What makes you happy at work? Maybe you have a great boss who gives you the freedom to be creative, rewards you for going the extra mile, and helps you to reach your career goals.
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Maybe you have none of the above and are updating your résumé as we speak.
It's pretty incredible how often you hear managers complaining about their best employees leaving, and they really do have something to complain about—few things are as costly and disruptive as good people walking out the door.
But managers tend to blame their turnover problems on everything under the sun while ignoring the crux of the matter: people don't leave jobs; they leave managers.
Bad management does not discriminate based on salary or job title. A Fortune 500 executive team can experience more dissatisfaction and turnover than the baristas at a local coffee shop. The more demanding your job is and the less control you have over what you do, the more likely you are to suffer. A study by the American Psychological Association found that people whose work meets both these criteria are more likely to experience exhaustion, poor sleep, anxiety, and depression.
The sad thing is that this suffering can easily be avoided. All that's required is a new perspective and some extra effort on the manager's part to give employees autonomy and make their work feel less demanding. To get there, managers must understand what they're doing to kill morale. The following practices are the worst offenders, and they must be abolished if you're going to hang on to good employees.
Overworking people. Nothing burns good employees out quite like overworking them. It's so tempting to work the best people hard that managers frequently fall into this trap. Overworking good employees is perplexing for them as it makes them feel as if they're being punished for their great performance. Overworking employees is also counterproductive. New research from Stanford showed that productivity per hour declines sharply when the workweek exceeds 50 hours, and productivity drops off so much after 55 hours that you don't get anything out of working more. Talented employees will take on a bigger workload, but they won't stay if their job suffocates them in the process. Raises, promotions, and title-changes are all acceptable ways to increase workload. If managers simply increase workload because people are talented, without changing a thing, these employees will seek another job that gives them what they deserve.
Holding people back. As an employee, you want to bring value to your job, and you do so with a unique set of skills and experience. So how is it that you can do your job so well that you become irreplaceable? This happens when managers sacrifice your upward mobility for their best interests. If you're looking for your next career opportunity, and your boss is unwilling to let you move up the ladder, your enthusiasm is bound to wane. Taking away opportunities for advancement is a serious morale killer.
Management may have a beginning, but it certainly has no end. When blessed with a talented employee, it's the manager's job to keep finding areas in which they can improve to expand their skill set and further their career. The most talented employees want feedback—more so than the less talented ones—and it's a manager's job to keep it coming. Otherwise, people grow bored and complacent.
Playing the blame game. A boss who is too proud to admit a mistake or who singles out individuals in front of the group creates a culture that is riddled with fear and anxiety. It's impossible to bring your best to your work when you're walking on eggshells. Instead of pointing fingers when something goes wrong, good managers work collaboratively with their team and focus on solutions. They pull people aside to discuss slip-ups instead of publicly shaming them, and they're willing to accept responsibility for mistakes made under their leadership.
Frequent threats of firing. Some managers use threats of termination to keep you in line and to scare you into performing better. This is a lazy and shortsighted way of motivating people. People who feel disposable are quick to find another job where they'll be valued and will receive the respect that they deserve.
Not letting people pursue their passions. Talented employees are passionate. Providing opportunities for them to pursue their passions improves their productivity and job satisfaction, but many managers want people to work within a little box. These managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions. This fear is unfounded. Studies have shown that people who are able to pursue their passions at work experience flow, a euphoric state of mind that is five times more productive than the norm.
Withholding praise. It's easy to underestimate the power of a pat on the back, especially with top performers who are intrinsically motivated. Everyone likes kudos, none more so than those who work hard and give their all. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good (for some, it's a raise; for others, it's public recognition) and then to reward them for a job well done. With top performers, this will happen often if you're doing it right. This doesn't mean that managers need to praise people for showing up on time or working an eight-hour day—these things are the price of entry—but a boss who does not give praise to dedicated employees erodes their commitment to the job.
Bringing It All Together
If managers want their best people to stay, they need to think carefully about how they treat them. While good employees are as tough as nails, their talent gives them an abundance of options. Managers need to make people want to work for them.
What other mistakes kill morale? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0,
The division, which employs around 140 researchers at its lab in a new building at Kings Cross, London, is on a mission to solve general intelligence and make machines capable of learning things for themselves. It plans to do this by creating a set of powerful general-purpose learning algorithms that can be combined to make an AI system or "agent".
Suleyman explains
These are systems that learn automatically. They're not pre-programmed, they're not handcrafted features. We try to provide a large set of raw information to our algorithms as possible so that the systems themselves can learn the very best representations in order to use those for action or classification or predictions.
The systems we design are inherently general. This means that the very same system should be able to operate across a wide range of tasks.
That's why we've started as we have with the Atari games. We could have done lots of really interesting problems in narrow domains had we spent time specifically hacking our tools to fit the real world problems - that could have been very, very valuable.
Instead we've taken the principle approach of starting on tools that are inherently general.
AI has largely been about pre-programming tools for specific tasks: in these kinds of systems, the intelligence of the system lies mostly in the smart human who programmed all of the intelligence into the smart system and subsequently these are of course rigid and brittle and don't really handle novelty very well or adapt to new settings and our fundamentally very limited as a result.
We characterise AGI as systems and tools which are flexible and adaptive and that learn.
We use the reinforcement learning architecture which is largely a design approach to characterise the way we develop our systems. This begins with an agent which has a goal or policy that governs the way it interacts with some evironment. This environment could be a small physics domain, it could be a trading environment, it could be a real world robotics environment or it could be a Aatari environment.The agent says it wants to take actions in this environment and it gets feedback from the environment in the form of observations and it uses these observations to update its policy of behaviour or its model of the world.
How does it work?
The technology behind DeepMind is complex to say the least but that didn't stop Suleyman from trying to convey some of the fundamental deep learning principles that underpin it. The audience - a mixture of software engineers, AI specialists, startups, investors and media - seemed to follow.
Suleyman explains
You've probably heard quite a bit about deep learning. I'm going to give you a very quick high-level overview because this is really important to get intuition for how these systems work and what they basically do.
These are hierarchical based networks initially conceived back in the 80s but recently resuscitated by a bunch of really smart guys from Toronto and New York.
The basic intuition is that at one end we take the raw pixel data or the raw sensory stream data of things we would like to classify or recognise.
This seems to be a very effective way of learning to find structure in very large data sets. Right at the very output we're able to impose on the network some requirement to produce some set of labels or classifications that we recognise and find useful as humans.
How is DeepMind being tested?
DeepMind found a suitably quirky way to test what its team of roughly 140 people have been busy building.
The intelligence of the DeepMind's systems was put through its paces by an arcade gaming platform that dates back to the 1970s.
Suleyman demoed DeepMind playing one of them during his talk - Space Invaders. In his demo he illustrated how a DeepMind agent learns how to play the game with each go it takes.
Suleyman explains
We use the Atari test bed to develop and test and train all of our systems…or at least we have done so far.
There is somewhere on the magnitude of 100 different Atari games from the 70s and 80s.
The agents only get the raw pixel inputs and the score so this is something like 30,000 inputs per frame. They're wired up to the action buttons but they're not really told what the action buttons do so the agent has to discover what these new tools of the real world actually mean and how they can utilise value for the agent.
The goal that we give them is very simply to maximise score; it gets a 1 or a 0 when the score comes in, just as a human would.
Everything is learned completely from scratch - there's absolutely zero pre-programmed knowledge so we don't tell the agent these are Space Invaders or this is how you shoot. It's really learnt from the raw pixel inputs.
For every set of inputs the agent is trying to assess which action is optimal given that set of inputs and it's doing that repeatedly over time in order to optimise some longer term goal, which in Atari's sense, is to optimise score. This is one agent with one set of parameters that plays all of the different games.
Live space invaders demo
An agent playing space invaders before training struggles to hide behind the orange obstacles, it's firing fairly randomly. It seems to get killed all of the time and it doesn't really know what to do in the environment.
After training, the agent learns to control the robot and barely loses any bullets. It aims for the space invaders that are right at the top because it finds those the most rewarding. It barely gets hit; it hides behind the obstacles; it can make really good predictive shots like the one on the mothership that came in at the top there.
As those of you know who have played this game, it sort of speeds up towards the end and so the agent has to do a little bit more planning and predicting than it had done previously so as you can see there's a really good predictive shot right at the end there.
100 games vs 500 games
The agent doesn't really know what the paddle does after 100 games, it sort of randomly moves it from one side to the other. Occasionally it accidentally hits the ball back and finds that to be a rewarding action. It learns that it should repeat that action in order to get reward.
After about 300 games it's pretty good and it basically doesn't really miss.
But then after about 500 games, really quite unexpectedly to our coders, the agent learns that the optimal strategy is to tunnel up the sides and then send them all around the back to get maximum score with minimum effort - this was obviously very impressive to us.
We've now achieved human performance in 49/57 games that we've tested on and this work was recently rewarded with a front cover of Nature for our paper that we submitted so we were very proud of that.
How is it being used across Google?
Google didn't buy DeepMind for nothing. Indeed, it's using certain DeepMind algorithms to make many of its best-known products and services smarter than they were previously.
Suleyman explains
Our deep learning tool has now been deployed in many environments, particularly across Google in many of our production systems.
In image recognition, it was famously used in 2012 to achieve very accurate recognition on around a million images with about 16 percent error rate. Very shortly after that it was reduced dramatically to about 6 percent and today we're at about 5.5 percent. This is very much parable with the human level of ability and it's now deployed in Google+ Image Search and elsewhere in Image Search across the company.
As you can see on Google Image Search on G+, you're now able to type a word into the search box and it will recall images from your photographs that you've never actually hand labelled yourself.
We've also used it for text and scription. We use it to identify text on shopfronts and maybe alert people to a discount that's available in a particular shop or what the menu says in a given restaurant. We do that with an extremely high level of accuracy today. It's being used in Local Search and elsewhere across the company.
We also use the same core system across Google for speech recognition. It trains roughly in less than 5 days. In 2012 it delivered a 30 percent reduction in error rate against the existing old school system. This was the biggest single improvement in speech recognition in 20 years, again using the same very general deep learning system across all of these.
Across Google we use what we call Tool AI or Deep Learning Networks for fraud detection, spam detection, hand writing recognition, image search, speech recognition, Street View detection, translation.
Sixty handcrafted rule-based systems have now been replaced with deep learning based networks. This gives you a sense of the kind of generality, flexibility and adaptiveness of the kind of advances that have been made across the field and why Google was interested in DeepMind.
Should we be scared?
The number of scientists and world-famous entrepreneurs speaking out on the potential dangers of AI is increasing week-by-week, with renowned physicist Stephen Hawking and PayPal billionaire Elon Musk being two of the most outspoken anti-AI advocates.
The pair, along with several others including Bill Gates and Sky cofounder Jaan Tallinn, believe that machines will soon become more intelligent than humans, just as they do in recent Hollywood blockbuster Ex Machina.
Despite this, Google is keen to develop its AI algorithms as much as possible in order to improve its offerings and boost its profits.
Suleyman tried to put people's minds at ease and explain the logic behind all the hype.
Suleyman explains
Over the last 18 months or so, AI breakthroughs have, I think, created a sense of anxiety or in some cases hype around the potential long term direction of the field.
This of course is not least induced by Elon [Musk] who recently Tweeted that we need to be super careful with AI because it's "potentially more dangerous than nukes" and that's obviously backed up by various publications including Nick Bostrom's - all culminating in this kind of sense that AI has the potential to end all human kind.
If you didn't really pay attention to the field and all you did was read, as I think the vast majority of people do, descriptions of the kind of work that we do on the web then you could be forgiven for believing that AI is actually about this. Whether it's Terminator coming to blow us up or societies of AIs or mad scientists looking to create quite perverted women robots.
This narrative has somehow managed to dominate the entire landscape, which I think we find really quite remarkable.
It's true that AI has in some sense really arrived. This isn't just a summer. These are very concrete production breakthroughs that really do make a big different but it's also sad how quickly we adapt to this new reality. We rarely take time to acknowledge the magic and the potential of these advances and the kind of good that they can bring. In some sense, the narrative has shifted from isn't it terrible that AI has been such a failure to isn't it terrible that AI has been such a success.
Just to address directly this question of existential risk. Our perspective on this is that it's become a real distraction from the core ethics and safety issues and that it's completely overshadowed the debate.
The way we think about AI is that it'll be a hugely powerful tool that we control and direct whose capabilities we limit, just as we do with any other tool that we have in the world around us, whether they're washing machines or tractors.
These are tools that we designed that we can control. We should explicitly be designing these systems such that we are able to control them and where we fear there's a risk that we're not able to control them, then that's I think when we should be slowing down, just as we have in many other sectors, from nuclear development to chemical weapons or the like.
We're building them to empower humanity, absolutely not to destroy us.I think our technology has the potential to really positively transform the world if we can steward it in the right direction and imagine new mechanisms of governance and accountability and transparency that involve a broader group in the process of directing the application of our technology.
There are many, many much more urgent concerns we need to direct our attention to. This conversation around whether we'll have human-like intelligences wondering around absorbing all the information that's ever been created and giving them rights and being conscious - these are just so…there are a few engineers in the room who will know how difficult it is to get these things to do anything.The idea that we should be spending these moments now talking about consciousness and robot right is really quite preposterous.
I don't mean to be dismissive, these are serious concerns and we put a great deal of effort and a great deal of our negotiating capital into establishing what we think is a reasonably effective process. We're introducing additional oversight and accountability into the way that we steward our technology with the establishment of our ethics and safety board.
These are important issues, we do need to discuss them but we also need to focus on what else is at stake in the world today. How can these tools be useful elsewhere? 800 million people don't have access to clean water, rising to 1.8 billion in the next decade alone. One of the most fundamental rights beyond so many people on our planet. 800 million people are malnourished but a third of the food we produce is wasted every year.
Looking ahead
Google has pledged to set up an ethics board to monitor its internal AI developments. Interestingly, this was one of DeepMind's prerequisites to signing the acquisition papers, suggesting that Suleyman knows AI has potential to do harm.
A number of people have already been appointed to the board but Google has refused to reveal who they are. Suleyman said he wants the names to be revealed.
"We will [publicise the names], but that isn't the be-all and end-all. It's one component of the whole apparatus," he said, adding that he was impressed a 100-strong company like DeepMind was able to convince Google to set up the board in the first place.
Some believe that the board should be appointed with the help of other organisations and public oversight but Google has so far decided to act independently.
A work colleague and friend invited us to help serve a dinner at Tent City on Mercer Island, Washington, near where we live. A number of tents are set up for the homeless community in that area. Various volunteers supply and serve dinner to the residents on a regular basis.
I took my two boys with me who were nine and five at the time. They had a lot of questions because this whole arrangement challenged a number of their common assumptions about how people lived in the world.
"Why don't they have homes?"
"Why don't they get food the way we do?"
We talked through reasons people end up in this type of desperate situation and the importance of a safety net for them. I explained that often the only safety net is others who are more fortunate being willing to share some of their time and resources.
The people we served ranged in age from the young to the aged. Many residents were missing teeth or had ripped and dirty clothes. They were genuinely appreciative. I was a bit surprised that they were specifically thankful I had brought the boys. Many said how fun it is to have active, joyful children in their midst.
After dinner, I saw my nine year old holding court with a number of elderly gentlemen who were talking sports in front of a small television set. He was having a great time sharing and hearing stories.
As some of the residents returned to their tents, I heard him tell a few of them, "Thanks so much for coming to dinner with us." I could see in the expressions on their faces that his simple gesture, treating them as he would guests at our own home, touched them. I hugged him a little tighter as we left to go home because watching that exchange touched me too.
It was a great reminder how treating people with respect and dignity, no matter what their circumstance, lifts them up and you too.
As a parent or at work, you'll probably be called upon to mediate a dispute at some point in your life. You require diplomatic skills even if you won't need to use them to negotiate international peace or halt a government shutdown. Skillful intervention works for settling which child gets to sit in the front seat or how to keep the office break room clean.
It's challenging to step into the middle of a disagreement, but it can also be rewarding if you can facilitate a solution. Implement these suggestions to mediate conflicts and enhance communications.
Benefits of Mediation
1. Break through impasses. Sometimes people are unable to work things out on their own. Mediation offers outside assistance that can help them make progress.
2. Empower participants. While the mediator facilitates the discussion, the participants get to express their views and propose solutions. Everyone benefits from talking, listening, and taking part in the remedy.
3. Foster connections. Studies show that even though we try to avoid those we find irritating, we tend to like them better if we spend some time with them. Mediation puts disputants in the same room.
Gathering Information through Mediation
1. Bring those who are arguing together. Sit down with both parties at the same time. Separate meetings can create suspicions and misunderstandings, especially when there are already underlying tensions.
2. Establish ground rules. Let everyone know the expectations. State the purpose of the meeting. Explain that they each will be given time to tell their side of the story.
3. Be neutral. Take an objective stance. Listen with an open mind. Avoid leading questions and try to let the disputants do most of the talking.
4. Ask people to speak directly to you. If you've ever watched court TV shows, you know the judge tells people to talk to them rather than to each other. In fact, you may want to arrange your chairs much like a courtroom with both people facing you.
5. Focus on one issue. Stay on topic. Deal with one issue at a time.
6. Describe specific behavior. While it's valuable for the involved parties to express their feelings, facts help to clarify the process. If your child says their older brother was mean to them, you need to know if they were locked in a closet or just sent to bed on time.
Taking Action through Mediation
1. Summarize the information. Review and repeat the information given by each party. Ensure you're all on the same page.
2. Identify shared interests. Take a moment to think about the goals you all have in common. Maybe you want to gain a new customer or meet a tight deadline.
3. Ask for suggestions. Now is the time for each person to talk about what they want to see happen. Encourage them to have a discussion with each other and find areas where they are willing to compromise.
4. Write out a plan of action. When you reach a decision on what you're going to do, put it in writing. It will help the disputants remember exactly what they agreed to. A written document also provides a sense of formality that motivates people to live up to what they promised.
5. Follow up. Even the most successful mediation sessions may need reinforcement. Schedule a time to get back together for a full review. You may need to make adjustments. On the other hand, you may want to use your follow up meeting to reward everyone for doing a great job.
Every conflict provides an opportunity to make positive changes. Discover the satisfaction of using mediation to achieve greater cooperation at home and work.
Our recently published "The State of Project Management Survey" gave a clear picture as to the state of project management maturity; 45% of the 317 organisations that took part are somewhat or very dissatisfied with the current level of PM maturity.
This is a significant figure and demonstrates the scale of the opportunity for project management improvements. The survey included a standard 5 level maturity chart for project management. The majority of organisations should aim to achieve level 3 as a minimum so with circa 50% of organisations citing a maturity level of 2 or below, it is no surprise that we find so many dissatisfied respondents in the survey.
So, what can we do to increase project management maturity? I spend much of my time helping organisations improve their project management maturity through a defined Maturity Roadmap.
Here are my 5 top tips:
1) Project methodology
Have you got one? Is it used? Is it practical? Many organisations have a project methodology but struggle to apply it. We can always create something sophisticated and clever, which means it could be complex, which means no one uses it and work around the process rather than working the process. Create a simple scalable, practical methodology that flexes to suit to size, scale, risk and the cost of each project.
2) Easy to use document templates?
Have you got a project management document template for a PID, a Business Case, a Status Report? Is it complex as hell and just turns everyone off? Re-write these documents based on a suite of questions to make them much more accessible. Eliminate the fluff and go for simplicity and ease of use. No point having a document template that people refuse to fill in or fill in after the fact just as a "tick box" exercise.
3) Training
Simple analogy; would you let just anyone drive the forklift truck, or would you put people through some training first? So why can anyone get let loose on a project? Projects are often given to subject matter experts. This is fine. But let's sprinkle some best practice project management on these SMEs and given them a fighting chance. A customised project management training course is needed, and you need the badge before you go off and run that business critical project.
4) Project Register
The first telling question I ask a client is simple. How many projects have you got? Most struggle to answer this question as there isn't a single Project Register. A list of all our projects, the PMs, the Sponsors, the budgets, the RAG KPI status. Easy to fix with some technology (SharePoint or Project Online are great for this).
5) Plan Templates
The majority of people struggle to create useful, realistic project plans. Do you undertake the same types of projects over and over? Get the experts in a room and create a template and some planning guidance. Actually use time sheet data (if available) and lessons learned to refine and improve this template over time. Why are you reinventing the wheel every time?
OK, I could go on and list many, many more actions. But that's the point. We sometimes cannot see a way forward when there is so much to do. So why not start with one of these goals? They might not all fit your situation, you might have ticked some of these off. But start the debate. "How can we improve our project management maturity?"
The Japanese have the longest life span in the world with 86 years for women and 79 years for men. All of this is thanks to what they eat thus making the islandnation with the lowest obesity rate (3%) in the developed world. "The Japanese diet is the iPod of food," says Naomi Moriyama, a dietician, "it concentrates the magnificent energy of food into a compact and pleasurable size."
1. Eat with your eyes There's a proverb in Japan that literally translates as "Not dressing up the meal with color is like sending someone out of the house without clothes." Traditional Japanese meals use food items that are red, green, yellow, white and black in colour to give the food an aesthetic appeal and reflect the nature of the seasons. Compare a platter of sushi or a bento box to a hamburger and fries (although the latter is perceived as delicious and can be wolfed down) the former is a work of art that has to be appreciated like art. Go slow, take small bites, relish every flavour.
2. Smaller portions Break down your meal into smaller portions, this way you can enjoy a greater variety of foods. Scientists in the University Of Illinois found that people tend to eat up to 45% more when they are served bigger portions. They filled their plates according to it's size. So bigger the plate, larger the portion size. Lesson learnt: Use dessert and salad plates.
3. Fill your stomach up to only 80% Or Hara hachi bunme as it is said in Japanese. The idea is to reinforce the eating of smaller portions. We have been raised to eat until we are absolutely full so that we don't feel hungry later. However it's better to not stuff ourselves and only eat until we feel adequately full.
4. Light dinner or supper Following the 80% rule discussed above, a light dinner puts less pressure on your intestines and allows you to digest your food in your sleep. Heavy meals can sometimes make you wake up feeling full in the morning and this upsets your routine when you skip breakfast.
5. Rice is nice Rice is a low fat complex carbohydrate that helps fill you up on lower calories (small bowl of rice has lesser calories than two slices of bread) This will not keep you hungry and craving for snacks right after your meal.
Have you ever wondered why you are not able to do more at work? What are some of the things that come to mind? Is it the lack of planning or passion for the work you do, or not liking your co-workers, your boss, or your salary, etc.?
The list can go on and on, but one way to help you achieve more at work is to learn different ways to reduce stress. If you are less stressed at work, you will be better able to focus and accomplish more tasks. By reducing stress you will be able to become more efficient, work with enthusiasm, and produce great results. Another great way to be less stressed would be to do work that you love!
If you want to reduce stress at work, simply find a few different ways that will help you to reduce that stress. Remember, what works for Peter does not always work for Paul, so don't give up if the first few things you try don't work for you. The good news is, reducing stress at work does not have to be difficult, and below you will find 32 simple things you can try out. They are some of the most common things individuals like you have used to reduce stress and get on with the job.
32 simple ways to reduce stress at work
1. Talk to a co-worker and keep the conversation positive. Ask for help if you need it. 2. Watch sports videos during lunch and short breaks. 3. Go outside and take a walk, even if it's just for five minutes. Running won't hurt either. 4. Eat some healthy snacks or food. Dark chocolate is excellent. 5. Listen to audio books, or read a book. 6. Take pictures of the beautiful scenery around your work place.
7. Re-organize and prioritize your tasks.
8. Find out what is stressing you, and try to change how you feel about it. 9. If you work standing up, try sitting down for a few minutes, and vice versa. 10. Read the news. Stay abreast with what's going on in the world to see the bigger picture. 11. Breathe in deeply, and out again. Do this for a few minutes. 12. Chew gum. Yes, it's that simple. 13. Stretch your body. Stretch your muscles, legs, hands, etc. 14. Socialize and meet someone new at your work place. 15. Meditate. 16. Massage your neck, shoulders, and back with your hands. 17. Write in your journal. If you do not have one, write about your dream life. 18. Reminisce your past times, those euphoric moments when you felt alive. 19. Wash your face or your hands with cold water on hot days, and warm water on cold days. 20. Laugh out loud ( LOL!). Laughter is a great way to reduce stress. 21. Move away from your computer, smartphones, etc. and observe your surroundings. 22. Take your shoes off, and walk barefoot. Enjoy being barefooted for a minute. 23. Spin in your chair for a few seconds. 24. Do some pushups. 25. Reach out to one of your friends. Send an email or call them on your phone. 26. Look out the window and admire nature. 27. Drink some tea or coffee. 28. Eat lunch with your best co-workers and do not talk about work. 29. Turn on your favorite internet radio. 30. Pranks. ONLY the ones that will make people laugh and talk!
These are all simple stress reduction methods, and do not cost an arm and leg. Stress can negatively impact your life directly, and those around you indirectly. I hope these tips will help you reduce stress while you work, and improve your life. How do you reduce stress at work? What can you add to this list?
Ex Machina sees a powerful CEO create super-intelligent AIs that turn against him ©Universal
