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THE COVID HANGOVER – DON’T WAIT UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE TO ACT

By on October 7, 2021 in Blog, Blog, Leadership, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Working smarter

You’re probably fed up of hearing about Covid. I know I am. And yet, it’s a big mistake to ignore the longer-term effects of Covid on your leaders, your workforce and your organisation. 

At Meta we’re seeing more and more people in our network suffering from the effects of what we’ve termed the ‘Covid Hangover’. So, we wanted to use this month’s blog to talk about what you can do to help mitigate the longer-term effects of that ‘hangover’ on your people and your organisation. 

It’s important to state here that it’s not too late! However, we’d urge you to not wait much longer before you start investing time and yes, resources, to ensure that you, your team, your organisation and your people don’t end up suffering from one almighty ‘Covid Hangover’.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a real game changer in the world of work. Now, more than ever, we need our leaders and our staff to be performing at their best, to deliver organisational Covid recovery business plans, but, after 18 months of the pandemic (supporting their organisations), the simple fact is that most of us have run out of energy. We’re working such long hours, working harder than ever before (this is borne out of the data in research conducted on working hours since the pandemic began), and almost every person we have talked to in the Meta network over the last few months is tired (at best), running on empty (most of the time), exhausted (more times than not) and, in the worst cases, close to burnout. 

That’s a concern to us, because we genuinely care about you! We also know that, with a small amount of help, support and development, you can prevent the worst-case scenarios, and get you and your organisation into a good place – ready for the next chapter of working in a post-Covid world. 

Organisational resilience is a serious risk to every business right now, perhaps the greatest risk – and your organisational resilience (the ability to bounce back and recover post-Covid) is absolutely dependent on your people’s resilience (their ability to bounce back and recover themselves post-Covid). 

As you know, at Meta we love etymology (the root meanings of words, what they originally meant).

The word ‘ORGANISATION’ comes from the same root as ‘organic’ and ‘organism’, it means ‘a whole consisting of inter-dependent parts, a living system’. 

Your organisation (and on a smaller scale your team too) is a ‘living system’. Its success and ability to recover post-Covid is 100% dependent on your people (the ‘living’ part of your system). As it’s an interdependent system, if one area fails (or in the case of the team, more than one person is off longer term, or you experience staff turnover), then unless the rest of the system (or team) can adapt and pick up the work, the system comes crashing down. 

With very little (if any) spare capacity in organisations anymore, as we’ve streamlined our organisations down to the bare minimum of people needed to deliver what needs to be delivered, it is doubly difficult to maintain the balance in the living system that is your organisation. What once was done by ‘two’ is now done by ‘one’ – if that ‘one’ is missing, who picks up the work? 

Then throw in the mix of a hybrid working model, with some people working virtually and some in the office using resources like protective screens for offices to protect from diseases and have privacy, and this means that more and more work pressures are not shared amongst the team (as they were), but rather fall on the individual.

So how on earth do we tackle this? 

Well first of all, we need to start acknowledging that we can’t work how we always used to. We’re working on average four hours longer a week than we did before the pandemic, and the truth is that, although we are working longer and harder than ever before, we’re still not getting everything done (at least not at the level we’d like to get it done). 

We’re working longer hours, and working harder – working through breaks, doing back-to-back (virtual) meetings, re-visiting our laptops and emails in the evenings, and yet, it’s still not enough. 

We need to be working in a smarter way. But what is smarter working? We’ve heard so much about it, but what does it mean in practice? 

Be very clear here, it doesn’t mean using more technology. Having more technology in our organisations has not lessened our workloads. If anything, it’s just led to an expectation that everything should be done, responded to, solved and completed, quicker and faster. It’s just made us go faster and try and do more. 

Smarter working is about understanding HOW WE WORK AT OUR BEST, as individuals, teams and yes, as organisations. It’s about understanding we’re not robots, we’re not machines, we’re humans and, as such, have to manage our performance and our workloads/tasks in a way that matches our natural peaks and dips in an average working day – and matches our own brain’s ability to perform. We need to understand HOW our brain works: how it stores, processes and performs at its best. Then you can instantly improve your own performance and productivity as an individual. 

Then there’s self-management – the bit where we make sure that we’re in the best state possible to do what needs to be done. When we’re flat, when we’re stressed, when we’ve not slept, when we’ve worked through lunch, we’re just not going to perform at our best and so our ability to do what needs to be done suffers. So does the quality of what we do, so does our ability to be creative, to come up with innovative ideas or innovative solutions. An organisation which delivers poor quality, struggles to be creative or innovative, is not an organisation that will thrive in the post- Covid world. 

We need self-management tools that help ensure we get a good night’s sleep, that we understand our own stressors and have ways of reducing the impact of stress on ourselves. We need to understand and work with our human being-ness – really maximise practical ways of improving our performance. 

Then there’s smarter working practices, proven techniques from academic, scientific and real-life smarter working experts, which help you to manage, prioritise, delegate, plan and organise your tasks and workloads so that you can be more efficient. You need to make sure that you’re assigning the most complex tasks to when you naturally perform at your best in the day, and the easier tasks to when you’re not. It’s about carving out the time to do the things that you don’t get time for, but you know are important – this is especially relevant for the leaders reading this. When was the last time you felt you had proper time to reflect, look to the future, think strategically and do more, rather than being reactive? 

We’re so busy, that we struggle to find the headspace or thinking time to look too far into the future, to plan our routes ahead. So, we end up firefighting, putting out fires that we probably could have foreseen and made sure didn’t get started up in the first place – if we’d had the time and space to think. It can feel, as a leader, that it’s nigh on impossible to get everything done, but having worked with many senior leaders and executives over the last five years, I can promise you that with some smarter working tools in your toolkit you’ll be amazed at what a difference it can make. 

But this is not just for leaders, there are so many smarter working tools that can help you, whatever level you work at in your organisation, and now we’re moving to a more self-managed way of working in the hybrid era, we can all benefit from a few smarter working tools in our toolkits and in our working practices. 

Then there’s the problem of capacity – as leaders we need to focus on how our people work going forwards. The likelihood is that, for the foreseeable future, we will not be getting any extra resources while we are in the recovery phase of the Covid journey. So, this means INVESTING in your people, up-skilling the organisation at every level (that you can) to help you through this challenging next phase. 

That future isn’t a long way away. You can start working towards it now – creating a new way of working that works for you and your organisation. The future of work is coming, and in order to make current structures work, there will be a need for a multi-skilled workforce – one that works cross-functionally and has a flexible structure that enables the movement of ‘floating resources’ that can help you maintain the living system (the organisation) and keep it working at a high level no matter what comes your way. 

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. First of all we need to take some preventative measures, to ensure that we don’t experience the worst effects of the ‘Covid Hangover’, as individuals, as leaders, and as organisations. 

The first thing you need to do?

STOP.

Yep, you heard me. You really need to stop and take time out. 

I was working this week (and last) with a senior leadership team in a large metropolitan council. They felt that, even though we were coming out of the Covid tunnel, they were still in ‘emergency mode’. They hadn’t stopped (quite literally in some cases) for 18 months straight. Meta had offered to do a free workshop with them around smarter working practices, and one of the most common pieces of feedback from the leaders was how good it was to stop and take time out for themselves and reconnect together as a leadership team.

It’s not just leadership teams, it’s all teams and all of us. We need to stop, create a little time (in your busy work diary) for reflection. Can you really carry on the way you are working? Or is what you’re doing, and HOW you’re working, unsustainable? Are you finding it really tough to do everything that needs to be done in normal working hours? Are you stressed? Overwhelmed? Run out? Is it affecting your work-life balance? Are you struggling with your sleep? Is it affecting your home life? 

If the answer is YES to any of the above – then please, please PLEASE don’t ignore your own intuition that says something needs to change. 

This is preventative medicine, it’s like taking a glass of water and a paracetamol BEFORE bed when you know you’ve overdone it a bit. It means that in the morning you’re likely to be OK, rather than struggling to function. 

Although I’m using a humorous metaphor here, let’s be clear, there’s nothing humorous about the risk to you as an individual, you as a leader, or to your business that the ‘Covid Hangover’ brings. There’s nothing funny about your leaders’ and staff’s mental and physical health being affected by what is to come – it will seriously affect your business’ ability to function. 

META – WE’RE HERE TO HELP SUPPORT YOU

OK so don’t stop reading, but this is where we do a bit of self-promotion. Why? Because we KNOW that we can help you! Be you an individual, a team leader, a CEO or organisational leader – we can genuinely help and that’s what we’re in business to do.

At Meta we’ve always been on a mission to change the way people work, and support leaders and organisations to do that. 

Most of you will know Meta as a business consultancy. You’d have come across us through a team, leadership or organisational development journey that we’ve done in your organisation, that you’ve been a part of.

What you probably DON’T KNOW about us is that, at Meta, we do a lot of research. We’ve been (for example) researching smarter working practices for over ten years now. We understood, earlier than most, that the way we were working wasn’t sustainable, that we needed to develop a new way of working – so have an extensive library of smarter working resources based on the research we have been using in the organisational work we have been delivering these past ten years. 

You probably also don’t know that, during the last 18 months, we have been working with frontline organisations and developing a programme we have called ‘Your Resilience Toolkit’ (see link to download information at the bottom of this blog) – a programme of workshops that brings together the very latest scientific research and simple-yet-practical tools (from our years of trying and testing out what really works in the busy workplace) that enable anyone who attends to re-build their resilience, combat stress, and work smarter not harder. 

We believe we have something really special here, and we’d really love to share it with you and your team or your organisation. We’ve had amazing feedback from the organisations where we have delivered this programme.

SO HOW CAN META HELP YOU? 

If you are an individual – If you’re reading this and you are struggling, or finding it challenging/overwhelming to do everything which needs to be done, or if you’re worn out, run out, exhausted – then PLEASE get in touch to talk to us about how we can help you develop your own personalised Resilience Toolkit to help you perform at your best (and mitigate the worst of your hangover side-effects!) You might have been on one Meta programme YEARS ago, but it doesn’t matter to us how long ago it was, or whether you’ve stayed in touch – if we can help, we will, so get in touch! 

If you are a team leader – It’s time to do something with your staff. Don’t delay, don’t put it off. Don’t leave it too late before you act. If you’re too busy, if there’s not enough time, then that’s a sure-fire sign that you really DO need to carve out a space to do something with your team. How about arranging a team away-day facilitated by Meta? We could share some of our Resilience Toolkit with you and your team and, together as a team, you can support each other to implement those tools back in the workplace. We’ve done lots of team away-days over the years and we’re really good at them. 

If you are an organisational leader – We invite you to have a conversation with us. It might be that you ask Di or Jo to coach or mentor you as a leader, or do something wider with your leadership team or organisation. It’s so easy, you just drop Jo an email and say “Jo, we’d like to talk about how we help get our organisation through this next stage of the Covid recovery.” Then we have a frank chat to talk through your options. We will always be honest with you, and make sure that what we propose is tailored just for you (and yes, works for your team/organisational budgets too!). We promise you that it will take less time and will cost WAY LESS than you think to do a really effective re-building organisational resilience programme. 

If you are a CEO/leadership team – During this crisis the biggest pressures have fallen on CEOs and their leadership teams. It can be lonely at the top, especially as most leadership teams have been working virtually. It might be that, as a CEO you arrange some coaching or mentoring with Meta, or it might be that you take time out as a leadership team and do some work to reflect and think about how you create the ‘what next’ in your organisational journey. Whatever it is, please do call on us, we’re here to help. We’ve been working with a number of CEOs and senior leadership teams with their Covid recovery plans since the beginning of 2021. We all need to turn the page on Covid: we need to learn what worked, what didn’t work, and create a new way of working. That’s not easy to do with everything else you need to get done. You need to take time out, away from the office, and have some quality facilitated sessions where you really work together as a team to envision and plan your transition strategy to your ‘new normal’ as an organisation. 

The transition out of Covid is an incredibly important period to your business, and we can help you to create an organisational strategy that works best for you and your organisation. 

IN CONCLUSION

We have deliberately made this month’s blog serious, and provocative, because we think this is something that we all need to be talking more about. We HOPE that it’s stimulated your thoughts and made you think a bit differently about your current working experiences. We also hope that you will now see Meta a bit differently and call on us whilst the worst of the ‘Covid Hangover’ is still preventable. We will do what we can to help and support you. 

That’s what Meta’s mission has always been, to support lovely people like you – so don’t delay, don’t wait until it’s too late, just get in touch. The help you need is only just an email or phone call away 

You can contact Jo direct: jo@metapositive.com

Or call: 07976 262352

In peace,

Jo & Di xxx

YOUR-RESILIENCE-TOOLKIT-smarter-working-in-the-hybrid-working-eraDownload
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SPENDING OUR PRECIOUS TIME MORE WISELY..

By on June 2, 2017 in Blog, Blog, emotional intelligence, health+well being, Living fully, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Working smarter

We talk about time in the same way we talk about money: saving, spending, wasting, giving, and taking. And of course, time is like a form of currency. We have a set budget each day of 24 hours, and once it’s gone, it’s gone. Fortunately, we get a new budget the next day, so we have plenty of opportunity to become better at spending it wisely.

So what does that mean in reality – spending it wisely?

1. Get enough sleep

Sleep is essential to our health. While we’re sleeping, our bodies have a chance to heal and renew, and our minds can process our day and relax. We all need between 7 and 8 hours of sleep a night for these processes to happen properly and leave us refreshed for the next day. For more information on why we need sleep and getting a good night’s sleep see Jo’s excellent articles on LinkedIn –

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sleep-your-most-vital-leadership-resource-all-jo-clarkson

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sleep-your-most-vital-leadership-resource-all-part-2-jo-clarkson

2. Identify what’s important to you and make it a priority

At work, these are the tasks that matter most that will make the most difference, both to the organisation and to your state of mind. At home, this is the reminder that time spent enjoying your children and your partner and your friends is more valuable than tidying up. I always classify as important those things I would regret not doing if I found out I was going to die next week!

3. Make sure you have some energy boosters in your day

If we have regular energy boosters during the day, we can be more productive and committed to what we’re doing, and we don’t get so exhausted. The first obvious energy booster that sadly most people are missing out at the moment is your 30-minute lunch break! It’s a GOOD use of your time to take that break, not only does it re-fuel you, but it also allows your brain time to re-build internal capacity that allows it to function at its highest level again for the afternoon, which means you.. Get more done! Other energy boosters are things like – 5 minutes laughing with someone, the 10-minute walk round the block, getting some fresh air, talking to a work colleague about non-work stuff, grabbing a coffee with a friend, sit down with a good book or TV programme for 30 minutes. Di had written a great blog all about energy boosters – www.dikamp.com/your-energy-bank-2

4. Be social

We all need human contact. We are wired to connect with other people, and it boosts our immune system to have friendly interactions. That brief conversation with someone at work, having a cuppa with a work colleague, talking with the check out lady at the supermarket, or having a natter on the phone with a friend is time well spent.

5. Have some fun!

Life is too short to miss out on the enjoyable bits! Whatever is fun for you will help to energise you, will enhance your positive attitude – well, it’s just good for you! It may be doing a puzzle, having a laugh, being silly with your children – just make sure you do laugh every day, and build in fun into your every week. Fun is for grown ups too, and having fun and laughing is SO good for your body, your mental well-being and your overall health.

Now even if you do all these things every day, you will have plenty of time left for those necessary things that don’t fall into these categories. In fact, if you do spend some of your time each day wisely, you will probably find you can do more of those necessities more effectively, because you are keeping yourself in a good state.

Now let’s look at some of the other ways we use to describe time.

Wasting time

We often describe something, as a waste of time because it hasn’t been productive – there is no clear result at the end of it. By this we mean a task done, something off that list of ours.

We need to extend this definition because sometimes it is good use of time to do something that has no clear end product. Many of the wise uses of our time come under this heading: being social, talking to work colleagues etc. The basic rule is that if it makes us feel better – more positive, more energised – it is not a waste of time.

Saving time

When we talk about saving time – by going to the supermarket in our lunch hour, by multi-tasking at home, by shopping online – we also need to consider what we’re saving the time for. Since we can’t ‘bank’ that time and save it for another day, I think we could decide to spend it on something that makes us feel good, rather than cramming in a bit more of the responsibilities and duties. Maybe you could just sit in the garden and daydream for a while, or do something else you find relaxing and pleasurable.

Spending your time wisely is making the best possible use of it, so that at the end of each day, you can say to yourself: ‘That was a good day.’

Let’s make the most of our 24-hour budget of time each day – Let’s make the time to think about how we do spend our time, and spend it well!

have a great month!
in peace,
Di and Jo xxx

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Don’t sweat the small stuff! – making the tasks we avoid easier to do

By on April 4, 2017 in Blog, creativity, health+well being, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Working smarter

We don’t think we’ve ever come across anyone who genuinely loved every aspect of their job. We all have some tasks to do as part of our responsibility that we would prefer to drop if we could. It may be all the emails, or some of those meetings or certain phone calls, but there’s going to be something that makes your heart sink when you think about it.
The effect of these tasks spreads beyond the task itself. When you know you have to do it, it can negatively colour your whole day:

• It brings out the most developed avoidance procedures we have
• We generally don’t do the task itself as well as we might
• It uses up a lot of our energy that could be better expended on things we get satisfaction from

This is too high a price to pay, so it’s worth re-examining our attitude towards these tasks.

What can you do about it?

1. Divide the task into smaller chunks
These tasks can easily become ‘elephants’ in our minds, so break it down into smaller parts: plan to make 1 phone call, not 5; clear 5 extra emails, not 10; avoid back-to-back meetings (at the very least make sure you’ve got 10m minutes between each one); give yourself a little space to breathe – diary in some reflection time; plan a little time each morning to plan your priorities and a little time to get back your perspective at least once a week.

2. Experiment with when in the day you do the tasks you don’t enjoy
We are all better at doing the less attractive tasks at certain points in the day. For example, you may find that first thing in the morning you can tackle something you don’t like, and then feel virtuous for the rest of the day. Or it might be that the end of the day, you’re only fit for something tedious!

3. Do something different
Look for ways to make it more enjoyable or at least interesting. What motivates you? It may be listening to some music, if appropriate, while doing it, or having a little competition with yourself – how many can you do in the next half hour? Or it may be giving yourself the added task of finding something to take away from that meeting, or something delightful about that person you don’t normally connect very well with.

4. It’s OK to avoid things sometimes
There’s nothing wrong with avoiding things if a) it’s not something that makes your priority list that day b) that actually it’s something that you don’t have to do or you’re not the best person to do it i.e.: it’s not really something that you need to do at your level. Ironically sometimes something you don’t like is something that other colleagues are happy to do – so can you delegate it to someone? Or swap it for one of their tasks that you wouldn’t mind doing?

It’s daft to continue to let a part of your job, and often a small part, bring down your mood for other things you have to do. When we let the small things disproportionately affect us, it can ruin our motivation for the entire day. Experiment with ways of making it work for you, and save your energy, creativity and drive for making a positive difference to the things that really matter.

We hope this blog has been useful to you, we think it’s about time that we began to really use the precious time that we have at work to do what needs to be done in a more effective way, working at a sustainable pace that ensures quality and creativity – we’re sharing this because we believe you can and DO make a difference to the organisations you work with, and if we can make your work day that bit easier, well, that’s what we’re in business for!

Have a great month,
In peace,

Di and Jo xxx

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CREATING TIME TO REFLECT

By on March 6, 2017 in Blog, health+well being, Living fully, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Resourcing yourself, Working smarter

So many people these days seem to have no time to breathe, let alone reflect! Diaries are full for months in advance, the lists of things to do are never-ending, and then you go home and try to catch up on the tasks there despite your weariness.

Our belief that enhanced technology would free people up has well and truly backfired. In those moments between meetings, the phone is pinging with emails and messages, and there is an expectation that we will respond quickly, even if it is the evening or weekend.

What this constant barrage does to us is push us this way and that, without a clear direction. We end up doing whatever is next on the list, or whatever seems most urgent, and we lose our perspective of the bigger picture. And this leads to constant busyness, but not necessarily any feeling of progress or achievement.

Carving out a little time to reflect can make all the difference. We don’t mean just sitting there, exhausted, taking time to breathe – although that’s important too! – we mean reminding yourself of the bigger picture of your life and work.

When we are under stress and pressure to deliver our thinking tends to become very narrow and we lose the breadth of our vision. We can only seem to focus on the immediate ‘what next’ and because we are stuck in the stuff we struggle to see what’s really important, to get proper perspective.

It’s actually relatively easy to get some perspective, we just need to find a little time (could be as little as 15minutes) to stop and ask ourselves some reflective questions.

Reflection questions part 1 – to broaden the context beyond work:

Firstly we need to remind ourselves of the big context: what our lives are about. So we need to consider questions like:

  • What’s really important to me?
  • How do I want my life to be?
  • How do I keep some balance in my life?
  • How do I look after myself?

We don’t believe that any of us would spend the last few months of our lives on the things that so often fill our time. The time we had left would become precious to us and be about what really matters to us and gives us joy. So lets’ make sure that we have time for some of these things now. After all none of us know when those last few months may be. Let’s live our life rather than surviving it.

Reflection questions part 2 – to help us regain perspective on all those tasks that drive you along:

When we are stuck in the day to day tasks that we face at work, we forget that actually we are more in control of our to-do lists than we think. Sometimes just sitting down and asking ourselves what we really want to get out of our week can make all the difference – questions like:

  • What do I want to achieve in my work life this week? 
  • What do I want to achieve in my home life this week?
  • What will give me a feeling of progress towards my outcomes this week?
  • What would make my life easier and more enjoyable this week? 

When we stop and think about it, we can sort out our priorities rather than being driven by the urgent stuff. It gives us back a sense of control, of being in the driving seat, and it reminds us that, most of the time, we are not dealing with life or death situations, and some things really don’t need to be done at all! We all have an innate wisdom, that part of us that knows how to make our lives work. It requires a bit of time and space to switch it on – it gets buried when we just rush from one thing to the next.

So, turn off your phone and your computer for half an hour, once a week. Go on, why not put it into your online diary now – time for REFLECTION – Ask yourself these questions, or remind yourself of the answers you’ve come up with. Give yourself time to reflect and regain your perspective, and take back control.

It’s your life, don’t waste it on things that, when you reflect on them, don’t really matter as much as you think they do!

We think that reflection time will make a real difference to how you feel, and the only cost is 30 minutes from your working week. We reckon it’ll give you a great return on that small investment of time!

Have a great month everyone,

Jo and Di xx

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Tips for thriving in challenging times – developing our allies & creating a real support network

By on February 6, 2017 in Collaboration, health+well being, Leadership, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Resourcing yourself, Team working, Working smarter

Over the 20 some years that Meta has been in business now, we’ve seen the best of business practices and the worst. We thought it was time to share some of the best practices we’ve seen in action that can help you to thrive rather than just survive the current challenging workplaces most of us face.

One of the fundamentals is remembering that work is not a solo sport, that we work at our best not when we isolate ourselves but when we feel part of a cohesive team and are valued members of the organisation that we work for.

Us human beings are social animals, and it’s important that we develop our own social support networks in order for us to thrive. No I’m not talking about online social networks but real social networks with real people we meet and contact on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. Research has shown that people with the most active social network links are more likely to feel supported and to have a more positive outlook on life, and those that do not have a strong social network tend to feel isolated, unsupported and have a tendency towards a more negative outlook on life.

So what does this have to do with us at work?
Well, the workplace is essentially an extended social network. If we are to thrive and have a more positive outlook about work, it’s important that we develop our support network within our team and wider organisation.

At Meta we’ve often talked about how important it is to have ‘allies’ within your team and organisations, people you can ally with on certain topics that are important to you that you wish to influence. We also think it’s important to have at least one ‘rant buddy’ someone you can talk to about anything in absolute confidence and have a good ‘rant’ with and clear your chest with. And what’s interesting is, that when we share our concerns with others, we often find a kindred spirit, someone who is feeling if not the very same thing, certainly something similar!

When we are under pressure and under stress there is a tendency to try and do everything ourselves. We struggle to see the broader picture and as we become more pressured and the demands on us grow so our focus narrows and narrows until we can literally only see what is next to do on our to-do lists! The irony is that as workloads get bigger we actually need to think more broadly, get perspective on things in order to accurately prioritise and plan what needs to be done.

Our state is incredibly important. Many people now are not getting enough sleep; many of us are running our fuel tanks on empty. So the first step is to notice where our fuel tanks are, are you running on empty? If so, make sure that you consciously make an effort to re-fuel your fuel tank so that you are more resourced.

The second thing is to ensure that you are not doing everything by yourself. There is strength in working with others, and it’s important to share the problems you face. In this case, the old adage is most certainly true; a problem shared IS a problem halved. By opening up to others we can begin to see that it’s not just us that feels like this, that is encountering these issues. Once we realise we are not the only ones feeling this way, we can start to do something about it. Often other people have a perspective that we’ve just not thought of. They help us to see the problem from other angles, to get a clearer picture and often can help us to come up with a way forward out of our ‘stuckness’, into a more sustainable solution.

So who are your allies in your business? Who are people that it’s important to have as a part of your work support network? If you are a leader, who is in your leaders network? Who do you turn to for advice on best practice and leadership advice?

And of course our support network is not just IN work, it’s also outside of work. We often call on our partners and our friends, but its important that we develop other networks of support, involve others who are perhaps in similar positions in other organisations who can understand the particular issues we face.

There is something to be said about developing a community, a network of people that you can share and learn from, it helps us to build our own inner resilience and to deal with the increasing pressures and workloads we all face.

So look to yourself and your network. Do you have a strong, vibrant active support network? Or could it do with a bit of tweaking, re-building and growing?

We at Meta are here to support you in anyway we can. So remember to include us in your support network and if you’re a leader why not come and take part in our new Meta leadership network? The first event is on April 6th and you can find out more about it on our events page – www.meta-org.com/.events
Have a wonderful month everyone, and if you would like some help with the challenges you face, remember we are here in your corner and are only an email or call away!

Jo and Di xxx

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WHAT DID YOU LEARN TODAY? – consciously learning from what work and life sends our way

By on October 31, 2016 in Blog, emotional intelligence, health+well being, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Resourcing yourself, Working smarter

We may ask this question of children when they’re at school, but we rarely ask it of ourselves on a regular basis. And yet it is an essential aspect of being human: our continuing to learn and develop ourselves. Now when we’re at school, there is an expectation that we will learn new facts and new skills, and we are tested and judged on our ability to do so. As we grow older, there is not generally the same encouragement – or pressure! – to continue to develop our skills and capabilities. One of the things we seem to learn at school is that learning is about coming to grips with something new, and there is less necessity for that as we settle into our particular career and way of life.

However, learning is so much more than that! When we talk about learning from experience, we are talking about the real process of learning: it is the gradual refining of our awareness, our understanding, our skills, and applying them to enhance our lives. We do this by reflecting on what our experiences are like, then taking the parts that work best for us and looking for ways to improve things that don’t work so well.

You may not realise you do this, because it is a natural process – our brains are designed to help us to do it. It is what Darwin described as the survival of the fittest – the process of adapting and refining the way we live our lives, so as to fit into and thrive in our world. We can’t help but do it as we go through our experiences.

So the question is not whether we have learnt anything today, but what we have learnt. When we are not conscious of what we are doing, we can be learning things that seem useful to us, but are not really helping us to be the best we can be and live our lives well. We may have learnt that it’s a good idea to keep your opinions to yourself if you want the boss to approve of you; or that you always have to put others first and be useful to them if you want to be seen as a good person; or that suppressing your values of what’s right and wrong is necessary to fit in. Of course, you will also have learnt some more useful lessons that do help you to be more of who you really are, but for many of us, our continuing learning has diminished rather than enhanced our lives and the way we live them.

It’s important that we set time to reflect on our learning. It might be at the end of the week or perhaps at the end of a month. When we become conscious of this form of learning, we are constantly evolving ourselves, refining our approach to work and life to ensure it becomes better and easier for us. When we learn from our mistakes, and as importantly when we learn from what we do well, then work and life just works!

It’s easy to dismiss our personal development as something that is a ‘nice extra’ to our life and work, however if we don’t give it any importance or any time, then we can get the feeling that we are going round and round in circles, hitting the same blocks and making the same mistakes. It can be very disheartening.

As human beings we love to learn and grow and when we aren’t consciously learning we can feel that we are not moving forward, that we are in stasis. Organisations rarely have the funds these days to do much more than the most essential of technical training, and so our personal and professional development is often left down to us. So what will you do to ensure that you are consciously learning?

At Meta we are committed to identifying easy and useful ways in which people can develop and grow into being the best of themselves, and sharing those ways with as many as possible. We know it’s possible to learn in ways that transform your life into one of possibilities rather than constraints. Isn’t this what we’re really here on earth to do?

Our Journey to Mastery programme is one of the vehicles we have developed that helps you to identify ways of enhancing your life through conscious application of your natural learning process, and we are starting a new programme in January 2017.

So if you’d like to kick start your own personal development plan for 2017, why not consider joining us for this transformational programme?

For more information and some testimonials from those who have already done the programme check our events page – www.meta-org.com/events

And we are not just pushing our programme, we believe its time for everyone to start reviewing their own learning. This year? I’ve learnt so much (often through adversity!) and you know what? When I stopped recently to say ‘what did I learn from all my challenges this year?’ it really amazed me just how much I got from it, and it really made me feel better to know just how much I had learnt. I’m also sure that as a result that NEXT year will be far better as a result.

So why not put aside sometime in your work-diary to review what you have learnt this year, we think that if you do, it’ll give you plenty to think about and might just make you feel a lot better about the year you’ve had!

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STRESS – THE SILENT KILLER – isn’t it time to admit we have a problem?

By on June 27, 2016 in Blog, health+well being, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Working smarter

There is no doubt we are living in a speeded up world. We are working far harder and for longer hours, than we ever have. The increased demands of the workplace are causing many of us to become far too tolerant of stress. Right now all of us will know of someone (possibly even us if we’re honest?) who is suffering from stress.

Stress related illness is the number one cause of visits to UK GP’s so what are you doing to monitor your own stress levels? ~Do you know your own physical and mental signs that you’re under too much stress? Do you suffer from difficulty in sleeping? Waking up in the middle of the night? Waking up with butterflies in your stomach? Suffering from low-level anxiety? Making snap or bad decisions? Not able to get over a cold? Getting ill easily and then being ill for a long time before recovering? Not being able to stop yourself saying something before you’ve said it? Feeling out of control? Wired? Short tempered? Being snappy? Uptight? Being grumpy for no particular reason? Not being able to motivate yourself? Bad neck or back or shoulders? Stomach issues? Gut or digestion problems? Struggling to eat? Smoking or drinking too much? All of these symptoms can be signs of stress.

At Meta we have looked at the science behind stress. We look at how the stress hormones affect the body and mind and look at practical ways to recognise the signs of stress and combat stress in the workplace. With some simple tools you really can change your relationship to stress.

We believe its time to highlight this silent killer. Too many of our friends in senior leadership positions have suffered from the long-term effects of stress. We’ve seen what ignoring stress does. It’s not pretty and it’s not clever. We have to admit that as a working culture we have a problem. We have a problem that we are not paying enough attention to. With increased workloads comes increased pressure, with increased pressure comes increased stress levels, with increased stress levels comes mistakes, inefficiency, inability to problem solve, the death of creativity and innovation and more importantly – serious illness. This is something that businesses and leaders need to address. Not just for the health and well being of their staff but for the health and well being of their organisations!

We can’t change how much you have to do on your to-do list but we can help you to truly change the way you work so that you don’t suffer quite so much from stress. Its time to stop ignoring what is right in front of our faces. It’s time to do something about stress.

We have a 1-day workshop on precisely this topic, so why not use your next team away day to do something really useful for you and your team? And help reduce stress in your workplace?

I hope that at the very least this update will make you think about your own relationship to stress. Are you in denial? Are you more stressed than you think? If you tick more than one of the possible symptoms highlighted in your article, you might want to think about it some!

At Meta we believe that everyone should have access to what we’ve learned, so if you’d like to find out more about the ‘science behind stress’ and ways to tackle it, from the extensive research we’ve done, we’d love to help. So get in touch and we’ll see what we can do to help you and your team tackle this silent killer before it’s too late!

Have a great week everyone,

Jo xxx

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EVERY TEAM NEEDS SPACE TO GROW – WHY TEAM AWAY DAYS MATTER

By on May 12, 2016 in Blog, Collaboration, emotional intelligence, Excellent organisations, Leadership, Meta Org Blog, Team working, Working smarter

Everyone these days seems to be getting on with their list of things to do, in their own world of busyness. Yet on a personal level, most of us find that it makes a difference when we stop and consider before we just bash on, and even more of a difference when we talk things through with others.

Yes, there are lots of meetings to go to in most workplaces, but these are not generally for sharing or exploring ideas and possibilities, they are for information giving, reporting and dealing with immediate issues. This way of working results in several things:

People still tend to work in silos

Despite being in a team, most people still do their work primarily on their own, and don’t use the benefits of working together or develop the relationships with others that make that easier.

Urgent gets done rather than important

People deal with whatever seems most urgent, and often neglect the important things that would make a positive difference to the culture, their effectiveness, and help to reduce the number of immediate issues in the future.

No one has a wider perspective

If people are focussed on what needs to be done next, they lose their perspective on what they are trying to achieve overall, and the consequences of their actions for others who are involved in the process.

What’s the alternative?

Most teams have an away day at least once a year. Too often these are just a lengthier and more complex version of the meetings they have back in the workplace.

What if they were a time to reflect, together?

The benefits of space and time away from the office can be enormous:

  • The team can develop their relationships with each other in a relaxed environment
  • They can look at ways of enhancing their effectiveness in working together, so they get all that stuff done more easily
  • They can reflect on the bigger picture, what they’re trying to achieve overall, and develop ideas on how to do that more effectively
  • They feel valued enough to be given the space to think about something other than their immediate list of things to do
  • The team can make important decisions together, so that priorities do not get confused
  • They can explore how best to work together, in order to achieve their goals for the year
  • They can develop particular skills across the team that will enable them to deliver their departmental objectives more easily
  • These developed skills become a shared learning, a common language of development that all the team share, something that brings them together
  • They have the opportunity to look at things that perhaps they don’t have time for at the office, things that are important to the team as a whole, but just not important enough to make the top of individual to-do lists
  • They can come up with more innovative solutions to problems because they are away from the BAU (business as usual) tasks back at the office
  • Teams are a living system, a social network, being away from the office reminds everyone that they are not just their job titles or roles, but real human beings and reconnect as such

And ALL these elements make a difference to how they perform when they return to their everyday working.

We at Meta have facilitated such days for teams in organisations over the past 20 years, and we know just how valuable they can be in helping to create sustainable success in the workplace. Time and time again we hear the same things – ‘it’s just so good to get away from the office together’, ‘I feel like this has really brought us together’, ‘I thought it was just me that thought like this, it’s nice to know we are all on the same page’, ‘its nice to have some space and time to think!’ ‘I can see how we can make this work if we work together on this’.

We all instinctively know that time away from the office together as a team isn’t a ‘jolly’ – (unless you decide that go-karting is the way to go!) – it isn’t a luxury, it’s an essential to the long-term success of the team. Without away days teams become fragmented and individualistic. It is no longer about the team and what the team needs to deliver but ‘how can I get what I have on my to-do lists so that I am in the clear’. That may sound harsh, but for many of us that is the truth.

At Meta want to change that story, we want to help you to create a team that grows and develops together. Having your away days facilitated by an independent, someone outside of the team dynamics, who is not involved with the organisation, has been shown to make a real difference to the effectiveness and longer-term success of a team away day. “Facilitate” means ‘to make things easy’ it’s our job to make it easy for you to work more effectively together, back in the difficult dynamics of your workplace.

So think about your team away day this year, would you like to get the most from that day away from the office? Would you like to develop the working practice of your team? Would you like your team away day to be fun, enjoyable, motivating, productive, inspiring and different? If the answer to these questions is ‘yes please!’ Then why not get in touch with us here at Meta?

At Meta we’ve been running staff and team away days for years. It’s what we call our ‘bread and butter’, because we’ve worked with teams at every level within organisations global to start up, from CEO’s and directors to people working on the shop floor. We know what works and over the years we’ve developed and refined our programmes so that they are practical and easily applicable back in the workplace, thus overcoming that traditional ‘that was a nice away day, and now we’re back in the office, we’ll revert back to the way we’ve always worked’. We love helping teams to realise their potential, and we don’t want your away day to be wasted. We want it to become a way for you to sustainably change the way your team works for the better. At Meta we truly believe that its time to utilise this opportunity away from the office to its fullest so that your team comes back raring to go and ready to give of their best.

So why not use YOUR away day this year to get more? Use YOUR team away day to motivate, develop and inspire your team, you’ll be really glad you did!

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WHY WE NEED TO TAKE OUR SLEEP MORE SERIOUSLY

By on February 26, 2014 in Blog, health+well being, Living fully, Meta Org Blog, Reducing stress, Resourcing yourself, Working smarter

Why one hours extra sleep is good for you and good for business! 

Right now at Meta we see so many of our friends and customers suffering. You’re tired, actually forget tired you’re exhausted and the work/life balance well lets just say there’s not much balance in it at all! So what can you do about it?

Well, one of the places we THINK we can save time is by shaving time off the amount we sleep, however if we interrupt our REM sleep (which if you have 7 hours or less a night you ARE) then your mind doesn’t get the opportunity to process the information/emotions/problems from the day before, so when you wake up you’re still processing the information from the previous day. Think about that for a moment – as you read this article do you struggle to absorb the information? When you get to work, do you already feel like your mind is half full and that it won’t take much to fill it? That’s because it is!

You see because many of us are under medium to high level stress it means that the stress hormones in our body are controlling which part of our brain is activated. When we are not stressed we utilise our conscious brain (this is about 1% of our brain by the way). Its used to analyse, process and is good for making good, thought out and rationalised decisions. However when we are under the stress that most of you will be feeling right now the body shifts to the ‘fight of flight’ response and switches to use the sub-conscious part of our brain (the other 99%) that is excellent at making quick decisions (should I fight or should I take flight?), but not about thinking things through! The sub-concsious brain, although able to process things  about 1 million times quicker than our conscious brain, does not have the capacity/ability to think things through and analyse the data to come up with an informed response. Its an instant YES/NO, this or that – its binary thinking. So when you think about this for a moment, it makes sense of some of the short-term knee-jerk decisions that are being make in the workplace and indeed in the wider world!

Our body requires sleep, its not a luxury, it’s a necessity! We are an amazing feat of co-operation; 60 trillion cells all working together to make us. Those cells need time to regenerate and get themselves working properly and that is why we need to sleep. We need time to absorb and process the day and to heal and regenerate at a cellular level.

In recent sleep research it has been proven that just ONE hour more sleep has an exponential effects on the body. Not only does it enable our conscious mind (that bit we use in our work day to day) to analyse, make good decisions, be more effective, process things quicker, and improve problem-solving skills. But when we get more sleep it re-activates our immune system (which for most of us is not working due to the amount of stress hormones running around our bodies which shut it down – more on that in another update) and it activates genes in our DNA that are beneficial to our health.

The study compared those that got 6.5hours sleep compared to 7.5 hours sleep, so 7.5 hours sleep is what we all should be aiming for. Personally I’m a big guy and I KNOW I need my sleep, I get at least 9hours which according to the research is what teenagers need  – so I guess I’m just a big kid! However many of you will be reading this getting an average of 7 or less hours sleep. So if you want work and life to feel easier, if you’re sick of being tired, getting sick and feeling like there’s not enough hours in the day to get everything done, then get yourself an extra hours sleep!

Don’t take my word for it, do your own empirical research and see what that extra hour of sleep can do for you. Ever since I found out about this I’ve been passing this information on to people that I’m working with. The response I’ve got from those that have given it a go has been really encouraging, it really does seem to work!

For more information on this check the BBC website where the programme ‘Trust me I’m a doctor’ explored this very research in a brilliant episode at the end of last year – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24444634

Have a great month,

Jo xx

CEO of Meta

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FOOD FOR THE SOUL

By on July 31, 2013 in Living fully, Meta Org Blog, Resourcing yourself, Working smarter

I recently went to see Bruce Springsteen in concert, and was struck by the level of joy he creates with his band and his audience. At the same time as loving the concert, I was reflecting on how rare it is to simply enjoy yourself: to sing, laugh, dance, and take pleasure in simple things.

We have been taught through the consumer culture to search for our delight through more, bigger, better, instead of listening to our hearts, which say simple, natural, shared.

This may sound idealistic, not of the real world. After all, how often can we go to concerts, or just dance? It’s not our everyday. Well, it can be: look at the sunshine, the flowers in the gardens. Listen to that lovely happy song on the radio as you drive into work. Taste that special cheese you decided to treat yourself to in your weekly shop. Smell your child’s head – how sweet! Feel the grass with your bare feet first thing in the morning. None of these are expensive or rare – and they all feed our souls.

And why do we do it – feed our souls? Because it is essential to our health and well-being.  It causes our brains to release those hormones which keep us well, and help us to thrive. Consequently, when my soul is fed, I am a more pleasant person to be around, I notice and appreciate the more positive aspects of my life, and I feel able to handle what the world throws at me. What is more, I don’t need the compensation of ‘stuff’ to try to fill the void.

If shopping did it for us, wouldn’t everyone in town look happy? If gadgets did it for us, wouldn’t everyone using their technology send positive messages?

We all have a sense of what feeds our soul: if your heart warms or sings at the thought of it, you know that works for you. That is what is worth investing in, spending time on.

This month, take a little time every day to feed your soul, and keep yourself well. The world is full of soul food, if we care to look for it – you don’t need to go and see Springsteen – although I would recommend it!!

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