Five to Thrive Week 8

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:

• Calendars are for more than just meetings. If you have trouble remembering to check in with colleagues, offer positive feedback or even respond to lingering emails, create weekly calendar reminders to stay on task.
   
• Feeling like an island? There are people like you all over campus doing very similar jobs. Consider organizing monthly get-togethers with those colleagues; “coffee crowdsourcing” is great way to strengthen relationships, get new ideas and commiserate.
   
• Don’t underestimate the simple and sincere “I’m sorry.” Apologies are power that cost you nothing.
   
• Demonstrate confidence in others and their capacity to do a good job through both words (coaching and praise) and actions (like project ownership or a challenge).
   
• Instead of sharing what will happen if employees or colleagues don’t do something, focus on what will happen if they do. Studies show that positive feedback is substantially more motivating than negative consequences.

Want more tips for building a thriving workplace? We’ve mapped it out for you. Check out the UMD Thriver Map, which profiles success stories right here at UMD and offers ideas you can apply today.