It’s Sunday afternoon as I sit at my computer and plan for the week ahead. I’ve been working from home for almost a decade now. My boundaries and rules have certainly changed over the past several years. As with most things, experience is the only way to do something well. This week, I’m sharing my top tips for setting boundaries around successfully working from home. When I came on board with HPC, it was way before Covid, and remote work was not super common, so I discovered what worked and didn’t work through trial and error. During those early days,
Ding, dong, the witch is…hovering over your shoulder micromanaging your work!? This Halloween, instead of Trick or Treat, let’s Train. We’re highlighting two applications of training as an employee engagement solution, plus 6 links to related resources on The Point Blog. Last week, Lorrie and I spoke about our Illuminate program at the University of Alabama’s HR Management Conference. Before the session, an attendee came up to chat with us about the HR horrors she’d been dealing with at her new company. Her scariest issue: employees’ fear of big, bad HR. She said she felt like the HR monster, scaring
In the second paragraph of Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmul, Ed describes the offices of Pixar like this: It has well thought-out patterns of entry and egress that encourage people to mingle, meet, and communicate. Outside, there is a soccer field, a volleyball court, a swimming pool, and a six-hundred seat amphitheater. Sometimes visitors misunderstand the place, thinking it’s fancy for fancy’s sake. What they miss is that the unifying idea for this building isn’t luxury but community. Steve (Jobs) wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate. In a whole book dedicated to explaining
Grown men in tank tops usually aren’t my jam. So when Pat McAfee made his appearance on Gameday this year to replace a former Georgia football player that looked really good in a suit (more my jam), I was like what the heck? I watched him for a minute, determined he was there to sensationalize, pull in a different type of audience, and create some new dynamic I wasn’t into. I thought I’d lost a little bit of respect for the Saturday morning football institution, even if Corso is still there picking his favorite team, glorified mascot head and all.
“Mom, I’m bored,” said one kid from the backseat after we told them NO MORE DEVICES on a road trip to kick off the summer. You see, devices for them create the stimulation that makes them, well, crazy. So after allowing them on the first leg of the trip without any constraints, we put a cease and desist order out on all devices and prayed we wouldn’t all kill each other over the course of the next hundreds of miles. Our trip began with a desire for our kids to see all 50 states before our oldest leaves for college