Five to Thrive Week 18

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:

• Don’t go dark on your network. People often forget about their professional network until they need it, but staying connected with colleagues and contacts you don’t see regularly can be done in just a few minutes a day. Stroll through your social feeds to share, like and comment, and congratulate successes. Better yet: Reach out to one person a week by email.
• Curb your enthusiasm: Some people are gluttons for the exclamation point, which can be hard to rein in during professional correspondence. Think you might be guilty of exclamation overuse but not ready to go cold turkey? Limit yourself to one exclamation point per email.
• Ask your team what “thriving workplace” means to them. While the answers will be different for each person, they will offer a glimpse of what motivates and reinforces good work and provide goals to strive toward.
• Diffuse difficult situations with humor. Being able to laugh and show perspective can put everyone at ease and encourage others to persevere.
• Help monitor the scope of tasks assigned to your team. Don't let members say “yes” to everything.

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.