The quality of our team, our organization’s very ability to deliver on its mission and remain agile and relevant, relies on the skills our staff bring to the office and use every day. In this episode of How We Work:TV, we explore ways to develop our most valuable of organizational assets, our people. We’ll cover eight strategies — all that don’t cost a dime! They include: (1) Career Conversations (2) Musical Chairs (3) Bring in Outsiders (4) Never Eat Lunch Alone (5) Co-Learning (6) SMART Task Forces (7) Job Crafting (8) Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) Want more ideas, tips, and assistance? Check out my previous posts about creating innovative workplaces and investing in our people, the job crafting workbook available from the University of Michigan, the Inspiring and Motivating Teams course by National Arts Strategies, or try Radical Focus to learn more about OKRs.

Throughout our lives, we’re constantly fighting the Battle of The Urgent versus The Important. If left unchecked, the urgent will fill our days, seducing us with its sweet, false sense of accomplishment and distracting us from the *important* work that changes the world.

Individually never as successful as the sum of their parts I have number of friends who are teachers, and I’ve noticed a theme over the years. Each spring, school principals start sketching out their faculty line up for the following year. They look at who’s leaving and what positions they’ll need to fill. They look at test scores and evaluations to see how they can curate the best teams. And here’s where it gets interesting.

How We Work:TV Remember that time you tried to teach yourself how to use a green screen, and well, one thing lead to another and you launched a web series instead? No? Uh, maybe I’m doing it wrong. I’ve published a number of pieces about how to create innovative workplaces — with a sense of shared purpose — where people can do their best work and thrive. The aim in doing this is to share our philosophy and experience at Fractured Atlas in hopes that it might be helpful to other organizations tackling similar challenges.

Fractured Atlas office following our 2016 renovation Remember that time you tried to change something and it involved other people? People will love this new thing, you said. It will make their lives so much better and easier, you said. Remember how you were blindsided by the push back, the skepticism as to your motives, and the accompanying anxiety, angst, and negativity directed towards you? Remember how you shouldn’t have been surprised because behavioral scientists have spelled out why change initiatives — large and small — can be fraught?

Searching for purpose in our work and life Me and my mom Today would have been my mom’s 68th birthday. Instead, my family lost her four years ago to brain cancer. Near the end of her life, my parents were preparing to retire and downsize to a smaller home. As an apartment dweller ever since I graduated from college nearly 20 years ago, I had more than a handful of boxes containing my belongings still stashed in their basement all these years later. I began that rite of passage where one needs to reduce their entire pre-adult existence into a small box that will fit in the back of a small closet inside of a small New York City apartment.

Here’s the good news. Your company has core behavioral values! Here’s the bad news. They might not be ones you want, ones you’re particular proud of, or ones you would print on a t-shirt even to wear on laundry day. Every organization — and every individual, for that matter — has core behavioral values. Values that define and drive the way we act, inform our work and decision-making, and signal to the world in a calling card of sorts, this is what’s important to us.

Being an “innovative workplace” isn’t just about having a great idea. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. The halls of history are littered with great, unrealized innovative ideas. Innovative workplaces instead are about the people and systems that allow and support ideas to be explored, nurtured, and often, nixed.

Attracting and retaining great people who move organizations forward Several years ago, I set out to interview a collection of senior-level executives about what they felt it took to attract and retain really great people who could move organizations forward.

We’ve entered a New Year — the future is upon us! It’s that time when people take stock of their life goals and think, time to change things up. As an employer, you can ignore this reflection point and pretend people aren’t thinking about it, but chances are at least a handful of those who work for your organization are dusting off their resumes and using this mile marker to take the next step in their careers. Happens every year. As an employer, it’s a good time to think about what you need to do to find that next stellar staff member when a position opens up.