Keep It Simple
Keeping It Simple
We cannot prevent the progress of technology in the world. Finding how to make it work with us to create amazing experiences is going to be an ongoing process. How can we keep a personal relationship and be involved with our staff when companies are managing facilities across many city miles, multiple states, and even around the world? Can we develop team development to include our growth in technology? Simple staff technological engagements can many times be overlooked. We are looking for ways to celebrate and acknowledge our staff. Simple forms of acknowledgement more often could help keep them engaged longer. Tom, with the University of Central Florida, mentions personalizing each student's experience (2022). Recognizing birthdays, work anniversaries, recognition of holidays, and many others. Platforms like FlipGrid, TikTok, and BeReal offer an experience to connect with teams on a more personal level. Another great point is making sure to treat students and faculty as a whole (2022). It is often hard to remember even in an employment situation; participants, contractors, part-time, full-time hourly, and full-time exempt we all have obligations and need levels of understanding towards each other. With technology rapidly changing how can we offer the best human to technology experience? Technology is hopefully being used to make things easier, do we pay attention to how much time we spend on how many different platforms? Making technology a co-worker is a great analogy to create a better experience with technology in the workforce. As a society we more than ever tend to close ourselves off from interaction. Research has shown that organizations who promote communication about their technology and operations have 20% lower stress levels (Yousif, 2018). It is important to encourage communication around technology and development to keep teams engaged and striving for growth.
References
Techniques for Student Engagement. Educause. (2022). [Podcast]. Retrieved 22 September
2022, from https://er.educause.edu/podcasts/educause-exchange/techniques-for-student-engagement.
Yousif, Nadjia. 2018. Why you should treat the tech you use at work like a colleague. TedTV.
The two take-home messages I’m hearing are 1) add a personal touch and 2) be transparent. Actually, I would add that you’ve done a good job emphasizing the need to include everyone in the organization, taking care not to exclude any category of person that contributes to the mission. In our organization, contractors are specifically prohibited from attending certain employee-appreciation events, and that is a sore spot for many. There are legal reasons for these prohibitions, and as a supervisor, I understand why they are necessary.
ReplyDeleteIt is still possible to demonstrate care and personal knowledge! Once a month, there is a video conference “open mic” for the pharmacy staff to raise questions or review updates to our electronic health record software. Participants may be contractors, commissioned officers, or civil service staff. The camaraderie of these events is apparent as we spend the first few minutes chatting (over the microphones or in the chatbox) and checking in on one another. I think it is the little things like that which make the pharmacy staff one of the best connected and most satisfied groups in the agency. As you said- keep it simple! The personal touch a simple but important feature!
One of the comments you shared was about organization promoting communication around the technology. I fully agree with this as someone who educates sonographers on the technology my company is putting out that communication is key to my stress and success. My team also has a group chat though Teams that when we have sonographers asking questions revolving our technology that we cannot answer we post and someone typically gets back with a helpful answer. This also helps with the stress of not knowing.
ReplyDeleteWe updated everything to work with Teams and I'm really excited about getting to use it. This is also one of those areas where we know what can make up an easier process but we are not ready to give access to everyone. Because of this we are unable to set up teams to ease communication between us all. I am certainly excited to be able to use all that Microsoft Teams has to offer.
DeleteWe use Teams for so many things, I think once you decide you will really like it. The only downside is for meetings Zoom does offer more but for everything else it is so easy to use. Good luck.
DeleteIt's interesting to think about team development and dynamics over the last 3 years with COVID related initial limitations and then restructuring so that teams are intentionally now often not all in the same physical space. Technology has made most of the methods I've seen/ used possible, but it has not equally accommodated all communication and personality types were equally accommodated.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure we've experienced that with people who perfer an phone call to a text message. More recently it has been "can't you just teams me I stead of email?" And I realized I was on the "digital immigrant" side of things (preferring discrete emails versus the freeflowing "chat" features offered). I think a lot of it has to do with how we process the data and what kind of data we are used to receiving. My biggest take-on would be knowing your people and what ways to communicate and connect that might be more (or less!) successful.
I love this and think about it all the time in my role at the hospital. Our department is going through a MAJOR downsize from 645 to 110 and then they have decided to outsource a company to help save cost. As we slowly watch all of our knowledge, friends, and family have to leave the ones that are left are mostly terrified of what the future holds. There was no rhyme or reason on the folks that were kept just positions the new company did not want to fill (my role being one of them, thank goodness). So your questions mentioned about how can we keep a personal relationship and be involved with our staff when companies are managing facilities across many city miles, multiple states, and even around the world is incredibly relevant right now along with developing a team to include our growth in technology? None of us know there the new company is going to take us or what type of technology will be used moving forward. But one thing is for sure, adaptability will be REQUIRED to keep the position. So hopefully the new team will take us under their wing on achieving success and bridging the relationships and technology gaps. I found the video Dr. Kang, Why you should treat the tech you use at work like a colleague by Nadjia Yousif to be inspirational on how to adapt to the new team and tech coming our way (End Note tab for Week 5).
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