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There are a lot of things you can do at the department or supervisor level to help people have a great experience as they start working for BYU. If you take a little time to be intentional about the experience, it can make a big difference.
2 Min Read
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Regardless of our position at BYU, one of the most important things we focus on is developing students of faith, intellect, and character. It is easy to see how this happens in the classroom, but often it’s more difficult to visualize how it might happen in a work setting. We asked students how supervisors could be more effective in this important responsibility. Here is one student’s response:
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Email seems to be consistently overwhelming. One of the strategies we talk about in our 5 Choices to Extraordinary Productivity workshop for alleviating the volume of email is to win without fighting. The idea is that the wisest warriors can win the fight without fighting. They use their minds and the tools at hand to accomplish their goals without having to resort to fighting. Those email messages come in looking for a fight, but we can help ourselves by using Rules within Microsoft Outlook. First, when you see that email from a vendor or someone whose messages you always delete anyway, why not win without fighting? Right-click on the email and go to Rules and then click on Move Messages From …, then select “deleted items.” This creates a rule that will send any message from that person in the future straight to the deleted folder without you having to do anything. No fighting necessary. Repeat for any other messages/senders you never read.
1 Min Read
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Erica Dhawan shares some great tips about how to write better emails on Daniel Pink’s Pinkcast series. With all the communication tools we have, email is still an important part of our work life. Here are a couple of my favorite tips from the video you can use to improve and clarify your email writing:
1 Min Read
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Have you ever completed a project only to hear something like “that’s not what I had in mind”? Despite all that time and effort, you may have missed the mark! Good project management can help, and it begins with what you do up front. The key is to have a good vision of what the final product or deliverable will look like before you start. This ensures that you find out what is really wanted. A good definition of project success is expectations met. A small investment up front to figure out those expectations will save a lot of time fixing the final product.
1 Min Read
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You probably have a big list of to-dos hanging around somewhere. It might be in a notebook, a spreadsheet, Outlook tasks, or on your phone. We make lists to try and organize all the items that we have to do with the hopes that we will keep track of them and that it will help us decide what to do in each moment. One of the biggest problems with our to-do lists is that the actual list seems about a mile long and quickly becomes overwhelming and unhelpful. To help from having to review all 500 items on your list when you have 30 minutes to work on something, try this one systemic change to your list to help you become more organized. Break your list down into smaller lists, organized by context. This trick from David Allen’s Getting Things Done has been a game-changer.
1 Min Read
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One thing we should all be doing better is delegating tasks. In our Getting Things Done workshop, David Allen teaches that when you are processing your to-do items or emails, you should be asking yourself the question, “am I the right person to do this?” We are often tempted to say yes. And how often do we say to ourselves that it will take longer to explain it to someone else and make sure it’s done correctly than to just do it? This reasoning can really bog us down in things that would be better handled by a team member or by one of our fantastic student employees. I’ve also seen this many times at church where the only real function some counselors or secretaries have is attending meetings. This could easily apply to kids as well. We could do much better at utilizing the resources around us so that we don’t burn out.
1 Min Read
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Customer service is an important part of our work at BYU. Whether it is a student looking to register for a class, a professor buying ice cream at the creamery, or someone wanting to sign up for office hours, a focus on customer service can really make a big difference in their experience. One key to customer service is developing empathy. This can be done by really talking to our customers and finding out, as Clayton Christensen suggested, what they are hiring us to do. We can collect data through observation and surveys but talking to our customers and building relationships with them can yield valuable information for how we serve them.
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A friend of mine recently asked for some advice regarding a work situation where an executive from another department had asked her to take on something her boss wouldn’t like. As I listened to her explain the dilemma, I finally asked if she had talked this over with her boss. She said she had worried about how her boss might react if she found out about the situation but hadn’t even considered approaching her to ask for help. I suggested that requesting help from her boss would put her in touch with someone with more experience, who could help her find an appropriate response to the situation. When people ask me how to approach a tough situation, I find myself asking them if they have actually talked to the other person about it. We often worry about what might happen if we bring up these sensitive issues but, in reality, the best approach is almost always to talk things out with the other person.
1 Min Read
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One of the big differences between control and chaos in my life is taking the time to have a weekly review and planning session. It sounds simple, but it can make a big difference. The idea is to set aside about an hour once per week to review your calendar, update your to-dos, and catch up on the open loops that are rattling around in your head, in your inbox, or on your desk. You might even take a look at your short and long-term goals. The hardest part is trying to find 1 of the 168 hours in a week to do it. I’ve read about and tried a number of different approaches, but one of the best practices across almost all of them are holding some sort of weekly review. Here are my favorite tips for making it work for you:
2 Min Read
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"New goals don't deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is a process, not an outcome. For this reason, your energy should go into building better habits, not chasing better results."
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I wanted to share a few of my favorite ideas from the book Atomic Habits to improve or start our own habits.
1 Min Read
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“Those who take pride in being ‘brutally honest’ are often more interested in being brutal than they are in being honest.” -@BobBurg
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“Communication is not about saying what we think. Communication is about ensuring others hear what we mean.” That is Simon Sinek bringing up an interesting point. Just because we said something or sent out an email, doesn’t mean that others heard what we said. I have certainly been guilty of this. We spend time thinking about something important and then try to communicate it to others. What we can forget is that while we might have spent a lot of time thinking through the issue, it could be brand new to the other person. They have likely not spent the same time considering the idea and are at the beginning of a journey we have already taken. We can’t always expect them to be where we are.
3 Min Read
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What’s the difference between my family eating all the strawberries from a large Costco container and making another avoidable donation to the compost pile? It is a simple task of slicing those berries up before putting them in the refrigerator. It seems like such a small thing, but sometimes we can take a small step that enables other behaviors to follow. I was reminded of this when my wife shared with me a post from Ralphie Jacob’s Instagram feed called Simply on Purpose. In that post, she shares how kids were willing to eat an apple that had been sitting around once it had been cut into slices – almost as if it were magical. She calls this behavioral momentum, which is a fantastic description of getting things moving. She asks how we can “cut the apple” in other ways. That’s when I remembered our strawberries.
1 Min Read
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With our upcoming book review of Atomic Habits by James Clear, I thought it would be fitting to share why I really like the book. The basic idea Clear shares is that we all have habits that we do each day, without paying much attention to them. Brushing your teeth is a good example. Chances are you do it the same way every day and don’t spend much mental power doing it. This is one of many things our brains have put on autopilot. These habits we engage in, or our behaviors, lead to the results that we get. And that means that the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
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There seems to be a general sense that people don’t like change. In fact, one study claimed that 88% of people surveyed believed that a change would make things worse for them! One thing we know for sure, change is constant. Does that mean we are doomed to life getting worse and worse as things constantly change? I don’t think so. It turns out that we might be focusing on the wrong thing. According to Mark Seine, Senior Director of Clint Leadership at TIAA, people don’t tend to resist change so much as they resist loss. He suggests that most people want change to happen, but they also have a hard time with the loss they will be experiencing about the old way they have done things. This is a normal and completely valid feeling that can happen during big and small changes.
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How many times have you found yourself trying to make a decision with another person only to end up staring at each other and hoping one of you will just pick something? “Where do you want to go,” comes to mind. Often there is not one best alternative, but it can be frustrating to make a decision and move on. To address this, it can be helpful to have a fair process you can use. This can be as simple as a coin flip or even a quick round of rock, scissors, paper. There are members of my household who have some very strong feelings around games. It could be about who gets to go first, or who draws two cards. To simplify things, we roll dice or just take turns. The key has been to establish the rules before play begins.
1 Min Read
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Human Resource Development, a department within Human Resource Services, provides consulting services for administration, staff, and faculty leaders throughout Brigham Young University. These services are offered at no cost to campus organizations.
2 Min Read
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