Who has never wondered how to reduce their workload? But who has never found a solution to the question, which is not episodic or ridiculous in terms of real benefits?
My colleague Oliver Kozak brought his scientific and systemic approach to present how continuous improvement can help us to really reduce worlkload.
The objective is to free up enough time to be able to start improving, in order to free up even more time up to 40% to be able to improve continuously and ultimately create much more value at work (by moving from the Spend-It-All team model to the Time-Investor team model). How to get there concretely? By improving in three areas: (your) work processes, team efficiency, and organisation development. Important: you have to go slowly, step by step, with persistence day after day, be patient, and get support.
I read in the train this Leandro Herrero’s article on the three models of change and to better remember it I sketched it.
In a nutshell, the article rightly says that traditional change management, the destination model, is often just a one–off. The journey model is about learning and experience. And the building model is about creating a long term culture with change-ability in the organisation DNA.
My colleague Valeria Croce asked me to record visually two fantastic sessions she organised on “Trust” with renowned speakers. I reproduce here, to accompany my visual notes, the essential passages of the articles that Valeria wrote after the sessions, as a report.
Resilient teams: how trust underpins care and performance in teams
To trust each other at work is even more important in the context of hybrid or remote work, with limited human interaction and the difficulty to reach out to new people!
Chris Tamdjidi shared with us the evidence and learnings he collected through the years working with teams inside and outside the Commission, focussing on the important role of trust in teamwork. He observed that:
It is difficult to build a culture of collaboration: while most teams have established processes to perform tasks, they don’t have established processes to improve how they work together,
During Covid he observed an increase in individual productivity, but a decrease in collaborative productivity: it takes more effort to connect with others and collaborate in a remote setting.
We risk to work in micro-silos, narrow connections because of remote working – we maintain the relationships we already have, it takes efforts to build new ones.
This is why it is important to build team habits that help strengthen collaboration, team resilience and trust, especially in a hybrid environment. These habits are: Habits of attention; of connection; and of positivity.
Why being trusted (or distrusted) matters
Trust is critical to create an environment where colleagues collaborate, share knowledge, engage and contribute to the achievement of the shared purpose. Yet, trust-based relationships require time to be built. What can we do to start building trust from the very beginning of a new collaborative project with colleagues from outside our team or unit?
Hilary Sutcliffe and Vanja Skoric shared lessons they learned working for over 130 civil society projects.In a nutshell, they identify four areas, where most barriers to trust and collaboration can be found, namely:
Prior experiences and assumptions
Skills and procedures
Culture and incentives
Process concerns
Three aspects that are crucial to overcome barriers are: A (truly) shared purpose; a trustworthy process (based on seven drivers of trustworthiness: openness, integrity, competence, inclusion, respect and fairness); and a visible impact.
Three drawings to illustrate in an offbeat way, and probably memorable way, the participants’ conversations during a session on knowledge management.
The session hosted by Huy-Hien Bui and Fania Pallikarakis, whose full title is “Knowledge Management and Collaboration in international organisations: Edge or Curse?”, was held as part of the Friends of Career Development Roundtable (FoCDR) workshop in Brussels on 17 June 2022.
On 24 April 2020, I attended an interesting online session by Rafael Höhr on “Applications to create graphics in newsrooms“.
Although the title was explicit, we were going to talk about tools to create graphics, I cannot help thinking that tools are not the most important part in the process of creating graphics. Rafael explained this very well during the session and despite everything we spent (too much) time on tools.
The process of creating graphics should follow this order:
First, create a story! A story around the questions you want to answer, around what you want to show, around the 5Ws
Link your story to skills. Surround yourself with a multi-skilled team that will help you analyze, edit, interpret, tell, graph, animate your data.
At the end only, choose the tool (s) best suited to your needs
My sketchnotes of Rafael’s online session:
Thanks to my colleagues in the EU Publications Office for organising the online session.
Being forced to work from home due to the coronavirus pandemic brought a lot of uncertainty, fear, big changes to our lives. Teleworking mindfully makes possible to live it better! This is the main message of an online session organised by my colleagues from the EC HR department.
Their presentation is based on the work of two extremely inspiring and inspired persons: the master of mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who described five stages of grief. (it fills me with joy to see how “we” rediscover the Elisabeth’s work during this coronavirus crisis).
Recently I posted on social media a visualisation of my CV based on my LinkedIn data. I enriched it with my practice of visual thinking and my main job experience.
I explain here how you can do the same and create your own visual CV using Excel only (Microsoft Excel 2016). If I used Adobe Photoshop to add the fades in the 2nd and 3rd graphics, you don’t need it for the basic version of the 3 graphics. You don’t have to be an expert in Excel either, a low-medium level is sufficient.
How to create a visual CV step-by-step:
Start with a new blank workbook
Create a table with the start/end dates of the different periods of your professional life that you want to visualise. Rename this sheet to “Data”. I customised the cell format of my dates with the custom type “mmm yyyy”. Up to you to use any other date format, it has no influence on the following. Note that I decided to start the list with my birthdate, which makes my data more complete than what is displayed on Linkedin. It’s up to you what data you want to see in your visual CV.
Create a new sheet that you rename to “Viz” for your visualisation.
Reserve its first line for your title and any other information you want to add. Create a matrix with the months of the year on an horizontal line and a top-down list with all years you want to use in the first column. In my case the list goes from 2020 to 1965. You can duplicate the line with the name of the months at the bottom of the matrix if your list of years is long (like mine).
Fill in the first 4 cells of the matrix with the corresponding dates. Then drag the fill handle to fill the remaining cells of the matrix with their date (from January of the year in the top-left cell to December of the last year in the bottom-right cell)
Select all your data. Select the “Format” option in the horizontal navigation menu and set the value of Row height to 20 and the value of Column Width to 4. In my case, these values resize the cells into a nice shape.
Select again all your data. Right-click them and select the “Format cells…” option. In the “Fill” tab, set the Background Color to white. All gray cell borders are gone.
Select the dates into the matrix only. The row(s) with the name of the months and the column with the years are not part of your selection. Right-click it and select the “Format cells…” option. In the “Border” tab, select the thick style line; change its Color to White; and tick the Outline and Inside options to apply these changes to the selected cells. Don’t press now the “OK” button or come back to the “Format cells…” option.
Within the “Format cells…” option, go to the “Font” tab. Select a light gray for the font Color. Then go to the “Fill” tab and select the same light gray for the Background Color. Confirm your changes with the “OK” button. If everything went well, your matrix should consist of gray cells with white borders. Something like this:
You have a nice matrix with all years of your professional life represented with a gray box for each month. You will now color each month with a different color according to the different periods of your professional life. You can do it by hand (like I did the very first time), or use the Conditional Formatting feature to change automatically the color of your cells based on the start/end dates you entered in the “Data” sheet.
Select the matrix of gray cells only.
In the horizontal navigation menu, choose “Conditional Formatting” and the Manage Rules… option
Click the “New Rule” button and select “Format only cells that contain”
Set the condition to format the cells of the matrix with your first professional period. In my case, it’s what I called Recklessness. The condition will select the cells “between” the start date of my Recklessness (= cell Data!$B$10) and its end date (= cell Data!$C$10). You do that with a click on the icons on the right of the field; here indicated by the red arrows, then go to the “Data” sheet to select the related cells.
Then click the “Format” button to choose what color to apply when this condition is met. In the “Fill” tab, set the Background Color to the desired colour. In the “Font” tab, set the font Color to the same as the background. My condition looks like that:
Confirm this condition by clicking the “OK” button, and apply it to the matrix cells with the other “OK” button. Cells corresponding to my period of Recklessness are now colorised in a dark violet.
Reselect your matrix of cells and redo the same steps to create a new condition for your second period: From the horizontal navigation menu, choose again the “Conditional Formatting” and the Manage Rules… option. Click New Rule… and select “Format only cells that contain”. Select the start and end dates of your second period and select a new color for the font and the background. In my case it’s the Primary School period that starts in Sep 1971 and ends in Aug 1977. I decided to format the corresponding period with dark ochre color.
Repeat these steps for all periods of your professional life. At the end, you have as many conditions as there are periods. And all periods of your professional life are now with different colors.
Add a title on the first row and any other details you want to display in a footer. Add the name of the period on the right of the related year, maybe using the same color as the period. Don’t forget to set the background color for these cells to white.
Excel does not allow to save your final work in image format. You need another program like Microsoft paint or Adobe Photoshop, or any other application for images.
Select all the cells with the visualisation of your CV. Copy them, Ctrl-C, and paste them, Ctrl-V, in your favorite application for images . Save to an image. That’s all.
To add other graphs on the right of this one, like I did with my practice of visual thinking and my main job experience, you should
add your new data in the “Data” sheet
go again through all steps to create a new graph and to colorise it, being smart in managing the matrix with the dates.
I look forward to seeing your results, feel free to share them with me.
