NEWS AND EVENTS
News
Volunteers needed for Husker Dialogues
On Sept. 10 at 7 p.m. in the Bob Devaney Sports Center, incoming first-year students will participate in Husker Dialogues, a diversity and inclusion event facilitated by student, faculty and staff conversation guides. Volunteers are needed to lead the discussions, train discussion guides, handle logistics and work with marketing and communications for the occasion. If you are interested in participating in this event, which reaches nearly 6,000 students, visit the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’s Husker Dialogues website.
ORED Wellness Challenge Update
ORED staff are invited to join their colleagues and record their wellness activities as we virtually visit the other Big Ten campuses. Each Monday, submit your activities of the previous week to Laurie Sampson, who is mapping out our progress. Each mile walked, ran or cycled is added to activity minutes to calculate a total number of miles (20 minutes of activity is converted to one mile for those activities where distance isn’t measured). Reminder: Yardwork is an activity!
An average of 15 staff members participate each week – and there’s always room for more. Currently, we are just outside Baltimore, Maryland, having logged 1,405 miles and visited the University of Iowa, University of Illinois, Purdue University, Indiana University, Ohio State University and the University of Maryland. The planned route includes the other Big Ten campuses: Rutgers University, Penn State University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Northwestern University, University of Wisconsin and the University of Minnesota before returning to Lincoln. The total distance in this tour is 3,622 miles.
Welcome
The Office of Sponsored Programs is excited to welcome Sarah Hansen to the pre-award team starting May 11. Sarah comes to us from Nebraska’s AEM Business Center, a unit within the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources that performs specialized business services in financial and human resource management. Sarah brings a wealth of pre-award (and post-award) experience as well as great institutional knowledge. She is also a lot of fun and will be a great fit for our team!
WELLNESS WATCH
As many of us continue to work from home amid the pandemic, new resources are becoming available to help us navigate the upheaval. Here are a few aimed at helping us stay healthy, calm and productive:
- The Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources has developed a website, “What to Expect While Temporarily Working from Home,” that compiles resources related to a variety of issues that may arise in a work-from-home situation, ranging from parenting to exercise to emotional well-being. The site features podcasts from Nebraska researchers and links to other relevant resources.
- When you’re using a home workstation not specifically set up for your needs, you become more susceptible to a variety of injuries. Nebraska Medicine distributed a video describing quick and easy chances you can make to your home office to ease the strain on your body.
- It may feel like your career is at a standstill because of the current circumstances, but this could actually be a unique opportunity to reflect on and strengthen your leadership skills in new ways. Forbes recently published an article, 15 Ways To Develop Yourself At Home, that describes a variety of skills worth developing. Thanks to Laurie Sampson for adapting the article, written by Joseph Folkman, for OPEN Book:
- Practice active listening. Most people don’t do this well and aren’t aware of it.
- Make an emotional connection. Most employees are willing to work harder and do more for someone they feel has their best interest at heart.
- Identify one project you need to start and get started. Taking the initiative is an impressive skill.
- Give more positive feedback to others. Look for opportunities every day to tell others they did an excellent job and thank them for their contribution.
- Find a persistent, nagging problem and fix it. Inertia keeps us doing the same thing in the same way, even when there is a better way.
- Help someone develop a new skill. Helping someone else learn something new can be fulfilling. While working at home, you could teach your children a new skill, for example.
- Connect something you want others to do to a long-term strategy and direction. When we connect our work to how it will help the organization achieve its goals and purpose, motivation increases.
- Identify one thing you ought to change to be more effective. It takes courage to change, but life continues to provide new challenges that require new skills.
- Create a specific plan for improving that one thing. Sometimes we resolve to improve, but we don’t create a plan with actions, desired outcomes and benchmark dates to evaluate progress.
- Ask others for feedback. Those people who have a regular habit of asking others for feedback and then acting on the feedback end up being much more effective and successful.
- Set a goal that is difficult and will force you to stretch. Stretching for something difficult makes people feel better about themselves and less helpless.
- Show your passion and get others excited about something that needs to be done. Your passion and excitement are contagious to others.
- Demonstrate your concern for another person. Connect deeply with another person.
- Look for additional opportunities to cooperate with others and get groups working together. This is a good time for groups to pool resources and pull together.
- Make three additional calls every day to check in with others and make sure that all is well. This will help solidify connections and ensure no one is struggling.
Thanks to all who contributed to this month’s OPEN Book. If you have something you’d like to include in the next edition, send it to Tiffany Lee.
