After 62 hours of talking to senior leaders about how the pandemic has affected the world of work, Taryn is now going through the transcripts to extract the findings. Here she talks about how the lack of rituals around online meetings destroys community -- and shares a quick hack that will help you get it back!

Almost everybody complains about the fatigue. It affects everything: decision-making, productivity, customer relations and more. In this episode, Taryn talks about four different kinds of fatigue and how to support your team, even when you're tired yourself.

How do you bring life-force back into the workforce? You start by acknowledging that people need community, meaning, boundaries and the right to live according to their own values. When we recognise and embrace the diversity in our common human experience, we can unlock joy, purpose, meaning and creativity at work. We can bring the life-force back into the workforce. If you have a team and would like to see them bring their life force to work, listen to this episode, and then visit http://www.lightwalkerconsulting.com to see what Taryn can do for your team.

When the pandemic struck, Taryn offered her clients an online course on the emotional impact teams could expect during the coming months. She named five phases. 1. Numbness 2. Coping 3. Feeling 4. Creating 5. Integrating In this week's episode she discusses how most of the people she's spoken to are stuck in the "coping" mode. They're being productive, but they're hanging on by their fingernails. Leaders need to do something, she says. They just don't know what it is. She offers a bridge between the world of "coping" to the world of creativity, innovation and a normal work day. Listen to this week's episode and follow The Lighthearted Leader podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts. This is the LightHearted Leader podcast with Taryn Sydow, brought to you by LightWalker Consulting. In today's episode we continue to discuss the research that LightWalker Consulting is conducting into how Covid-19 is affecting the world of work. As usual, Taryn will give us a finding from the research, her insight based on that finding and one thing a leader can do differently to improve their own life or the lives of their team. If you would like to participate in the research, please sign up at lightwalkerconsulting.com/wtf-h or click the link in the show notes.

People whose employers don't offer corporate wellness programs say they would definitely use them.

People whose employers do offer wellness programs find that the wellness program actually adds to their sense of overwhelm. When you have day with back-to-back online meetings and hundreds of emails to process, it's hard to find another hour to attend the wellness session.

Mostly, leaders themselves aren't using the wellness programs they are creating for the employees. The whole system seems broken. 

In our research we found one unexpected thing that is reducing overwhelm in the people we talk to.

We are now 50 interview in. Listen to the podcast to find out more, or visit http://www.lightwalkerconsulting.com

Taryn Sydow is interviewing leaders about the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual impact that working from home is having on them and their teams. 

In this episode, after 31 interviews, Taryn talks about the one change leaders can make that will engage their teams more.

How has the pandemic affected people in large corporates physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually?

How should leaders best respond? 

LightWalker Consulting wants to find out. We have launched a research project called Where To From Here (WTF-H), which helps South African leaders make better choices when leading Work From Home (WFH) teams.

Look forward to episodes covering how people's relationships have changed with their co-workers, how they cope with stress, and what people love -- and hate -- about working from home.

After 42 hours of listening to people's experiences of work, in this episode, Taryn is talking about how nobody wants to go back to the office full time. Only 3 people out of the 42 have said they would consider going back to the office full time. 

People are meeting in person, but they're not going to the office. They're meeting in restaurants and coffee shops. Does this mean the office needs to turn into a coffee shop?

Even if you go back to the office, the work is all online. So your team meetings and client meetings are still happening on the screen, and offices aren't set up for that. The WiFi can't cope with all the simultaneous on-line meetings, the open-plan offices don't give people enough privacy and are too noisy for effective online work.

In the mean time, the job of a leader stays the same: build engagement, team cohesion and a sense of purpose. Before March 2020, leaders could say they were building engagement and community because people were together in the office. But that wasn't necessarily the case.

The leadership opportunity is to use become intentional and skilled at building the employee experience and meaningful team engagement. How can leaders use the online meeting tools as ways of building connection, not as task management tools. Listen to the podcast to find out more.

You can follow the podcast and blog on http://www.LightWalkerConsulting.com 

Email Taryn (at) LightWalkerConsulting.com