Tips & talking points: 2 ways to leave work stress behind

TIPS

2 Ways to Leave Work Stress Behind

Too often, we take out job-related stress on our friends, children or partners. Here are two ways to make sure your work troubles stay at the office:

— Have an end-of-work habit. Signal to your brain that it’s time to go home with a ritual that helps you unwind. Take a more scenic route home, listen to music on the bus or go to the gym.

— Create a third space. It’s easy to just shuttle back and forth — physically and emotionally — between work and home. But having a third space besides these two locations will help you decompress. It might be anything from a quiet café to a book club to a poker night.

(Adapted from “Don’t Take Work Stress Home With You,” by Jackie Coleman and John Coleman.)

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Get What You Need From a MOOC

To get the most from a massive open online course, or MOOC, you don’t have to invest hours and hours of your time. There are generally three ways to learn what you need.

— Go for the certification. This means completing all the coursework, and sometimes paying a fee. It’s a smart investment if you need to prove to a current or potential employer that you have certain skills.

— Audit. Another option is to watch the videos but not complete the assignments. It’s the right way to go if you’re looking to brush up on a topic and don’t have several hours a week to commit to the workload.

— Sample. This means watching a video here or there to get the specific knowledge that you need. For example, say you wanted to do some regression modeling in Excel. Instead of watching a full course, you might look for a single lesson in a broader statistics course.

(Adapted from “3 Ways to Use MOOCs to Advance Your Career,” by Walter Frick.)

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Use Celebrations to Mark Important Moments at Work

Ceremonies at the office often focus on celebrating the positive: birthdays, work anniversaries, promotions. These types of recognition are important, but companies should also consider using celebrations to help people through hard times. This can be a powerful way to mark difficulties, honor those who have made sacrifices and help people move on. You may not pop a bottle of Champagne after a difficult reorganization, but you might gather as a group and read your mission statement aloud or hold a mock funeral for the past. Communal experiences like these can help strengthen your group’s bonds, values and vision.

(Adapted from “Why Your Company Needs More Ceremonies,” by Patti Sanchez.)

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Assess Whether You’re Working With Quality Data

Bad data causes all sorts of trouble: poor decisions, angry customers, higher costs. Use this exercise to assess whether there are problems with your data.

— Gather. Assemble the last 100 data records your group used or created. For example, if your group takes customer orders, assemble the last 100 orders. Then focus on 10 to 15 critical data elements or attributes

in the data record.

— Review. Ask two or three people with knowledge of the data to join you for a two-hour meeting. Working record by record, mark obvious errors, like a misspelled customer name or information that’s been placed in the wrong column.

— Summarize the results. Total the number of perfect records, and then determine what percentage of your data is accurate. If you have a data quality problem, target your efforts to fix it.

(Adapted from “Assess Whether You Have a Data Quality Problem,” by Thomas C. Redman.)

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How to Tell Your Boss You Disagree

Most managers report that they don’t hear enough alternative points of view. To disagree constructively, try these things:

— Provide suggestions that your manager can act on, not just objections. Instead of pointing out that a system is faulty, say, “How about we contact others in the industry who have used this system to see if they’re having the same problems?”

— Offer a range of options. Binary choices (“Your way or my way”) are likely to meet resistance. Suggesting a few possibilities signals your flexibility and invites your manager to respond in kind.

— Avoid “hot-button” language. For example, if your boss always recoils when someone describes an approach as a “best practice” or “the next big thing,” find another way to express yourself.

(Adapted from “Managing Up” from the 20-Minute Manager Series.)

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TALKING POINTS

Jobs Outside Your Field

10%: Even though it might seem that scientists and engineers are always in demand in the U.S. labor market, many people who studied in technical fields don’t necessarily work in them. According to a survey of more than 25,000 U.S. residents with degrees in science or engineering, more than 10% said that they worked in an industry outside of either field, and 30% said that their job was only somewhat related to science or engineering.

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Westerners Favor More Bank Regulations

82%: In a survey conducted earlier this year by the Brunswick Group in Britain, France, Germany and the U.S., 82% of respondents said that they favored more regulations for banks, and 59% supported the breakup of large banks.

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Big Money for CEOs

50-100 times: Data collected by researchers from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and Harvard Business School in 2014 found that CEOs around the world earn, on average, about 50 to 100 times what workers earn.

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Immigrants Drawn to Entrepreneurship

27.5%: While immigrants represent 13% of the U.S. population, they comprise 27.5% of the country’s entrepreneurs, making them almost twice as likely to launch a business as U.S.-born residents.

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The Power of Positivity

3 times: According to an IBM survey conducted in 26 countries and involving 19,000 workers in various industries, employees who receive positive recognition from their supervisors have an engagement level at work almost three times higher than workers who don’t receive such recognition. Researchers also found that employees who get positive recognition are much less likely to quit their jobs.