Tag Archive for: worklife

I don’t love a resolution

I don’t love a New Years Resolution. They seem fleeting, pointless, and TBH I never stick to them because my focus changes and then feel guilty.

However, in the spirit of the New Year, Dr Lisa Chaffey ClinScD PLY challenged me to consider what I wanted from 2023. In one word.

For a day and a half I mulled this over.

Wisdom. Opportunity. Yes. Growth. Change. Gratitude.

All worthy words, but discarded.

I finally settled on ‘Focus’.

Lisa asked why. And it’s because whatever I do – whatever that may be – I want to do it well, being present and with focus.

That to me means work, new opportunities, family or fun.

It’s not quite a resolution, it’s not quite a goal. It’s an anchor, an errr, focus, if you will ?

In one word, what is your 2023 bringing ?

New Years Focus

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The ones I never got to meet

I wrote about the lives of many I never got to meet.

As a young journalist, I asked questions of their loved ones to learn about them, and to share their lives and loss with the wider world.

The love and grief in family, in friends, with so many missing early on, and later, confirmed lost, was a grief felt by those closest to them as well as a town, a nation and the world.

Through the Lee family and the Cartwright family I learned how much Aaron, Justin and Stacey Lee and Bronwyn Cartwright meant to the world.

Therese Fox, who survived incredible odds, felt like a miracle. Her generous and loving family allowed me in to the Sydney hospital where she began her treatment and recovery. They allowed me to follow her life for the next 12 months as she gained strength and met the first year anniversary of a bombing that rocked Bali and Australia.

I spent the first anniversary of the bombing in Bali. I listened to each of the names of the many dead read out as part of the memorial ceremony, the voices rolling their names like waves of grief over the crowd.

It’s been 20 years. It’s only been 20 years.

It’s unlikely that grief has lessened for the families of any of those who were lost.

Those tears don’t end.

October 12 2002

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Examples of good and bad COVID19 comms – discuss

I had a doozy of a topic to facilitate at the IABC  #converge21 communications conference last night – ‘what has your government done well or badly in covid communications?’ 

Starting with ‘the good’ there was a crazy silence.

For the ‘bad’, there were plenty of examples.

It’s perhaps not so surprising when considering a worldwide, fast moving, frightening pandemic with a large impact. 

Some of the international participants were still living it. Political infighting and media manipulation seem universal. It can also be difficult to separate out the action of government from the communication of the action by communicators. 

When I was preparing, I was looking for non-Australian examples. This link collects a number of international marketing and public health campaigns, not all government. 

Some interesting examples – from an American-based ‘You’re freaking us out, wear a mask’ to Finland using teddy bears to demonstrate social distancing on buses before donating them, to Thailand’s ‘Dear Crisis’, resilience building campaign. 

Thanks to the participants at my virtual table for contributing to the discussion ?

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Culture – keep up

This article about how to keep/instill/grow a corporate culture in a distributed work model made me do a happy dance.
https://www-entrepreneur-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.entrepreneur.com/amphtml/364250

A combination of forced work from home (pandemic style) and choice (working for myself) gave me real insight (like many) and a further interest in the alignment between culture, HR, leadership and internal communications.

When I hear senior executives note that they can’t temperature check the health and culture of their organisation without being able to walk the floors and see people I think it’s a lazy and old-fashioned attitude. It’s also not inclusive.

Though I get it – face to face contact is amazing – managing a team during a pandemic I found that while collaboration in a remote environment does take some additional work – a distributed team is really just like any other team, whether they work face-to-face or not.

The author notes that “corporate culture is more than creating a friendly break room with comfortable chairs and bringing in a box of doughnuts on Friday – developing it means intentionally engaging employees, educating them, and providing venues for interactions, knowledge sharing and training.”

Culture is what creates a real sense of trust and engagement, he says. This is a challenge in many organisations regardless of where their employees work. The consequences of COVID-19 has just highlighted this more.

This article provides great data that indicates not only was teleworking increasing prior to COVID19 for employees as well as gig workers, but that self-employed and home-based self-employed population has grown. Add partners, third-party providers and freelancers outside of the corporate structure to the ecosystem and traditional structures including internal communications will be challenged and fail.

Despite the oft-stated importance of culture, building, maintaining and living it and whatever values are important to an organisation, it takes work – from all levels – an appropriate investment including commitment and budget, an understanding of how it connects to real life and more than lip service.

Collectively, we need to get our shit together. I can put my hand up and say my own attitude to running teams, supporting and leading organisations and living remote work life has changed markedly, and needed to. This is not reinventing the wheel and expectations have never been higher as the world shifts in post-pandemic reality.

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