First Published in Conference News Magazine in April 2019
Religious or not, lent always feels like a good time to set yourself a new goal of giving something up, it’s the chance to re-set your new year’s goals and give it one last shot before you declare it impossible for the rest of the year.
Henry Ford famously said, “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, either way you are right”. And I’ve seen it time and time again with my coaching clients. Those that have too much work to do that they can’t leave work on time and are on first name terms with their local Deliveroo drivers. The thing is, when they decide that they are going to change the way they organise their work and they change their attitude between long days as being inevitable to the exception, it changes them. It takes time but it does happen.
As manager’s we can help. We all know people work long weeks in events, 20% of eventprofs admit to working more than 60 hours a week according to Stress Matters research. As managers we need to pay more attention to our resourcing plans. Our teams are tough, they are resilient but sometimes we push them too far. When did you last check their time sheets to see how many hours they are doing per week? If you believe that your team are you biggest asset, how often do you put your foot down and bring additional resource in when needed?
One of the Stress Matters pledges is to restrict the number of hours that the team are expected to work. Recognising that some weeks they will need to do more than 50 hours per week but that should be the exception, not the norm.
Managers, look at your resourcing plans, look at your team, are they doing their contracted hours or are you consistently expecting them to do an extra 2 days per week? And team members, look at how you manage your time. Are you being as efficient as you can be or are you feeling so overwhelmed that you’re procrastinating?
