Work & Family Life: It's Here to Stay

This week, I'm talking about ways to help your employees balance (or at least try to) job and personal responsibilities. It's one way to demonstrate that you value their work and it also helps develop them as not just good workers but good people, too. Here's a piece from Susan Ginsberg's newsletter, "Work & Family Life," that came out quite some time ago but still has usefulness for today's worker, especially one with a child in college.
But why would that be helpful on the job? How can an article about making the most out of your college experience help with employee development? One of the hardest and perhaps most obvious challenges facing anyone juggling a family and a job is the distraction of worry. I call it a distraction, because, frankly, it's that worry that keeps us from focusing. So that becomes the answer to the question I posed at the start of this paragraph. If you want to help your employees focus on their jobs when they're at work, then you need to help them figure out how they can minimize their worries when it comes to family. For some, depending on their circumstances, that's nearly impossible. Of course a job often becomes the distraction, giving people a break from the worries at home. But that's another story, another post. If I'm worried about whether or not my kid is doing well at college, a piece like "How to make the most of your college experience" is going to come in handy. I'll get some good ideas in a relatively short period of time and expert advice (very often the articles include an author as a source), too. Then, after reading the piece, I'll clip it and send it to my kid. That makes for some convenient employee development.
    What's interesting to me is the newsletter's shelf life. I'm looking at an article right now. It's called "Keys to success for women in the workplace." Here's one that comes in handy for me in some situations: "RADIATE CONFIDENCE. Signs of self-assurance include taking slights with a grain of salt, letting negative comments slide, not taking the bait when someone razzes you and keeping things in perspective. You may not always feel confident, but at least you can act like you do." This concept is an important part of employee development whether it's something that's included in a workshop on confidence in the workplace or in an article like this one that takes about five to ten minutes (at the most) to read. It's amazing really how much one can glean from just a few minutes of reading.