Healthy connecting – managing demanding workplaces
March 17, 2015 @ 4:47 pm
When the workplace can make 24 hours a day demands on you how do you switch off and manage to hold onto reasonable expectations of yourself and your colleagues? Questions like this are beginning to filter into contemporary working life. Our flexible ways of working are actually making us feel more trapped than the rigidity of a 9-5 work day. Now we can work whenever we feel like it, many of us are finding it harder to carve out reasonable expectations of when we are at work and when we are not at work. How do you switch off the computer, tablet, phone and deal with the feeling you may risk missing something important?
These dilemmas have been raised both in training sessions and with peers; how to juggle the increasing demands placed by the technological changes brought into modern working life. Whether you are expected to work in close contact with people, because your office has become open plan without quite enough space for everyone, or whether you are working from home and rather isolated from a team environment; how to make meaningful contact and good relationships is a key task of surviving and thriving in a working and productive life.
In response to these questions, this course has been designed to give busy professionals a space to decide where their priorities are and how to reclaim control over their working life.
First course is booking now
Staying connected to the people who matter – family and friends as well as business contacts
Making the unmanageable manageable – what are reasonable expectations of yourself?
Developing resilience strategies – what are the core qualities of resilient people and how can these capacities be developed
Find out 18th May 2015 9.30 -4.30 here
Space
January 26, 2015 @ 12:00 pm
Recently I’ve been reflecting on space. How do we conceptualise space? Boundaries around space and spaces have been gradually eroded; the office is shared and usually there will not be enough desks for every worker. This is a deliberate policy.The idea that we use space to symbolise our identity and make our desks our safe working base has been removed from many workplaces. Space in which professionals see people has become a premium; patients are left on trolleys in corridors in hospitals; offices no longer have interview or play spaces for children and their families. The idea of neutral space in which to perform professional tasks is being gradually lost. Schools struggle to find spaces to offer parents or professionals meetings or have smaller groups of children. Training spaces have gone and been replaced with multi-functional rooms in which children and families may have contact as well as professional meetings being held including supervision. All of these bookable functions mean that there is never quite enough space for the people requiring it and the different functions of the task are not so easily accommodated. A room suitable for families to have contact in is not performing the same function as a meeting room or a training room or even a safe space for supervision. It also means everything has to be planned and booked in advance. Yet we know that in health, education and social care there is a need to be prepared for and responsive to the unexpected. Not having space to deal with the sudden disruptions that arise is problematic and causes additional and unnecessary stress.
Physical space has a price tag attached. There is little public acknowledgement about the need for emotional space that also encompasses physical space sometimes. Robin Murray, a leading psychiatrist once passed a comment during exploration of his life scientific (Radio 4) that has stayed with me, that if the housing situation was better in cities there would be a much lower rate of schizophrenia. Our mental health is improved when we have sufficient physical and emotional space. At a time when empty houses in London are increasingly under scrutiny is it time to ask questions about space and how it is used? Who has access to space and what is a fair distribution of space; according to need rather than only according to income?
Two observations have struck me in the last week; firstly the bafflement of a manager of a home saying we only have 4 beds why do I keep being asked to fill them with 5 bodies. To her the beds are peopled, to the commissioners they are commodities. This is a central paradox is space personal or is it merely a commodity. Secondly observing that the car parks of public buildings are full before 8.30 so people can get a parking space and have first option on the limited number of desks. Latecomers to training days explain that having travelled miles to unfamiliar venues they then struggle to get parked. It has become impossible to cater for everyone. Survival of the fittest indeed. Another experience of a similar phenomenon is trying to get onto the M3 from the M25. One of the downsides of life as a trainer is frequent travel. Currently there are roadworks at the junction for the M3 from either side of the M25. On one occasion it took me 2 hours to negotiate the last mile to the turn off. Essentially this is a space issue; too many cars wanting to use the same space at the same time. Of course there are solutions such as queue jumping and not being saintly I am sure I’ll be tempted to do that. However as with all forms of queue jumping some will pay more of a cost than others. Who is getting queue jumped over in our rush to space? Certainly those with caring responsibilities are not in a position to get into the office before 7.30 to offset the anxiety of space – parking/desk.
Space and access to it has become a major stressor in the way we live today.The extent to which we have control over the space, we individually feel we need, to live and work in really affects our sense of emotional well-being.
