Five to Thrive Week 9

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:

• Meet an employee over breakfast, lunch or a cup of coffee instead of in the office. The change of scene interrupts patterns and can elevate a regular meeting to something special.
   
• Help new employees realize success and belonging faster by revamping your onboarding process. Introduce them to people they should know and organize meetings with colleagues to tap into the institutional brain trust. And share the details, like how to get parking passes, where to grab lunch and how to fill out the online timesheet.
   
• Put yourself in their shoes by doing their job. Don’t ask people to do something you haven’t—or wouldn’t—do yourself.
   
• Be transparent. Share information and acknowledge any elephants in the room. Be open to conversation, even when there’s not an easy answer or things are outside your control.
   
• Actively observe your office environment. Are people respectful of each other? Do they seem happy? Address concerns quickly before they grow.

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.