#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

After my lackluster morning, I decided to do some research and really figure out the right way to spend the first hour of my workday. And after a little practice, I learned just how productive one can be when you’re thoughtful about this. So grab some coffee and make these four things a staple in your morning work routine:

Via The Learning Factor

Kids get a ton of press for stressing out their working parents. Work-life balance is incredibly hard, screams one survey. You need to be a productivity ninja to squeeze it all in, implies another blog post.

 

And after having a baby last year, I can see why. From broken sleep to incredible amounts of laundry (babies are so small, how do they produce so much?) and a million other responsibilities, kids are a huge if happy time suck. But just because they demand a ton of effort, does that mean children end up being a net drain on your professional productivity?

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Make it okay to ask questions

 

“We have weekly Q&A sessions where the whole company comes together. This was true when we were 20 people and it’s true now when we’re closer to 100. People can ask questions of [CEO Adam D'Angelo], of other managers, or each other. It's really about being encouraging of what people what to know about in the company.

 

The second area is making it okay to ask outside. We feel comfortable consulting with other companies we might have some connections with, where they might have similar challenges, where we might learn if we share best practices with each other. An example: Recently, we hosted a roundtable where startups came to Quora to talk about infrastructure. A lot of us use Amazon Web Services and we were starting to think about how we could improve cost. We wanted to learn from bigger companies and smaller companies what they had taken on."

 

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Like thousands of professionals all over the country, you're trying your best to stay organized, keep your appointments, and still churn out the countless hours of work you need to keep pushing your company forward.

 

Most of us aspire to conquer more and more work in less and less time, but since none of us can cram more hours into the day (despite our best efforts), increasing our productivity is the best we can do. Even so, in some cruel twist of irony, most "productivity enhancers," like going to the gym every morning, seem to add more effort to our already busy lives. Instead, try one or more of these 15 productivity hacks--which you can execute and experiment with immediately:

 

 

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Many people fear that no matter how they prepare, their negotiation will spiral into an unproductive debate or a shouting match. Even if you’re approaching the negotiation with a collaborative, joint problem-solving mindset, it’s possible that things will get heated. You know when it’s happening: Perhaps you feel yourself getting emotional. You sense that your blood pressure is rising, that you’re becoming angry or anxious. Maybe your counterpart is doing the same. The volume might be getting louder, or one or both of you have started to yell.

 

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Here are fives ways these experts suggest reshaping your career envy into something good.

 

1. Never Assume Luck

 

Everyone’s acting as their own best public relations specialist. Just because their star seems to rise effortlessly, doesn’t mean their path was devoid of sacrifices.

 

Reaching out to someone you admire--and yes, envy a little--is empowering and enlightening for both sides (and chances are, they never saw themselves as someone to envy!). Find out their process, and what unique challenges they had to face on their way to where they are. They likely made their own luck, or had a mentor that changed everything.

 

2. Ask Yourself Why You’re Envious

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Working from home is everyone's dream, right? If that's true, then why did 60 percent of the employees who participated in a Stanford University work-from-home experiment opt to go back to corporate HQ?

 

The 2013 study offered a sampling of employees in the air travel and hotel booking industry an opportunity to work from home for nine months. Surprisingly, many of them had a very lonely experience. After only a few months, 50 percent of the volunteers and 10 percent of the non-volunteer group asked to return to their cubicles.

 

Loneliness and lack of social interaction were cited as the No. 1 reason for abandoning home offices, but these aren't the only drawbacks. How can you have your cake and eat it, too? Because I've successfully worked from home for nearly 16 years, I consider myself an expert on the topic.

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A few weeks ago, we talked about why happiness at work matters; this week I'd like to share the flip side of that: the gigantic cost of unhappy employees.

Employee engagement has been a hot topic for several years now, but what does it really mean and how do you know if your employees are engaged at work? And why does it matter?

 

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace reported on employee engagement in more than 140 countries and divided employees into 3 categories:

 

"Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.Not Engaged employees are essentially "checked out." They're sleepwalking through their workday, putting time--but not energy or passion--into their work.Actively Disengaged employees aren't just unhappy at work; they're busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

 

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