Mind Your Focus and Focus Your Mind: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous and Back

It was a beautiful Friday afternoon, the kind that makes me itchy to close the computer, grab my puppy (Shanti), and hop into my vintage red BMW convertible for an adventure! It had been a really great week business-wise, and I was ready to celebrate.

Resilience. It has been the buzzword of the pandemic - the biggest test of resilience in our lifetimes for many of us. Times of ambiguity are one of the largest contributing factors to stress, and there is no more ambiguous time than right now. Not only have organizations had to exhibit extreme agility to adapt to environmental circumstances, but every individual contributor has experienced their own enormous shifts in the way they work as they seek to navigate the further blurred lines between work and life. 

In our last onboarding post, we said that great onboarding programs work to make new employees feel prepared for, welcomed, informed, accompanied, safe, and valued — to feel that they belong.

So leaders, in your experience:
What makes a difference in getting new hires up to speed?
What matters most in employee attraction and retention?  
What kind of culture are you growing, day by day?

Ultimately, whose job is it within the organization to make sure that the above happens in your onboarding program?

This is Part II in our Onboarding Series designed to help making the new hire process easier and more fulfilling for employees and employers. Read How to Successfully Onboard and Engage New Hires for Part I.

We recently posted our thinking on the clear difference between new hire orientation and onboarding, both so necessary in bringing new employees into new organizational environments, whether that environment is onsite, remote or a hybrid arrangement. Because of the new ways of working and interacting within our work teams, thorough onboarding is even more important now. Here are some helpful steps to help employees feel they belong and can perform at their best.

The pandemic provided me an opportunity to return to my pre-corporate nomadic ways, living in a different city every few months, transitioning from skylines to mountaintops, across time zones, cultures, and languages. In fact, I write this just having returned from one of my many sojourns; exploring the world while maintaining productivity and professional connection, juggling not only a full-time position but also graduate school. Even though it’s good to be back home for a little while, I’ll soon be ready to board a plane again.

People are leaving their jobs at a pace we haven’t seen in several decades. Not only is this eye-opening, but it’s creating significant organizational challenges around retention as well as attracting and onboarding new employees. Almost every conversation with our clients and colleagues involves some reference to these topics and requests for tips and tools to offset the trend we’re calling, the ‘big quit’.

Mother’s Day is coming up. The day we celebrate all mothers everywhere. But statistics rolling in this year tell us that a quarter of working mothers are considering leaving the workplace permanently.
Roughly, 1.5 million more women than men dropped off the job map due to childcare responsibilities in the past year, leaving women’s labor force participation at a 33-year low. The pandemic has made working mothers’ issues more visible and acute, but they’re not new.

The air was fresh, the sun was bright, and snow crunched underfoot as my dear friend and mentor, Steven Vannoy, and I set out on one of our cherished hikes along the foothills near Red Rocks Park in Colorado.
We hiked and laughed and talked about life and our families and, as is often the case these days, the conversation turned toward the global pandemic. Yet, instead of the common, often cumbersome, conversation related to illness and vaccines, Steve delighted me, as he consistently does, with a different question. He paused mid-step, turned to me and said, “I bet your business is thriving while many others are struggling during COVID. What do you think has made Continuum so successful?”

Since Continuum was founded in 1995, we have been dedicated to giving back to the communities where we live and work. From the beginning, we measured our success as a company by the Triple Bottom Line of making a positive impact on people, planet and profit. Apply for a grant. Become a donor.

Recently, I was facilitating a client video conference on Zoom. The speaker, a young woman charged with leading an organizational initiative, began to outline her project update. As she did, serious and focused on the audience, her toddler, dressed in blue pajamas with brown curly hair, climbed a wooden cabinet in the background. I gasped, anticipating a fall and loud wailing.

During Black History Month, after a year when the push for racial justice has been highlighted and accelerated in new ways, I’ve been reflecting on my own sadness that changes in our country, sought for so long, have not come easier. I am a white, educated, middle class woman who can freely walk into any store, buy a home in any neighborhood and be welcome, and drive around without fear of being stopped for no reason. It is a privilege to live in this day-to-day reality without fear. I want this for everyone.

The morning sunrise is a little bit dimmer today.
Beverly, an older wise woman, has been a dear friend and guide for me over the past twenty years. Whenever I am down, or when the earth feels shaky under my feet, or if I am confused about the next decision in my life, I have reached out to her. Just the sound of her voice would center me again.

I’ve been coaching a new leader who moved her family halfway across the country to take a dream job only to discover the week before she started work that everything had changed. It was March 2020 when the work world entered into pandemic lockdown, and so many of us began adapting to work from home.

Starting any new job is incredibly exciting, but it is not easy. Those first few weeks can be filled with mixed emotions ranging from excitement and joy to overwhelm, feelings of uncertainty, insecurity and the constant need to prove yourself. Starting the journey of a new hire in a virtual environment amplifies these challenges. As more and more companies decide to continue with remote work even as the pandemic subsides, the difficulties of being a new employee rise.

Have you ever stumbled across something that turned your world around? That’s what the odd-sounding philosophy and methodology called APPRECIATIVE INQUIRY did for me. And, it’s available to you, too.
In late 1996, my friend and colleague Ravi Pradhan called me late one night from the Albuquerque airport saying that he had just attended a four-day workshop on something called Appreciative Inquiry [AI]. The instructor, Dr. David Cooperrider, was a professor of Organizational Development [OD] at Weatherhead School of Management within Ca

This has been a challenging year for us all. It is easy to turn inward, as individuals and as organizations, to become focused on our own needs, stability, and for some, survival. It is not a year where most of us would naturally extend ourselves and look for ways to give back or to search out avenues to share our time, money and talents with others.

Gratitude is good for us, so much so that November is National Gratitude Month in the U.S. And this week brings Thanksgiving celebrations. For those of us who opted to show our gratitude to others by staying at home with less family around than usual, it’s a good time to reflect on what and whom we value.

Ongoing uncertainty seems to be the theme of the year, and this US Election week is no exception. The whole world is watching to see the results and what our choice will be. It is clear that no matter which candidate prevails, a large group of people will be very disappointed and angry. There is much we must do to better understand our neighbors who may think very differently than we do by beginning to communicate, ask questions, listen to understand and start building bridges to unite our country again.

At Continuum, we believe that the best place to begin the conversation is to “Choose Love” as our starting point for every interaction, conversation and decision we make. We are proud to sponsor the Let’s Choose Love social movement. The Manifesto below outlines the invitation and the foundation of the movement. Please join us!

Connecting with people we love and care about via Zoom no longer has the same allure as it did in March when many of us enjoyed the novelty of hosting virtual family check-ins and coffee dates with friends.
As the pandemic drones on, so does the increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness and a whole host of other mental health issues. It turns out that our need for physical touch and meaningful, face-to-face human interaction is paramount to our ability to be resilient and maintain our mental stability.

Have you ever wondered how some leaders, who undoubtedly have an overflowing workload, still find time and energy to enjoy life with family and friends or engage in their favorite hobby or sport? They typically are the same leaders whose people clamored to be on their team, consistently obtain profitable business results and have enviable levels of employee and customer satisfaction ratings. Who are they and how do they do it?
They are leaders committed to, and intentional about, being less transactional and more transformational in their day-to-day interactions.

Throughout life, some of my best memories were the times I spent hanging out under the stars. I have sweet memories of childhood sleepovers in my parent’s back yard, big sky evening vistas in Montana, and wilderness white water rafting adventures with friends camping along the western rivers of our country. The magic of the night sky fueled my curiosity and imagination.
My knowledge of astronomy is minimal, but my pride in being able to identify the Big Dipper, the North Star and the Milky Way is solid. I know the Big Dipper. To this day, the first thing I do when I walk out at night is look up to see if I can find that one thing I know. There is comfort in the knowledge it is always there and that I can see it.