The best thing that can happen to people at work is to experience flow.
Flow at work happens when you are completely involved in what you are doing.
When you’re in a state of flow, you know what needs to be done and how well you are doing. You have the skills and tools to get the job done and you are able to thoroughly focus. Needless to say, flow results in higher employee engagement and productivity.
A good friend from my home country of Scotland always struggled to keep up with his peers in school. But he also succeeded where most people would have failed.
Early on in his career as an engineer, he designed and built a huge dome — essentially a projection screen stretched over curved pieces of metal — for Dynamic Earth, a conference venue and geology visitor attraction in Edinburgh.
It’s official. HR has gone out of fashion. It can join trifle and perms in the category of things we look back on and wonder how we ever let that happen.
Let’s look at the evidence: HR leaders, surely the champions of their profession, don’t have HR in their job titles any more.
Hiring someone is supposed to give your team (and you) a great level of capability. You should be able to deliver more. But if you get it wrong and hire the wrong person you will create management challenges that take up your time rather than ‘free up’ your time.
If you had to create a list of the companies you’d like to work for – how would you go about assessing which ones would be the best fit for you?
The problem with things like the Best Place to Work surveys is that they tend to look at tick box criteria: how well people are paid, their benefits, training budgets, if they comply with employment legislation etc. What they don’t capture are the more important things that are harder to measure, like whether someone’s work is intrinsically interesting or meaningful.