Five to Thrive Week 6

UMD’s Thriving Workplace Initiative (TWI) 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:

• Take a lesson from Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Aaron Burr in “Hamilton”: “Talk less, smile more.” When you make room for silence in a conversation, it opens an opportunity for others to share their thoughts and feedback.
   
• If you find yourself procrastinating, consider using the Pomodoro method: Set a timer for 25 minutes, in which you do only the task at hand. When time is up, take five minutes to check your email, get some coffee or handle other distractors. For every four sessions, take a 15-minute break. Want a variety of options? Use www.marinaratimer.com.
   
• Eliminate the phrase, “That’s how we’ve always done it.” An open-door policy to new ideas and ways of working fosters innovation, motivation and possibility.
   
• When the opportunity strikes, pitch in and help on a job that isn’t yours.
   
• Connect your team to what’s happening on campus. Barring confidentiality, share communications from senior leadership or news and successes from other departments. Not only will it keep your team members informed, it helps them see where they fit into the bigger picture

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.