5 Top Tech Solutions For Hybrid Companies
With over 50% of US workers working remotely at least once a week and tech solutions catching up quickly to meet the new challenges faced by modern businesses, hybrid workplaces... Read More
Did you know September was National Self-Improvement Month?
Probably not. And yet for many, autumn’s commencement is a kind of self-improvement clarion anyway.
The old back to school sensibility of reinvention still lingers, no matter how many years removed from a classroom you are. Dealing with a pressure-filled Q4 and changing daylight hours requires peak powers of operation. It’s a time to reflect and recharge. Renew focus. Complete the work.
The research tells us meditation is one of the best means to that end, a performance-enhancing tool for the ages. The irony is that, as an ancient practice, mediation wasn’t designed as a business tool at all—or as a business, for that matter. Quite the opposite. Nonetheless, 22 percent of employers will have offered mindfulness training to employees this year, and the meditation industry is now estimated to be worth a billion dollars.
Clearly, the tenets of mindfulness and wellness resonate with a workforce seriously overstretched and overburdened with digital detritus.
If you haven’t already invested in yours, here’s a good place to begin helping your workforce.
Communal Standing Desks
Remember when standing desks were in vogue? Then they fell out of fashion. Now they’ve returned to the scene, albeit with a little less fanfare.
The takeaway this time around? Rather than station themselves at a standing desk all day, employees are sharing them as escapes when they need a break from their sedentary habits. In a reversal from a few years ago, the standing desk represents “stepping away” from the minute-to-minute and doing so in a physically healthy way, too.
For office space budgets, that’s a welcome change. Investing in standing desks for individuals (who eventually stop using them) is now giving way to investments in small sets of communal posts for employees.
If you’re in the market, this ErgoDesk comes highly rated and fairly affordable.
Office Meditation
If you’re curious about the mediation craze coursing through corporate America, you can test it inexpensively—with potentially high yield. Services like Exubrancy connect you to a professional who can come to your office and lead your staff in meditation. You can book a one-off session or schedule more frequent occurrences.
Book Clubs
A common challenge for companies of any size is sharing best practices across teams. Silos form naturally. The day-to-day obscures collaborative opportunities. The forest is lost for the trees.
A book club can help in at least two ways: creating an excuse for people across teams to convene regularly, and starting dialogues that can help overcome internal communication woes.
It’s also a fairly inexpensive investment in your team’s professional development and team bonding.