Five to Thrive Week 13

UMD’s Thriving Workplace Initiative is making the University of Maryland a great place to work by providing tools and support to foster engaged, inclusive and empowered faculty and staff across campus.

Each Monday, its Five to Thrive list offers five strategies crowdsourced from research, experts and our own UMD community to help your workplace thrive.

Want to build a Thriving Workplace? Here are this week’s tips:

• Let employees know you value their opinions. Invite their perspectives on a particular problem and issue. Whenever you can, implement an idea and give credit to create a feeling of investment.
• Understand what your people are good at and leverage those talents to inspire engagement, performance and ownership. Pair people with complementary strengths (such as an ideas person with someone with a penchant for organization) to tackle projects collaboratively.
• Are you smarting from the shrapnel of an ugly conversation? Revisit it ASAP to repair any collateral damage. Acknowledge the mess (and apologize if necessary), ensure that the other person understood your intent and ask for feedback. These efforts will make it easier to start anew.
• Acknowledge the post-project hangover. Notice, recognize and compensate for crunch times at work; and create space for down time and reflection as well as time to recharge.
• Before offering feedback, ask questions to get the full picture. For example, if a colleague made a bad decision, explore their thinking behind the decision before suggesting alternative strategies for the future.

Want more tips? Visit the Thriving Workplace Resource Library here or sign up for Food for Thought Friday, which delivers strategies to your inbox each week. Send an email to thrivingworkplace@umd.edu with the subject listserv to subscribe.