Sticky Learning Lunches #6: Get to Know Your Employees and How People Feel Whilst Working Remotely

Use these two simple methods to find out how people feel because happy employees are productive employees. Use your time working from home to become the very best version of yourself. This is a Virtual Classroom of 20-minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Good afternoon. I wanted to open up the window. We've got a couple of minutes before everyone's coming. I can see there's a few people already waiting, so I wanted to start this session off as quickly as possible. Get you in the room. Say good afternoon to you. See what's going on. Bear with me. Today's session is all about emotions. That's one of the key things we're gonna be looking at today. I

Nathan Simmonds:

'm just rejigging some of my windows so I can make sure I can see what's going on. So the first question for me right now, how is everybody feeling right now? So this could be week 2, 3, 4 of current situation of the coronavirus lockdown. Good morning. Uh, good afternoon Andy.

Working from home can distance you from your employees

 

Nathan Simmonds:

How are you currently feeling in this situation? You've got the chat box. Question box over here. Plug it in. Tell me how you're feeling right now. I wanna see what emotions are coming up. Gonna blow my nose. It's a bit clear here today. On a scale of three, then one being not so good, two in the middle, three feeling good on a three scale. How are we feeling? Three is a good. Two's in the middle. Got a couple of in the middle East. How else are the rest of us feeling? One, not so, three being absolutely. How are we? A few more people still coming into the room right now,

Nathan Simmonds:

Just getting a gauge of how we're feeling while the rest of the people go. Again, let's make sure we've got drinks handy and available. Herbal teas. We've got pen and paper ready. We're gonna dive into this very shortly. I wanted to let you know we are not gonna be running at this point in time, a session this Friday, Friday off for you guys. Everyone's thinking in different places. We are gonna be running the session tomorrow, again, one o'clock tomorrow, Thursday, last session for this week, which is gonna be around the, the technical, the technology side of what we're doing for work and at, at home.

Nathan Simmonds:

So welcome back. Absolutely. We're just getting into this. We're gonna share the link for tomorrow's session. If you haven't already registered for tomorrow's session, Sarah's gonna drop that link into the chat box. Click through there in a in a minute while we're doing this, and while you're listening and register for tomorrow's session, which is gonna be a bit more about technology for tomorrow to help you working from home.

Nathan Simmonds:

Ah, good. There's the link. Thank you very much. What are we covering today? We are covering emotions, how we are feeling, how other people are feeling, what are our emotions, how we are going to direct them and what we're gonna do with them. And some quick route to help us make the best use of them. Okay, Good. I think everybody's in,

Nathan Simmonds:

Let's bring this to life. Who right now is experiencing yes or nos in the, in the questions of chat box, who right now is experiencing some new emotions or, um, experiencing a higher level of emotion right now in this current situation? Yes. Or nos in the chat boxes? Who's experiencing more emotion right now? Yes. Yes. Coming through? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Guys, let me be frank and honest with you.

Nathan Simmonds:

It was a loaded question. Okay. We are in isolation. We're in a lockdown situation. We talked a bit about this, um, last week about the isolation. These are some of the symptoms of cabin fever at a very kind of low level. So the emotions, we're starting to get a little bit more erratic. We're getting a bit more snappy. We don't know what to do them with them. We are in close proximity to those we love and we care about just at a very intense level.

Nathan Simmonds:

And for those of us that maybe haven't got gardens or haven't got access to green spaces, they can get to that, that relate, that closeness is getting quite, you know, is getting a, a completely different level of intensity with it. And we're gonna look at some of the things we need to be doing that's gonna help us move through this. So what are our emotions? The first thing we wanna understand is what are our emotions? Taking your advice. I'm not using the purple pen today. So definitely not.

Nathan Simmonds:

Our emotions are a gauge. They're like a barometer for the quality of our thinking. Everything that we are experiencing always starts with a thought. So whether that thought was what you learned from your parents, what you've learned from TV or a book that you've read or from your previous experiences, the moment that you go into that experience or a situation similar to that, the thought kicks in and then the emotion comes out.

Nathan Simmonds:

So every thought, every emotion is predicated on a thought. And Marcus really has said it most clearly is things are neither good or bad. It's the thinking that makes them that way. Things are neither good or bad, it's the thinking that makes them that way. So every emotion you are experiencing when you are looking at a situation is based on how you are thinking about it.

Nathan Simmonds:

The key element here, and one of the lessons that I I love teaching through making business matter is what you think of a situation is what it becomes quick tie into how we deliver feedback when we are giving someone feedback. Bonus points here in the chat box. What's the normal conversation or what's the normal title of a conversation when we want to go and give someone feedback about something they've done wrong? What's the normal con uh, titles we give to these types of conversations?

Nathan Simmonds:

Steely silence. You've gotta go and give someone. So-called negative feedback. What's the normal business title or kind of in politically incorrect title we give to these conversations, coaching sessions and performance. Ideally it would be shit sandwich. We've got one of them. . Yeah, a bowl looking, that's also another one for it. The normal one. We've got some good stuff coming in here.

Nathan Simmonds:

The normal one is the difficult conversation. Disciplinary. Yeah, depending where you are in that journey. How many people here have been taught to how to have a difficult conversation or you've gone on a training course called difficult conversations?

Nathan Simmonds:

Absolutely. So what are we saying that the conversation's going to be difficult? So what happens is, at the start of the day, oh, I need to have a d difficult conversation, um, with this person, oh, do you know what that means? They're gonna be difficult. It's gonna be difficult. Do you know what? I'm gonna go and find something else to do over here and I'm gonna spend my whole day being busy with all this stuff that needs to be done to justify why I don't have the conversation with that person over there because of the label that we're applying to it.

Nathan Simmonds:

So what you think of a situation is what it becomes and then you start to add your emotions to it based on your previous experiences. So it's super important. We understand it's the thinking process that is the, is the initiator of where we're going with this. So what is it we want to do with that life lesson here? Valuable one is it's the labels that we're attaching to it that are causing the problem.

Nathan Simmonds:

And it's now we do this to ourselves and we do this to other people as well. We judge our ina inabilities and our capabilities by attaching different labels to what we think other people think we're capable of doing complicated. What we need to remember though is labels are Velcro, not super glue. So you can change those labels at any given time and that includes in the isolation and the working from home situation we're in right now.

Nathan Simmonds:

Let me give this to you as another question. What's one of the things that's frustrated you most about working from home and being in isolation right now? What's one thing that's challenged you most or caused the frustration to come up? And by the way, if anyone can see the questions there, side just said, just married my wife, that that was a previous statement he made. Not in answer to the question that I've just asked. Just covering you there. So I've got you back. Missing out on conversations, absolutely.

Nathan Simmonds:

Communication, breakdowns, delays in decision making. So we've got three great points that's come up there. Flip it around with a different question. What's the positive opposite of those things? We take that last one. The delays in decision making. What's the positive of those delays in the decision making? When we got the more time to think absolutely missing out on conversations. What's the positive opposite of this?

Nathan Simmonds:

This? So we're starting to think a little bit differently. Choice over who to speak to. That's amazing. Ab absolutely this. So it is the moment, the way we think about one thing from one angle. It causes the emotions to come up and the frustration, we shift the angle. Actually what's the positive opposite of this? What's the benefit in this? Okay, let's go from that angle and start pulling out because all the time you'll get your, you are stuck in your frustration.

Nathan Simmonds:

It's causing hesitation all the time that you are complaining. You're keeping yourself stuck to your circumstances because complaining is the glue that keeps you stuck to your circumstances. You cannot activate solution thinking while you are complaining. So it's super important.

Nathan Simmonds:

Exactly this another point here.