in the virtual world requires a new skill set. Thankfully, whether you are a development officer or researcher, fundraisers happen to be well placed to learn the ropes!

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