Duration: 13 half-days
Organizations are always striving to find ways to support productivity, engagement, wellbeing and results in their teams, but 2020 introduced unprecedented challenges. COVID 19 amplified both the need for focus and productivity and the challenges that get in the way of it. Employees are needing to adapt rapidly to working from home, while also implementing huge shifts in the core business models and processes of the organizations they work for. This can feel overwhelming. It may not seem like it, but there’s a bright side. The forced shift to remote work presents an opportunity for organizations to examine and rebuild their foundations for driving performance, engagement and results in ways that support all stakeholders to reach new levels of thriving.
The Thriving Together While Working Apart program provides a big picture overview of fundamental skills, knowledge, tools, and mindsets that support teams to thrive no matter where they are working from. Many people theoretically “know” these fundamentals, but don’t apply them as fully as they could. For this reason, this training includes application assignments for each session to support participants to apply their learning in their lives and work. Reviewing the fundamentals of productivity, performance and engagement together with their colleagues has the added benefit of surfacing team processes and organization-wide systems that need to be optimized to support working from home and enhance performance overall.
During the pandemic, bringing your team together to (re)discover these foundations is even more essential. People are mentally exhausted from the changes that 2020 has brought and the uncertainty of how much longer this will go on (or what insane thing will happen next). This is bound to dampen focus and productivity – a key source of intrinsic reward for most people. This creates a negative feedback cycle that further increases their stress, dampens their energy and impedes focus and productivity. Bringing your team together in a structured way to learn new techniques for improving energy, performance and fulfillment no matter where they are working from has many benefits. It provides them with skills and knowledge, but perhaps more importantly it deepens the connections that build trust and strengthen culture.
Note: This session is designed for employees at all levels. Please see our Leading a Thriving Team in a Remote Work World if you are looking to train leaders and managers specifically. Leaders and managers can attend this program with their teams, but it is often beneficial for leaders to attend our leader-specific program just prior to their teams or in parallel with their employees going through the program. This supports leaders to model best practices and support their team members to apply the learning in their daily work.
Day one provides participants with an understanding of the foundations to put in place to stay productive, healthy and energized while working from home. Topics include:
Day 2 is our first group coaching session to support students to apply their learning in their unique situation. It includes a review of successes, questions and progress on individual action plans and assignments from Day 1.
Day three covers core principles of productivity that will amplify achievement and fulfillment regardless of where team members are working from. Topics include:
Day 4 digs deeper into participants successes and setbacks in applying the productivity principles from the previous week. This session often surfaces opportunities for the team or organization to improve productivity for all team members.
Delegation and collaboration can feel much more difficult when people are no longer in the same workspace. The good news is that it can become even easier and more effective if people put in place the simple process taught in this session. Topics include:
Day 6 provides opportunities for participants to share their successes and setbacks from their delegation assignments the previous week. A common result of this session is for teams to develop the first draft of a best practices template for delegation that is unique to their team or organization.
Whether people work from home or in a common office space, there isn’t usually much in common with their methods of project and work planning. It can range from holding everything in their head, to paper lists, sticky notes, spreadsheets or online project management systems. This session brings everyone up to speed with work and project planning foundations and best practices. Topics include:
Day 8 provides opportunities for participants to share their project and work plans and provide each other with ideas on how they could be improved. A common result of this session is for teams to develop the first draft of a project or work planning that is unique to the needs of their team or organization.
Change is a constant in the current and future world of work. This session provides employees with an introduction to the Result of Note™ systems-thinking method – a framework that empowers employees to lead and manage change more effectively by identifying solutions to address their frustrations and to optimize systems for the organization as a whole. Topics include:
Day 10 provides opportunities for participants to share the Result of Note systems they implemented in their work and life the previous week. A common result of this session is for teams to identify key Result of Note systems opportunities for their team or organization.
Even before working from home became the new normal, technological advances were driving work life integration and blurring the lines between life and work. This session provides participants with tools to create a healthy balance between life and work (even when life might need to be happening in the middle of their home workplace). Topics include:
Day 10 provides opportunities for participants to share their insights from implementing their Energy Action Plan.
Any successful person knows that “It’s not what you know, it’s what you do.” For this reason we include this essential progress, planning and integration session as the final session in the program. At the end of session 12, participants will receive an assignment to do a progress report on their insights and results from the previous weeks of the program. They will also be tasked with creating a plan for how they will continue to integrate their insights from the training into their life and work over the coming 3-6 months. All sessions in this program are incredible opportunities for building connections, strengthening culture, building trust and strengthening inclusion, but this one goes the extra mile. It helps all team members to solidify their goals, ask for the support they need to follow through, and develop the authentic connections that will build that positive peer pressure research shows helps people to achieve their goals.
We highly recommend that clients plan to provide individual or group coaching follow up support to this and all our other programs. Research shows that learning dissipates rapidly if structures are not put in place for it to be applied. Talk to us about including a package of coaching hours with your program that employees can access, putting together monthly group coaching sessions to help people stay accountable to their goals, a performance buddy system, developing peer coaches, or even certifying your internal trainers to deliver our core programs to your staff on an ongoing basis.
Note: All above sessions are condensed versions of our more in-depth programs on each topic. If you would like to have your team focus in on only one of the areas outlined above to address an immediate need, please contact us for more information on the area of interest.
By the end of the program, participants will: